Building Understanding

My wife recently passed on to me an International Herald Tribune issue. Long story, but essentially, I was ‘unplugged’ somewhere and needed something to pass the time. It was a random day, with a random issue. I love the IHT, but don’t find much occasion to read it anymore (read that as time to read it) and get most of my news via RSS anyway. But here’s the thing…via RSS, sometimes, you miss the random gem, which you only come across if you either a) subscribe to everything, or b) get a hold of a newspaper.

On this particular day, the IHT re-ran a NYTimes Op-Ed piece by David Brooks called “Lord of the Memes”, which I’ve since also found online here.

In it, Brooks – with tongue in cheek – discusses the changes in what it takes to be psuedo-intellectual:

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

He writes of a change in times for what it takes to impress people. It’s a great article, read it.

He takes us from the period in which:

status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

To one currently, where “media displaced culture.”

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

Pretty funny and poignant stuff.

His main point, nowadays, being cool means keeping up with new technologies and gadgets so much so that “you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.”

Good stuff.

Anyway, I could quote the whole thing really…so I won’t. I’ll just suggest again, that you read it.

Enjoy.