From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith
1992
Global
dumbing, according to the thesis I have been considering lately,
involves the virtually imperceptible but steady deterioration of the
aggregate human mind -- as well as of its institutions -- much as the
temperature of the earth is apparently rising at a rate so minuscule
that scientists will be still be debating its escalation even as the
waters of the Atlantic Ocean lap at the potted plants in the lobby of
the Trump Plaza.
In fact, global warming and global dumbing are
intimately connected. Without the latter, something actually might be
done before that portion of Washington below the fall line of the
Potomac is totally submerged. And like global warming, global dumbing
concerns itself with losses incurred by energy transfers and nature's
ceaseless quest for the random equilibrium of chaos. It is, in short,
the entropy of the human spirit and of the systems it has created.
In
physics, entropy is a measure of unavailable energy. In the natural
world, entropy is reflected in the pollution from your car and the
radioactive tailings from Seabrook. If the world were perfect, energy
would do just what it was supposed to do and not go wandering off like
some groupie of that cosmic band, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. As
it is, much of it is wasted and thus when you bake something, your
kitchen as well as your oven gets warm. Such phenomena led the German
physicist Ruldolf Clausius to propose in 1865 that we were losing energy
everywhere and that we call this sorry state of affairs entropy. It's
been downhill ever since.
Allow entropy to go on long enough
and you could theoretically have all energy transferred from where it is
to a great hyper-heated toxic dump in the sky, with the result that the
whole universe would just burn up. Fortunately, there is still debate
about this.
Entropy causes enough problems as it is, such as the
tendency in nature for things to move towards an equilibrium of
disorder and towards a simple, inert state. Thus while we can easily
burn wood in our fireplaces, no one has figured out how to take the
ashes and turn them into a tree limb again, let alone recreate a whole
rain forest. Information theorists say entropy goes on in communications
as well. The repeated transfer of information results not in knowledge,
they argue, but noise and static as the information degrades in its
repetition, much as a fifth generation photocopy of a fax becomes
unreadable.
Cultures lose energy, too. Which is why the
Egyptians don't build pyramids any more, and why Guatemalans have to
import digital watches rather than just checking their Mayan calendars.
The creation of a great civilization or a great world power wastes a
enormous amount of energy. As Barry Commoner put it, in nature there is
no free lunch.
In earlier times, it was possible to avoid
cultural entropy by stealing energy from somewhere else. This, of
course, was the foundation of slave trade, the British Empire and
various new world orders of the first half of 20th century. While it
still goes on, energy theft has become more difficult as the world has
steadily lost its cultural, political, environmental and economic
differentiation, not to mention the creation of OPEC and the appearance
of nuclear bomb factories in various third world countries.
The
global human mind faces a similar problem, thanks to such factors as the
ubiquity of American film and television, excessively frequent summits
of world leaders, international conferences on every conceivable
subject, multinational corporations and other well meaning efforts that
bring the world closer together but in so doing leaves no corner of it
immune from human energy loss. If there is, in fact, a entropic collapse
of the earth, the last sound may well be that of Larry King telling a
caller from Bali to hold on a minute for a word from our sponsor.
Nor
is this entropy limited to the more public pursuits. Indeed, a cursory
examination of American business suggests that its major product is
wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers,
Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising
agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic
planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country
has any manufacturing base at all.
We have created an economy
based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising,
planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or
defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few
remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for
another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.
Things have
degenerated so far, a recent article in Business Economics points out,
that we even cite entropy as an indication of our economic progress, as
when we add the cost of cleaning up the Valdez oil spill to our gross
national product. . .
One might look to our universities for
ways to counteract the entropy of our society. But one would do so in
vain. In fact, one sure clue to the rate of entropy is relative
inflation, for inflation, after all, is a measure of how much its costs
to do the same thing today compared with yesterday. The difference is a
form of entropy and at the top of the list you'll find academia.
It
shouldn't really surprise when you realize that these campuses have
been actually teaching the entropic lifestyle for years. It was
America's business schools that spread the word that management was an
overarching skill that eliminated the need to know anything about the
particular product or service that was being managed. It was
agricultural schools that fostered entropic farming with its emphasis on
pesticides and capital intensiveness. And it has been our academies of
the liberal arts that have so failed to guard our language that a
majority of college graduates seem to think that having a "process" is
the same thing as creating a product.
Scale plays an important
role in entropy. Roughly speaking, the larger a system or institution,
the more wasted energy. This applies to governments, corporate
bureaucracies, or the limousines their leaders ride. Part of this is due
to the fact that as a system becomes larger, a proportionately greater
amount of energy has to be devoted to keeping the system alive rather
than doing what the system is meant to be doing. Hence the college
president who spends 70% of the work day raising funds instead of
raising academic levels, a phenomenon that can be noted at a mundane
level by anyone who has moved from being a member of a committee to
being its chair.
If you think about it, I am sure you can find
in your own experience numerous examples of the increase in human
entropy. An easy test is to write down all the institutions, committees
or groups with which you have some affiliation. Now put a check mark
beside each which is doing a better job now than it was five or ten
years ago. See what I mean?
Applying this test to the entire
decade of the 80s, I could only think of a few major exceptions such as
laptop computers, Velcro and mini-vans, although, being as subject to
global dumbing as everyone else, I may have missed something.
The
problem of entropic systems is further complicated by the fact that
nature didn't intend these systems to exist in the first place. So the
bigger and more complex they become the more unnatural and unstable they
become. Just as an ice cube would rather be water, so the Resolution
Trust Corporation would much rather be a bunch of political hacks
handing out patronage to their Republican allies. Entropy drives these
systems towards their natural state, resulting in not only
ineffectualness and anarchy, but massive corruption as well.
Since
everyone has forgotten what these systems are meant to do, it is no
longer possible to determine clearly what those within them are meant
not to do. Aided by the entropic use of language, our ethics as well as
our productivity become degraded. Thus we find the mayor of Washington
accepting scores of free tickets to the Super Bowl from Jack Kent Cooke,
with whom she is engaged in intense negotiations over a new stadium,
and the debate centers over whether the tickets represented "the
appearance of a conflict of interest" rather than -- to use a
pre-entropic phrase -- a bribe.
Fortunately there is no evidence
that global dumbing has entered the human gene pool. Nature, before
people began fiddling with it, handled the problem rather neatly by
regularly killing off the entropic and giving birth to new life and
energy. I find considerable comfort in the fact that I have never seen a
small child facilitate anything nor one enamored of process in any
form.
Instead, they like to make things, do things, laugh and
sing. Thus I strongly suspect that we have just taught ourselves to be
dumb and, however difficult, it remains possible to re-educate
ourselves, even if it means going back to kindergarten to learn how. In
any case, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this issue.
If global dumbing is not halted, we may wake up one morning and find
that no one in this country knows how to make anything anymore. We may
discover our dearest friends and relatives in a catatonic state before
the TV and the device won't even be on. When we call for help we may
find that 911 has become an endless loop voice mail system from which
one can never disconnect. We may even, some day, elect a hologram as
president -- and we'll be too dumb to realize it.
