Hello!

Okay, so at the end of last week’s instalment, Matt was saying that he’d noticed, in recent times, a more popular appreciation for “nerdliness and remembering and memory and having a good mind”…

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SH: Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, because I sometimes wonder about the current prestige of general knowledge, but you’re saying your experience is going counter to what my glum old outlook… Because I often see people not being interested in anything at all that happened before they were born, and being utterly incurious about anything going on outside their own little world. I seem to encounter it a lot, but maybe I’m just on the lookout for it. But when someone’s asked a question and they angrily respond “I don’t know, that happened before I was born! How can you expect me to know that?” Well, I know what the French Revolution is, you know…

MP: Can I say something to that, please? I want to speak to that question in their defence.

SH: Yes.

MP: The person I am now – this nerdly knowledge person – started when I was young not as a choice, but because I lived in a monoculture where there was limited input. So if I wanted to be interested in things, I pretty much had to be interested in stuff that was happening. When I was seven or eight, say, and starting to show an interest in the world and starting to go “What’s a capital city?” “Does every country have a capital city?” “Where’s the Nile?” “What are trees made out of?” “Where’s the Amazon?” “Where do tigers live?”… I had few places to turn, right? I was not bombarded with the entire universe of human knowledge coming at me all at once.

SH: No.

MP: You know, you did not get lost down a rabbit hole. We had an encyclopaedia at home, and I could page through that, and it was nice and structured. And also in terms of the culture that was being thrown at me, you know, I was watching cowboy movies and World War II films. That’s why I became interested in history, because I just wanted to know, was Jason and the Argonauts before Ben-Hur, or after? You know; biplanes… What war were they in? I was just trying to make sense of a monoculture that wasn’t aimed directly at me.

I think it’d be really difficult now to stay sane as a young person, because every message pretends to be directed at you. “Keep your attention on me!” “I’m the most…” Every message says “You!” Whereas back in the culture I grew up with, I was free to just kind of make up my mind and make sense of it.

That’s how I knew about things that happened before I was born… because that’s what the culture was drawn from; all the stuff that happened before I was born. Whereas now, young people have been identified as this crucial market.

SH: Yes, sure.

MP: And that drives everything. So they’re just bombarded with all this stuff and they’re flat out just making choices about what they’re going to pay attention to.

SH: That’s a fair point.

MP: So I don’t blame them for making a simple decision like, ‘we’ll just keep it to stuff that’s happened since I was born – we’ll just keep it to that’. I mean, I know who Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are because they were just part of the wallpaper when I was growing up.

SH: Yeah.

MP: And there weren’t that many music artists out there. So that’s how my knowledge formed. Whereas now, there’s so much music and so much content in general that even if you’re just looking at one particular medium like film or music or whatever, that could be a full-time occupation, or even just staying across what’s happening in one genre of music. There’s so much content. Whereas in the monoculture that I grew up in, there was just less content. It was all pre-filtered and a lot of it was from before I was born.

SH: And a lot of it came through English and American lenses.

MP: That’s right, yeah. We had Australian stuff and we had English stuff and we had American stuff.

SH: And you talk about war movies – I’m assuming that maybe 90% of those were American?

MP: Yeah. So, yeah, and Westerns and all that sort of stuff.

SH: And I do see that now, as you say, it’s just a dazzling sort of variety of everything pumped at you, 24-7.

MP: That’s right, yeah. So, I can see why someone would say, okay, let’s not worry about what happened before I was born. I’ll just try and make sense of what’s happened since I’ve been born.

SH: Yeah, that’s a good point.

MP: Being 25 years old now, there’s a lot to make sense of. It’s not like filling in the gaps about the Romans is going to help you figure out modern stuff, I don’t think. It’s so far removed now. For example, if you talk about vaccines now, it’s not about where they came from or how were they invented. It’s like; should I be having them or not? Who made them? Is Big Pharma charging us all too much? There’s a whole bunch of other questions in the discourse to be asked now, besides “what”… I mean, I was just trying to make sense of stuff I’d seen in films and TV. It’s way, way, way more than just that now.

SH: Yeah, that’s right.

MP: It’s actually too much. You’d have to be a really special brain now to be able to deal with the modern world and have all that knowledge of what happened in the 20th century and all those preceding centuries.

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What do YOU think? Do you agree with Matt? Just a reminder that you can always add your thoughts to any of our conversations here at HTWGS – simply ‘leave a reply’ in the comment box below. As always, I’d love to hear from you!

Join Matt and I back here again next Tuesday, as our conversation takes in topics ranging from AI and rote learning to 700 millimetre builders’ measurements!

Bye for now!  

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