CoEternity

   

    The world is coming to an intellectual end.

    Again.

    This time there is an implication that, because we don't sit still and read old books--we now gulp instant verbal gratification from all manner of efemeral sources--we are doomed. 

    The fatuousness of recurring, spoken doomsady alarms is rightly ridiculed by thinking individuals. That righteous derision applies, however, only as long as we are considering alarms raised by someone other than ourselves. When we see troubling signs in behavior of specific others or sniff sweeping trends among a younger generation, we most often define these phenomena as evidence of decline, rather than the stuff of never-dormant human proclivities.

    Ever-improving achievement is our laudible, if laughable, objective. And, yes, we are right to fear educational decline left behind by an inattentive leadership that is ever more aloof from our exploding, cross-cultural population. The efficacy, however, of  consecrating a national education strategy to combat literary lethargy among populations that grow by 33% each generation, simply cannot be measured.

    All countries in the world now face some jarring level of dilution of national identity and individual productivity in an age of externally-provided simplicity. This is not surprising when a given student anywhere across the seven continents may have intellectual curiosity, but has no practical need to learn how the toilet works. Learning for the sake of learning is beauty itself. But this selfish pusuit  has always appealed to a small segment of human kind; learning the means of survival has been, thus, relegated to the opposite end of the achievement spectrum, and that distance has pointed up a mutual disdain.

    When we study previous declarations of cultural decay and the aura wafting above every past golden, intellectual age, the radiance fades--till it resembles air pollution. This happens when expectations of human ascendancy are confronted by the truth of minimal curiosity in the average human.

    In every case, that curiosity has been, and will reflect, the one concrete wish of human desire: the power to define and savor one's own intent.

    We reach for, and grasp, that which we value and for which we work hard. If, on the other hand, our grasp seems to exceed our reach in the current moment, that may well be the result of our rising fear--fear based upon getting older as an individual and as a culture. But this reality  does not mean that we are special in our regressive tendancies. All evidence points to our inherited, generally weak, human ambition.

    As was every person, in every previous era or age, we are unable to grasp the inevitability of our death. Nor do we appreciate the subsequent fact of our life's irrelevance.

    By the way, we only hear the doomsaday declarations from those who write to keep themselves alive.  "Alive" doesn't always invest "vitality" into the doomsday discussion.