Nation's public discourse gets dumb and dumber

Insight on the News, April 17, 1995 by Tom Shachtman

Unlike intelligence, most of which is inherited, articulateness is mostly learned behavior. This means that its decline has to do with inadequacies and wrong turns in the learning process, but also that such declines are capable of being reversed.

We can hear inarticulateness in the diminished vocabularies of television broadcasts, which have dropped from high-school level 30 years ago to junior-high level today; we can see it in the fall in high-end achievers' scholastic Assessment Test scores, from 11.4 percent above the 600 mark in 1972 to only 7.3 percent above the mark in 1992; we can feel it in the general dumbing-down of popular culture.

The decline has several causes. There is the shift away from the use of the full, literate-based language and toward a culture that derives its literacy second hand - from television, popular music, telephone conversations and the like. The speech forms and vocabulary of this "secondhand culture" are more reminiscent of cultures without a written language than they are of cultures that possess vocabularies in the hundreds of thousands of words.

Another cause is a dearth of articulate models of behavior and of sponsorship for articulate behavior. The lack of good models in the "speech community" in which infants first learn their language is exacerbated by the absence of articulate parents from the home during most hours of the day. It is further deepened by poor teaching methods and by the countervailing presence of inarticulate models in the popular culture. Our pantheon now denigrates the eloquent and glamorizes rather inarticulate athletes, movie heroes and actors who cannot speak intelligently for themselves. These attitudes crystallize into entertainment-industry products that reinforce stereotypes of dumb but honest heroes and glib but evil villains. Today's public sphere is largely defined by the absence of fine political oratory and by the presence of overly loquacious but shallow presidents, governors and mayors and belligerent and banal legislators. Political officeholders' inept attempts at expression are repeated by an uncritical press, which also shortcircuits debate by goading political participants to assume more and more confrontational postures. Mistakenly assuming that a lower target means a broader audience, those who create television entertainment, news programs and political candidacies dissipate their energy in the titillation of a large audience and have no incentive to address such other objectives for their products as the championing of articulate behavior.

To 20th-century totalitarian regimes, power was what came out of a gun. In a future inarticulate society, power will consist solely of what comes out of a television set; nothing that exists out of view of a television camera will have very much sway on the populace. Television as the locus of power will sap the last remaining strength from institutions such as the church and the home, which now rely on interpersonal contact for their influence. In the future, when the father of a family wants to convey something of importance to his child with the utmost emphasis, he will make a video recording. In the inarticulate society, schooling will be big business - but it will be machine-intensive, with many computers and television screens, some interactive.

Teachers will become programmers, not instructors or discussion leaders, and their status will fall commensurately. The content of schooling will consist of vocational training for limited-purpose jobs and taste training for consumption; the ability to analyze, previously the desired end-product of higher education, will become as arcane and lightly regarded as knowledge of Latin. Interchanges on the Internet, once predicted to be the salvation of literacy, steadily will be reduced to the babble of fan clubs, the expression of feelings and the trading of insider information on what is currently valuable. As voice-input to computers replaces typing, there will be even less inclination to use the literate-based language for computer communication, and the computer no longer will be construed as an aid to literacy or to articulate behavior.

The inarticulate society will not be mute; rather, it will be full of noise, music and conversation and have very little space in it for silence or for the reflective thought to which silence often gives birth. Words will be everywhere, featured as graphic elements on television and computer screens, but their variety and resonances will be circumscribed. The ability to speak well will be measured in terms of volubility or quickness, not whether one has anything germane to say. Secondhand products will replace nearly all literate products; history, for instance, will be reduced to comic-book renderings of the past, with commensurate distortion of the facts and excess visual emphasis. Vocabularies will be condensed until there is little difference between the written and the spoken language. The types of sentence structures will be reduced. Punctuation will be voluntary, spelling phonetic. Libraries will have more audiovisual materials than books.