Johnson vs. Bauerlein, Round 1
In the one corner, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You; in the other, Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation. Two very smart people with very different ideas about where young Americans are heading. I’ve written a little about these two before — here and here — and promised to revisit the issues. This is a belated attempt to do so, though I’m just going to outline some thoughts here and then (I hope) develop them further in later posts.
Johnson’s basic position is that (a) today’s young people are smarter than kids of earlier generations and (b) this is largely a result of their constant exposure to varieties of pop culture that are cognitively demanding. It takes more brainpower, he would argue, to play Grand Theft Auto IV than to play Monopoly; and Lost demands levels of concentration and attention that Gunsmoke never did. Pop culture today is “good for you” because it forces you to develop a certain mental acuity in order to enjoy it. Johnson also frequently cites studies indicating that today’s teenagers are “the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era.” So when Johnson looks at the data about young people, he’s especially interested in, and encouraged by, two things: skills acquisition and activity levels.
Bauerlein, by contrast, is concerned about the content of young people’s brains, or the lack thereof. If they don’t actually know anything about American government, should we really be encouraged by their apparent political activism? Bauerlein cites one study of American teenagers — cultural conservatives love this kind of survey — showing that 59% of them can name the Three Stooges, while only 41% can name the three branches of government. (And perhaps the disparity is even greater, depending on the methodology of the study: would an especially Stoogocentric teen get proper credit for naming Curly-Joe as a legitimate Stooge?) For Bauerlein there is nothing remotely exciting about a generation of passionately committed political partisans who don’t know jack-shit about how government actually works — and therefore about what would make for positive change, or about how such change could be achieved.
The disagreements begin here, but go much deeper. I will say more in a later post — again, I hope — about long-form versus short-form reading, and the cognitive benefits of each. But for now I’ll leave you with this thought: much of the disagreement between Johnson and Bauerlein involves different models of the future. Johnson is banking on the relatively near future being quite different than the relatively recent past: he is expecting that the existing economic structures will morph, or rather will continue to morph, into new shapes that will place a premium on a certain set of cognitive skills; and he is likewise banking on the internet functioning efficiently as a universally-accessible outboard brain that can always be counted on to hold the content that people haven’t bothered to upload into their own craniums. I’m not sure whether Bauerlein thinks such a scenario likely — probably not — but if he did think it likely he certainly wouldn’t think it desirable. But in any case, future developments in culture and economics are going to make one of these guys look really bad.
“He is likewise banking on the internet functioning efficiently as a universally-accessible outboard brain that can always be counted on to hold the content that people haven’t bothered to upload into their own craniums.”
I do this now!
— bcg · Jun 17, 06:41 PM · #
I will say more in a later post — again, I hope — about long-form versus short-form reading, and the cognitive benefits of each.
I really liked the first paragraph-and-a-half or so of this article, but then I got, like, bored and stuff.
— David Samuels · Jun 17, 06:50 PM · #
The more fundamental problem is that the basic tools of sound thinking about humanity — contrast, analogy, statistics, etc. — are becoming ever more suspect of leading inevitably to political incorrectness of thought. So, I’m sure that we’re headed for a Golden Age of gadgetry and celebrity gossip, but we’re headed for a Dark Age for significant thought.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 17, 10:08 PM · #
It’s worth remembering, though, that Johnson agrees with Bauerlein about at least one important point: Long-form reading is imperiled, which is a problem.
See pages 184-88 of Everything Bad: he specifically says that the cognitive tools required for “cognitive immersion”—whether in sustained thought (nonfiction) or in another’s consciousness (modernist fiction) need to be defended against the eroding forces of popular/networked culture.
(Anecdote: I teach his book all the time in writing courses, as an example of how to build certain kinds of arguments. Students always complain that the book is “too long”—at 200 pages!!—and that they can just watch his Stewart and Colbert interviews. Which isn’t true, but somehow speaks to both Johnson and Bauerlein’s points.)
