How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization
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There was no 'golden age' where nerds were popular and intelligence was always the most valued part of society. People aren't morons because they read about celebrity gossip or buy a ton of stuff or interact on social media. There was always a sizeable portion of the population who didn't care for intellectual parts of life, even back in the days of newspapers and radio broadcasts. Go back even further, and well, you were often deeply unpopular (at best) for having views considered 'dangerous' to society.
At least nowadays, it's easier to get involved in subcultures and groups for things you're interested in rather than being limited by geography. At least a lot of things previously considered 'for geeks' are now mainstream in some way. At least there's now a potential option for an intelligent outsider to make their fortune without having to be born into wealth or popular in a large company.
Anti intellectualism is not new, it's not increasing and it's certainly not bringing the 'downfall' of western civilisation.
Definitely not in America, there wasn't.
Other societies are different.
Because there was anti intellectualism back in Victorian times, at least in quite a few cultures. And every dictatorship/tyranny tends to have some rather extreme anti intellectual policies (the USSR, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Nazi Germany were quite prone to murder them en masse). Religious societies don't tend to deal with this sort of thing well either.
But I'll be interested in knowing what societies were more tolerant towards 'nerds' and intellectuals and outsiders compared to the US, Europe, etc.
Also, you're conflating different types of intellectuals. Nerds who are interested in science and engineering frequently aren't all that interested in art, social justice/change, government/politics, etc. Germany under the Nazis certainly had a lot of engineering prowess. They didn't tolerate anyone who wanted to change the government, obviously, but they certainly made use of their scientists and engineers. The Soviets, similarly, were always been pretty strong at math and science (while not tolerating political dissent).
Religious societies never seem to do very well with "nerds", and not too surprisingly, highly religious societies never seem to become strong in science and engineering or even industrialization. When they do, it's coincides with them watering down or neutering the religion, as we see in Western nations now.
Looks like cherry picking by the author. Long ago, people thought Elvis and Ed Sullivan were the 'end of Western civilization'.
However, the economic events of 2008, and recently accelerated in 2013, seem to have puts the nerds at the top of the socioeconomic totem-pole as measured by income, prestige, and wealth. As housing, energy, construction, manufacturing and other 'blue collar' and 'low-skill' jobs and sectors have faltered, 'nerd' jobs like IT and coding have been very resistant, seeing strong growth and high wages compared to the proliferation of low-paying service sector and 'gig' jobs, as well as the downsizing of middle management and mediocre employees.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nast-intellect.png
Obviously the nineteenth century was okay with using intelligent people as the butt of jokes and in negative comparisons.
Anti-intellectualism/nerd bullying on the other hand has always been with us
I ask because while i know it is a popular trope, i have never experienced or seen it in my country, despite being the prototypical nerd and having grown up in a poor area.
Edit: to add this perspective though, my wife went to school in a relatively small town (Rolla, MO) and also had a 400 or so graduating class, but she claims ignorance of any sort of nerd bullying and thought it was a TV trope only thing too. She graduated in 2002. Maybe something changed between those dates?
Admittedly, it was unrepresentative in other ways: one third Ashkenazi Jewish, one third Persian Jewish, one third mostly-white-and-Asian other, very high population of affluent immigrants. We were plugged in to American pop culture, but I think we were isolated in some senses. Little to no idolization of the sports teams, for example.
[edit] I guess I didn't see too much actual violent fighting otherwise beyond (I guess) normal making fun of / pushing around of nerds, although I did see a few fights between girls and some involving more metalhead/burnout types (in case anyone is familiar with the John Hughes High Schooler taxonomy)
Same in India as well.
The vast, vast majority of violence that happened at my school (and we had a fair amount) was between unpopular, non-nerdy kids with homelife problems.
Also, no, it didn't matter who started the fight. If you were involved then you were equal and disciplined the same. It's ridiculously backwards
The teachers naturally will "like" the talented social sociopath, so they forgive and don't punish their transgressions against the weak.
People draw the line at different points. Some might consider the shoving that happened frequently to me one year something far worse than what I considered it to be (frustrating and annoying, but not causing me any anxiety for fear that it'd happen again, I knew it'd happen again, but I didn't have panic attacks about it).
Physical violence was mostly between the bullies/"bad kids".
While I was nerdy, these things happened more because of differences of ethnicity than anything else.
When I left NYC I met someone who claimed that he had "never been punched" and I thought that was the craziest statement I had ever heard.
I am near two high schools in downtown Oakland and I have seen only 1 fight in the past 2 years. I think that today's kids are much less prone to violence even in the rougher neighborhoods and adults are much more likely to intervene.
I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.
This means that there isn't much social ROI for bullying someone and so people are largely left to their own devices.
