Decline
Laying on the sofa watching series
Watching series has become an ordinary activity shared by all social groups in the modern society. Poor and rich people alike all share the same hobbies. There is little difference in their cultural backgrounds. I imagine that, a few decades ago, wealthy members of society used to have different occupations from poorer ones. Beware, I don’t mean that I would want to go back to the past and have the poor illiterate and living in terrible conditions. What I mean by that is, for instance, the rich would read lots of books - got to the theatre, the opera, and open their minds. Whereas the destitute would hardly ever read, if they could read at all!
Everybody has the common ground and cultural references. In a sense, higher social groups have grown to read less, spend more times watching series or travelling. I claim that modern occupations have lower values, indeed current activities don’t elevate their thoughts like before. Binge watching series is a passive activity that does not help with developing thinking or with the ability to speak. TV series display unnecessary violence, false cruelty and pseudo-realism to attract empty-minded audience in search of shocking images. You judge a series to be interesting if it shows enough cruelty, rough language and violence because it feels real. But what do you learn from it besides having your attention captivated like a newborn in front of a TV screen?
From the humanist dreams to the democracy’s downfall
I suspect people who held knowledge before were more complete than people nowadays. Without pulling as far as Leonardo Da Vinci who used to be a perfect intellectual - he was an artist, he could draw, he could paint and he was also an accomplished engineer. Coming back more recently, engineers from a few decades ago were much more knowledgeable in scientific fields. Past engineers were truly technical, they excelled at theoretical math and physics, but they also were able to put their knowledge into practice, designing and constructing machines. Today’s engineers barely understand the basic foundations underlying the whole building blocks they use everyday.
Furthermore, recent improvements made in modern engineering mostly consist of incremental and marginal additions to theoretical foundations that past engineers built before us. In the best case, current engineers learn and are able to add small improvements to engineering master pieces. However, most of the time people only learn to reproduce recipes learnt at school or in the corporate world. There are hardly any breakthroughs brought by the millions of engineers throughout the world, while a century ago very few high quality engineers could invent cars, aircrafts, etc. Modern engineers - the title is absolutely misleading, can’t develop a critical approach, think up innovative solutions that make technical breakthroughs.
Moreover engineers was a status that encompassed skills beyond the simple technical aspects. Although engineers were primarily people with scientific knowledge, they were also in charge of conducting the development of industries. As they had a grasp of the technical constraints brought by the activities, they were also able to chose what was best for the business in terms of employment, finance, etc. In all aspects, engineers had the sense of the duty and had all their minds oriented to building strong industries - because a strong country was a country with a strong industry.
Nowadays, most engineers are nerds who can hardly express themselves correctly. They can’t synthesize their jobs and ideas in simple terms to anyone, let alone are they able to develop long-term plans and put everything together in order to reach their goals. Most of them, including the most brilliant ones, don’t read, which reduces their minds to limited technical people. Our society has made the choice to lower the entry level for democracy but it has traded excellence for mediocrity. I don’t think people were naturally smarter before, but I do think that our expectation towards engineers (and people in general) has declined. And this has brought about generations of young and clever people being limited in their growths for the sake of well-being and concern.