James Drogan

...the display of incompetence and dysfunction by the political elite and the punditry comes Neal Gabler's provocative opinion piece, The Elusive Big Idea, in today's New York Times.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

For some time now I have opined that most Americans are satisfied with a beer, a boat, and a sound bite.  We have ceded our rights and responsibilities to the aforementioned political elite and punditry.  In the words of Gabler:

We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

Gabler closes his piece by suggesting that we "Think about that."  I echo his admonition.