July 11, 2008
Idiocracy, 18th Century Style
Sometimes things just click together in my academic surfing and I find how many unrelated references I had previously not thought about actually are connected. While looking up the concepts related to baroque theater (just for game use, honest!) I found myself in the realm of Restoration (and subsequent) art critic, which led me to Pope's satires.
Not being of a literary bent I had never encountered Pope's Dunciad before. It is a very fun read, an equal mixture of satire against literary enemies and fears about the dumbing down of early 18th century Britain.
The basic story is that the goddess Dulness, goddess of stupidity, is recruiting Lewis Theobald (literary rival of Pope) as her new king and showing him how the war against quality, learning and independent thinking progresses with the help of nonsense, hired pens and bad writing. "While pensive Poets painful vigils keep,/ Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep" The literary marketplace is full of idiots, flatterers and profiteers selling whatever sells, priming the public to want more spectacle rather than better works. Academia is either promoting whatever fits the rulers, or losing itself in irrelevance:
Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in chains,
And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains.
There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound,
There, stripp'd, fair Rhetoric languish'd on the ground;
His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne,
And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn.
Morality, by her false guardians drawn.
Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn,
Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord,
And dies, when Dulness gives her page the word.
Mad Máthesis alone was unconfined,
Too mad for mere material chains to bind,
Now to pure space lifts her ecstatic stare,
Now running round the circle, finds it square.
It doesn't seem that much has changed since then. Including that it is hard for poets to tell when science is very relevant (Pope jokes several times about the study of fleas, which in time of course turned out to be quite important - not to mention the "mad" mathematics above).
In the end the "translatio stultitia", the progress of idiocy (a concept related to the renaissance idea of translatio studii, that learning forms a wave moving westwards - incidentally a concept Robert Anton Wilson filed off the serial numbers from and used in a few of his books) will overwhelm what little learning has been amassed:
How little, mark! that portion of the ball,
Where, faint at best, the beams of Science fall.
Soon as they dawn, from Hyperborean skies,
Embody'd dark, what clouds of Vandals rise!
It is interesting that the often quoted ending lines,
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.
actually refers to the triumph of lack of reason and quality, not just chaos or entropy in general. Pope was seriously worried that stupid memes were outbreeding the good ones ("Behold a hundred sons, and each a dunce"). Memetic dysgenics is always more pressing than genetic dysgenics - the generation time for memes is faster.
It is still a very fun poem (with plenty of very dirty jokes in the second book) but also a good reminder that the eternal war on stupidity has to go on. We cannot leave the enlightenment to sputter out - or think it wasn't ribald, violent and fun too.
Posted by Anders3 at July 11, 2008 01:12 PM