I normally enjoy going to the bookstore, but today, while there, I inadvertently gazed into the abyss. I saw a series of books that made me wretch with disgust. So profane were the titles alone that I had to run screaming from the store as if escaping an oncoming fire. It was a group of books entitled "The Thirty Second_________" and you filled in the blank with Philosophy, Religion, Economics and so on.
These books professed to give you a thirty second explanation of all the great ideas, religious beliefs, economic theories, etc. so as to prepare you as a well read Bohemian. In fact, the book cover specifically asks the philosophical question, "Do you know enough about things to join a dinner party debate or dazzle the bar with your knowledge?" So the new standard of knowledge appears to be your ability to ruminate on it with a drunken colleague at the Wild Wings bar.
Call me old fashioned, but knowing more than a headline about, say, Kant's Cosmological Constant is a worthy goal. That is not to say everyone needs to be a PhD in philosophy, but neither is it helpful to just know enough to be profoundly ignorant. I would rather know nothing about Einsteins Equilibrium equation than know it's name so I can respond "What is Einstein's Equilibrium?" in a parlor version of Jeopardy. Knowing just enough to be dangerous is in itself a precarious situation. Suppose I had read the "Thirty Second Guide to Circumcision" and you were next on the chopping block. I think you would prefer I get the five volume course before sharpening your little tyke's pencil.
We live in a sound bite world. Some of us have the attention span of a hummingbird. We flit here and there and only ever reap a tiny amount of nectar. I don't blame the individuals, they are merely products of the environment. As with most things wrong with the world, I trace this fascination with anything superficial and fleeting to the subversively satanic MTV. If it couldn't be said, sung, or smoked in a two minute time span, it was not relevant. At its inception in the seventies, people would sit for hours mesmerized by the parade of spandex wearing, midriff bearing, puffed hair musicians with the occasional "news" report from the world of rock. The explosion of MTV clones ushered in the era of the thirty second sound bite which has forever changed our culture.
The science of neural embodiment looks at how cultural and societal shifts change not only our behavior but also the physical structure of the brain. Pre-1974 the part of the brain devoted to attention and reasoning was a substantial part of the neocortex. Today, this area is so small it makes Kim Kardashian's bikini look like a burka.
The demon possessed MTV was not the only culprit however. TV news broadcasts and video journals also specialized in "Wham bam, thank you mam" information dissemination. Imagine an expose on the abortion debate crunched into a one minute network news report. Can you say superficial?
Newspapers have always depended on headlines for readership and interest. I know I am guilty of scanning headlines and taking their half baked information as gospel and never delving into a more in depth discussion in the body of the work. For example, for years I thought Barney was a purple dinosaur puppet that appeared on a kids TV show. If I had read pass the headlines I would have realized he was an alien shape shifter sent by Xenon from the planet PBS-13 designed to infiltrate your child's mind and convince them that a single payer health system was best for the country. See what you miss if you stay only on the headlines!
How can you possibly do an ounce of justice to a topic like Buddhism or macroeconomic theory in thirty seconds? The headline answer is that you can't, but is there some value in knowing a little about a lot? The long answer is ...no. A jack of all trades and master of none is another way of describing a liberal arts graduate working at McDonalds. We live in an increasingly complex world and the idea of being a trivia whiz may get you kudos at the local watering hole but it will also get you a place in the unemployment line. I am not advocating for the dissolution of the Renaissance man/woman. A proper understanding of that term is someone who knows a lot about a lot, but for those of us with an IQ a few hundred points below Leonardo DaVinci I suspect it is better to follow your passion, get good at it, then branch out.
It took more than thirty seconds to write this, although you may disagree based on its content, so it is hard to believe that a thirty second education in anything is much worth pursuing.
