IF you are one of the growing band of the disillusioned who own now as a "consumer" rather than a reader, or see yourself as part of an intelligent audience switched on by what is "good" rather than by what is necessarily "popular", then this is the book for you. It will raise the levels of disbelief that such truly important steps towards democratising culture - political correctness is precisely that, and why not? - should end up gaping back in parodic wonder.
In "Dumbing Down: Some Leading Indicators", the lucky-dip lead-up to these flinty, sometimes snooty and prissy but essential guides to the contemporary culture which transatlantically embraces us all, one professor of television is quoted as saying: "If you back me against a wall, I would say ostensibly, as a piece of art Hamlet is in some ways superior to Lou Grant." Ostensibly is right.
Television is the big bad ugly wolf in much that goes by the term "dumbing down", the deliberate pandering to the lowest tastes by the producers, editors and multifarious marketing people who see their role in the cut-and-thrust commercial environment as that of continuously promoting evermore "new" angles on the entertainment fetish of post-industrial capitalism.
Unquestionably, the quality of television has taken a nose-dive over the past twenty years or so. The ludicrous computerised version of human sport and physical exertion known as the Gladiators marks off It's a Knockout (remember Eddie Waring?) as belonging to a previous lifetime. Television drama, following the American style, is set mostly in "real-life" fire and police-stations, hospitals veterinary and GP practices, while the soaps bubble away in the virtual reality of TAM rating wars.
The talk shows, with their subtitled metaphors of experience and communication, have jettisoned argument and revelation in favour of the floss of self-promotion, while personality disorders become a grotesque laugh-in.
"Dumbing down" pervades every walk of life and lifestyle, according to the twenty-plus essays gathered here into five sections on education, arts and sciences, the media, and sections apiece on public and private life. The cultural war which afflicts American educational and civic life is hailed often as the hallmark of a great and thriving democracy. Reading this book makes one wonder.
The on-going struggle for an egalitarian and vibrant culture along with the clear need to keep multicultural tensions in check, has given birth to what one contributor calls an obscuring "emotional literacy" and self-defeating "feel-good" factor.
There is much to learn from Dumbing Down and much to disagree with: Cynthia Osick's "The Question of Our Speech: The return to Aural Culture" is an important essay; Nahum Waxman on "Cooking Dumb, Eating Dumb" struck me as daft, while "The Trivialisation of Tragedy" by Jonathan Rosen sounded a timely warning, as many of us in Ireland begin to make of our own historical wars an education site not just for political redress but for cultural tourism as well.
Writing on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Rosen states: "Tragedy is what draws tourists. They come to feel that calamitous events are somehow informing their own lives, enriching them, making them better. But that is not the same as learning what happened to particular people, in a particular place and time, and facing the honest consequences of those events." As he says a little earlier in the same essay - a comment which could act as epigraph for much of what is best in this collection - "Something has changed in our understanding of what history is that makes us wish to conjure the past and have it perform for us." That is the ultimate in consumerism.