Intellectual Bear Market

The US has been in an intellectual bear market for at least 40 years, perhaps 100 years in the opinion of some writers. This morning's WSJ brought news that SAT scores are down again and gains of recent years are mostly gone. Critical reading scores are at decadal lows per the chart in that article. This is even after the "re-scoring" of the test a few years ago. Sigh ....

I don't know what is on that test anymore, as my memories date to over 35 years ago. At that time one needed to have a fairly good vocabulary to perform well on the verbal test. That's why I started my word card file about 40 years ago. Being much better in math & science than those skills of the other parts of my brain, I had to work on my weakness's - as my basketball coach had taught me.

Now, how many young people read a newspaper ? Or many books ? But even reading newspapers doesn't bring the same benefits anymore as those are now written at a much lower level than years ago. You've seen my quotes by H. L. Mencken. In nearly every column of his, I find a $10 word - either a new one or an old one in my card file. Even columnists in newspapers mostly write simple polemical pieces spouting old bromides - original thought is quite rare.

Political dialogue had been horrible since Lincoln, with few exceptions. Here is Mencken's thought on that from 1926:

"Any man engaged habitually in controversy, as I have been for twenty years past, must enter upon his declining days with a melancholy sense of its hollowness and futility. Especially in this great republic, where all ideas are suspect, it tends almost inevitably to degenerate into a mere exchange of nonsense. Have you ever examined carefully the speeches made by candidates in a presidential campaign ? If so, you know they are of bilge and blather all compact. Now and then, true enough, one of the august aspirants to the Washingtonian breeches is goaded or misled into saying something pungent and apposite [*today's Word of the Day], but not often. His daily stint is simply balderdash."

Doesn't that fit today, 80 years later ? Read a speech from the Democratic Convention - I mean read it, don't watch it.

This opinion is not just mine. Talking to a non-posting reader a couple days ago, we both agreed current newspaper writing stinks. And in my correspondence with another non-posting reader, we agreed that one must read several newspapers to get a more true understanding of the world events. I cannot remember the last time I found a $10 word in the Wall Street Journal. And its coverage of events has declined so much that I had to subscribe to the Financial Times to get more facts.

Since Mencken saw this 80 years ago in the Roaring '20s, we can't blame it all on TV, or even radio. Perhaps prosperity breeds ignorance via sloth as the midwife? I don't know. Any ideas are welcome.

Word of the Day

"Apposite" - adjective [$10]
Apposite means highly pertinent or appropriate.
Sentence: Reading three newspapers online and one international news service this morning, I did not find one single apposite analysis or fact to help me understand the economic trajectory of the world. All was just blather or short term opinions or tired restatements of fears.