— Jason B. Jones · Jun 18, 12:19 AM · #
I don’t have anything much to say other than how nice it is to have time to read again now that the school year is over. We’re sending a lovely young man from our church to Wheaton this fall. Maybe he’ll be in one of your classes. I told him to try to take a class with you. His name is Riley Balikian.
— Joules · Jun 18, 01:29 AM · #
Curly-Joe is not a legitimate Stooge. Any study that would state or assume as much is fatally flawed in its methodology.
— Mark in Houston · Jun 18, 02:02 AM · #
Alan: I haven’t read either of the books, but the analogy of Grand Theft Auto to Monopoly strikes me as fatally flawed. You have to account for the percentage of time spent on different activities. Kids today spend a vastly greater percentage of their time indoors, interacting with man-made environments and jumping through man-made hoops than they did two, three generations ago. That has probably changed the shape of cognition. The Flynn Effect suggests, in fact, that we’re all getting smarter, but we may just be reorganizing our brains to do the kinds of tasks that IQ tests measure well more swiftly and accurately, while doing other tasks much less well. I’m skeptical that this means we’re training our brains to be generically more plastic. Video games change all the time, so they may accustom us to rapid change, but they also change in predictable ways associated with the genre, and if the future “skills market” doesn’t line up well with the kinds of cognitive skills that video gaming hones to a fine edge, then I don’t see why today’s kids will be able to adapt better than yesterday’s. Not all rapid change is the same.
— Noah Millman · Jun 18, 10:50 AM · #
Totally unrelated to this post, but can I make a request to the TAS writers? Can the RSS feed please be modified to hold more than the 5 most recent entries? I do all my blog reading through RSS, and it’s frustrating that unless I constantly check TAS, I end up missing a lot of content. Thank you.
— Derek · Jun 18, 12:20 PM · #
Derek-
The feed now contains ten articles. Bu this is not to say that one shouldn’t CONSTANTLY CHECK TAS.
-Matt
— Matt Frost · Jun 18, 12:35 PM · #
Matt, thank you very much!
— Derek · Jun 18, 12:53 PM · #
Isn’t there a deeper disagreement at work here? It might be the case that contemporary American pop culture does, in fact, prepare kids well (cognitively speaking) for participating in a fluid economy, etc., while at the same time neglecting the skills necessary for careful, deep reflection. Perhaps what is at work here is less a claim about whither our young’uns and more a disagreement about whether that’s a good thing? (Note that I’m going off various descriptions of the books, as I haven’t read them yet…)
— Michael Simpson · Jun 18, 12:53 PM · #
Jason: That’s a very interesting anecdote, and I’ll bring it up in my next post on the subject. I also plan to mention that Johnson has acknowledged the costs of declining long-form reading, but has been reluctant to spell those out or evaluate their importance.
Joules: Welcome back!
Mark: Agreed without reservation. Thus my statement of concern.
Noah: Very important point about plasticity, or the lack thereof. Are we breeding a generation of very narrow specialists, with small sets of highly developed skills and general incompetence beyond them?
Michael: Note that I say “The disagreements begin here, but go much deeper,” and that even if Johnson’s predictions turn out to be true and our young people are really well adapted to the future job market, Bauerlein is unlikely to think that’s a compensation for what will be lost. But more on all this later.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 18, 04:15 PM · #
The changes in how we (and our children) are learning and processing information are clearly important and worth discussing. But whenever I see an author trying to pass a simple Good/Bad judgment on a huge, complicated trend where there are clearly both gains and losses, I feel like he’s trying to sell me something. Besides his book.
Regardless of whether or how much reading is declining, it would be a good thing if people were reading more and reading more thoughtfully. And no matter how much it tempts us to read fewer books, the Internet is too valuable to reject.
— Michael Straight · Jun 18, 05:44 PM · #
What cranky people like Bauerlein ignore is that they wildly overestimate the knowledge of past generations of teenagers. I suspect that no more than 40% or 50% of teenagers of any decade could identify the three branches of government. For this purpose, you can’t compare the answers of “high school students,” for example, because a much higher percentage of teens are in high school than was the case 50 years or 75 years ago.
— David A · Jun 19, 04:01 PM · #