Why we became so ignorant

Google, Wikipedia and the Web: a surplus of information which threatens culture

Internet, Google, Wikipedia and company, people commonly say, ruin or at least threaten culture, despite the large amount of information they provide or maybe because of this flood of information. It's a complex issue which has to be tackled without any catastrophic or nostalgic and blames of the iniquity of times and without passive and joyful acquiescence to any bad trend It's not strange culture can be weakened by a surplus of information which prevents from selecting and reflecting and embarrasses times of the authentic culture, which is not accumulation of knowledge but rather critical and self-critical ability, passion, distance. Culture, as Lin Yutang used to say, is loving and hating with reason. It's strange information, even the mere one without any reflection,  is being impoverishing up to ridicule.

There is no doubt that today we have tools of information incredibly fast such as those offered by search engines. These are a great help in everything because they provide quickly to breaking news and data reachable only with a long, arduous and uncertain job. Like everyone else, it happens to me too to use frequently and usefully, albeit with the help of additional material, search engines for what I write about. That information, of course, are not yet culture, but they are the lead. But strangely today is the information to regress fearfully, as if, instead of having so functioning tools, we lived in a world with no communication, no books, no newspapers, no radio and tv, no internet.

In their book La cultura si mangia (Guanda) Bruno Arpaia and Pietro Greco quote impressive and comical examples of incredible ignorance. A deputy of the Democratic Party of the last Parliament, when questioned on television about the meaning of synagogue, she replied: " the place where Muslim women go to pray their God." Fifty, maybe a hundred years ago, even illiterate people would have known almost, albeit crudely, that the synagogue deals  with Jews. Another politician, when asked who Netanyahu is replies, "the president of Iran." The mechanism here is clear: she will have opened a newspaper, will have seen a headline in large letters like, "Netanyahu protests with Iran" or something like that, and then in her mind the two terms associated themselves, such as straw and hay , right and left in the square-bashing of conscripts a century ago.

Arpaia and Greco sympathize with the “centrosinistra”, but to be fair they can find ignorance wherever; of course, in their book there are so resounding examples about members of the “centrodestra”. Recently, on Espresso, Umberto Eco recalled how in quizzes broadcasted in primetime TV some people proved to believe that Mussolini was still alive at the end of the eighties or nineties. Perhaps the worst trouble is that these people didn’t fly into the desert to hide the shame of being caught in such ignorance, maybe they have been flattered to be appeared on TV, even though with laughing stock. But they can console themselves because they are in good company in the all world.

It is often the ruling class, or that consider itself the one or that destined to become the one, crowding the desks reserved to scholars with donkey ears. A young woman from a Jewish family, whose great-grandparents had died in a concentration camp, showed to know very vaguely who was Hitler. When I taught at Bard College, a great American college where Hannah Arendt taught and has been buried, between 39 graduates only one knew who was Tito and nine didn't know who Stalin was. It is difficult to understand how this could happen , given that today is even easier and faster to know who Stalin was .

Perhaps today there is a great imbalance between supply and demand, especially in cultural field. Very few go to the library to take a book for their own interest, few go to the library for personal motivations. We usually go there asking what is strongly offered, and search engines suppose the customer’s initiative, they suppose he or she should put the question, although they often respond in turn by discharging and offer and therefore also too misleading. But even this really explains the reason why in “the era of knowing everything” we know less and less.