Regardless, even in this thread there are people who claim to be from small schools and have not experienced physical violence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I do think it's far, far less common than Hollywood would have you believe.
I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid.
The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there.
Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing.
Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq.
After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit).
My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville).
I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)
Couple that with the rise of China and India along with the rest of the developing world and you have a recipe for no jobs, bad politics, and poor education.
Ross' problem wasn't bad friends, it was entitlement. He always felt that he deserved Rachel when in reality he didn't do anything that impressive or have the self confidence for her to consider otherwise. This was the writers fault, not the actor...
I can't tell if you're joking... you think the fall of Western Civilization started in the 1930s?
As per the title, the writer should have shown a "causal" link between the TV sitcom, and the perceived downfall of the Western civilization. Proving causality is hard, but I would have been happy even if the author had shown some level of correlation. Unfortunately, none were to be found.
The Western civilization is not same as United States. It presence is from the Western Europe to far reaching islands of New Zealand.
This is also something of a problem with HN, where such shallow articles sometimes get pushed up to the front page just because the author decides to write a challenging, and overreaching title.
In America, whether you go to college, and particularly whether you went to the couple of dozen top colleges, is hugely important. For example, virtually all members of Congress have college degrees. As do all military officers. And good luck finding a major business leader who never went to college.
There are some jobs which require very specific training that is available only in college; no getting around that. But it goes much further. In America, some jobs that _don't_ require mastery of any specific body of knowledge still require a college degree, any college degree, just as a test of basic competence. And a society that looks askance at intellectual activities just would not do things that way. It would use other criteria for judging general character and competence: achievements in sports, the arts, the military, something like the Scouts, or maybe leadership in organized religion.
If America were truly anti-intellectual, it would not trust a sector as intrinsically intellectual as colleges to do its social sorting. And with much less ability to confer social status on those they admitted, colleges would matter far less.
Can you believe these white social integration liberals that don't live as minorities in minority neighborhoods?
Can you believe this health and fitness advocate that once ate a Snickers?
Can you believe this yoga instructor that bought lululemon?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354581
(entirely unrelated tangent: R.E.M. ITEOTWAWKI(aiff) as a preliminary Friends theme song? Now that puts the whole show in an entirely new perspective)
All of which (including Friends) I enjoyed. But I always have this uneasy feeling, that this "let's give them what they want" culture, which has spread into everything from politics to tech, has all kinds of costs and consequences. Or maybe I am just getting old.
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
- re: Why Nerds are Unpopular - http://www.paulgraham.com/renerds.html
Related: https://xkcd.com/603/
Are you saying she was surprised by the news' idiocy?
There were shows which identified themselves as providing "news" and she wanted to hear the "news" but it had never occurred to her that she and the media would disagree on what that word meant. The thing that took her away from single tracking mainstream media was Michael Jackson's death. It was tragic but she just wasn't that interested in it and so many other things were happening at the same time that were getting no coverage that she could see. I suggested she seek out other sources of information and she did. A trip to the library for copies of various magazines and other newspapers and she was amazed at how much stuff she was not getting in the channels that she had voluntarily limited herself too.
Her big epiphany was that there is no "this is the information we're not sharing with you" summary. And without that summary, you don't know what you don't know unless you go looking for it.
Then culture has never in the entire history of man been "A-OK".
Which is perhaps true. But since it would basically be true by definition, it's not very useful, either practically or academically.
That wasn't really the case in the olden days, where gatekeepers controlled access to the media and a large audience. If your local/national newspaper was lying, you'd only know if you were deeply involved in the subject or went to serious lengths to research it. At which point, so what? You'd have no way to easily publish your findings and get a large portion of society hearing them and realising the current media were lying to people or pushing a distorted narrative.
The internet has merely made it easier to fact check people's claims and expose the mistakes made (and lies told) by the 'establishment'.
Note: Of course, the media could indeed be worse for various reasons (like say, the internet making decent journalism too expensive to be viable and culling the herd down to 'those best at attracting attention to themselves'), but you have to question whether things really were ever 'good' here, or whether the barriers to entry just made them appear to be 'good'.
I think before Vietnam journalists largely imagined themselves on the same side. I think after Vietnam, government propaganda got a lot more sophisticated. Besides that, the business model collapsed, making newspapers into supplicants and leading to cutback in resources devoted to investigative journalism. The latest trend of advertorial has newsrooms basically renting themselves out to businesses to write ad copy; how can you really cast yourself as an objective investigator after doing that?
Of course, journalists who imagine themselves as part of the circle of power are a problem but were around in the past too.
I guess my primary complaint is that the author assumes the ignorant masses can learn nothing useful from "Friends". Plenty of academians have had epiphanies during a break from studying/working.
Anyone who claims to know the single event that brought down Rome is a fool.