[extropy-chat] Intelligence of Leaders

[Lee Corbin]

PJ writes

> There is much to be said that the electorate in the past was smarter as well
> and it had nothing to do with IQ.  It had to do with the fact that the
> electorate read and paid what we might view today as excessive
> attention to politics.

Yes, what changed it was sports, in the 1910s and 1920s as I understand it.
Before sports became huge, the typical man's hobby was politics.

>  Political debates could be days long affairs in the 19th C. and were attended
> widely and reported on avidly.  Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for
> example.  The issues were complex and divisive and both men held the attention
> of the crowd for an entire day of debating, where each man could talk for up
> to 3 hours at a time!  More importantly, they actually understood what the hell
> Douglas and Lincoln were arguing about!
>
> Neil Postman writes extensively on this subject in "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

Yes, I recognized your description of the Lincoln-Douglas debates as emanating
from that book.  I too was struck by the *length* of the debates:  First one man
would speak for three hours, then the other for four, and then the first speaker
had an hour to rebut.

But over the years I've become a little more skeptical that when I read "Amusing
Ourselves to Death."  For one thing, remember the part where Postman describes
the debates as big social events?  The farmers would come for miles around to
hear the speakers, but there were children running around everywhere, and I'm
guessing that very few of the women listened at all.  I go further to wonder just
how attentive the men were.  After six days straight planting or reaping, who
can really say how much of those complex 19th century sentences were really
understood by the audience?

> Read the chapters "Typographic America" and "The Typographic Mind."
> It's a beautiful, brilliant analysis of just how verbally literate the pre-visual
> (movie/TV/advertising) world was and how they actively used their literacy.
> This was the final flowering of the Enlightenment mind, here in the US.The
> downhill slide began with visual advertising at the turn of the 19th C. and
> its coffin was nailed by television.

Okay, thanks for the pointer.

Samantha added (at 1:52 am today in the thread "it's all understandable, except)

> It does not help that the people have been conditioned and/or
> conditioned themselves to spend much of their free time being
> passively entertained by the idiot box or endlessly playing some
> video or computer game.  The distribution of intelligence in say
> the US was no greater 100 years ago than today.

True.

> Yet we used to be an extremely literate society where even the
> "common" person read books of some substance.

I still very much doubt it, (having yet to read PJ's recommendation.)
Not all that many people finished high school, as I recall.  Yes, by
1906 literacy had improved upon 1856, but still poorer than today,
I'd say.

Lee


>
Read the chapters "Typographic America" and "The Typographic Mind."  It's a beautiful, brilliant analysis of just how verbally 
literate the pre-visual (movie/TV/advertising) world was and how they actively used their literacy.  This was the final flowering of 
the Enlightenment mind, here in the US.  The downhill slide began with visual advertising at the turn of the 19th C. and its coffin 
was nailed by television.
>
> Before the slide, however, almost every free-born American could read and the political system took this as an assumption.  And 
> politics was played out accordingly.  Of course, there was negative campaigning and mud slinging going on.  I'm sure there was in 
> Ancient Athens.  But in the televisual world, instead of substantive debate, we now live on the sound-bite and the image.  There's 
> not much political substance there, because it's simply impossible to transmit the necessary information in those types of 
> formats.  We vote on the best smile, now.  Just like Miss America.
>
> Even tonight's results are not about real substance.  They are about "getting the bums out."  No IQ necessary, from either voters 
> or politicians.  Just pure emotion.
>
> Respectfully,
> PJ