by Roger D’Aprix

I’ve just returned from a long and happy vacation at the same Maine coastal cottage my family and I have visited for the last 38 summers. It’s located right smack on the Atlantic on a high rocky bluff with a 20 or 30 foot descent to the water. It’s a modest cottage in the Mid-Coast area of Maine where you can sit on the deck and gaze all day at the lobster boats sailing close to shore, pulling their traps and methodically sorting the legal from the illegal-sized lobsters.

Maine is a state that loudly proclaims itself as “Maine: the way life should be.”

I couldn’t agree more after spending three weeks every year without access to email, a cell phone or the Internet. All there is to do is to sit and read and contemplate ‘the way life should be,’ but rarely is. Every time I’m there I’m filled with the same feelings of nostalgia, liberation and nothing-to-do-or-care-about that I used to enjoy as a kid on summer vacation. A major cause of that feeling is liberation from the technology that shapes most of our work lives. If the locals want to hook up to the Internet, they have to drive several miles to an Internet Café in a corner of a bookshop. Most choose to ignore the opportunity and to live uncluttered lives without a thought about email, websites, blogs and virtual ‘friends.’

But forgive me, this blog is not about a paean to Maine or a knock on relentless technology. It’s really about a provocative book I read entitled “Just How Stupid Are We?” by Rick Shenkman, a political analyst and professor at George Mason University. The subtitle is “Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” That truth as Shenkman sees it is fairly ugly. In his view the American public is easily fooled, uninformed about the actual workings of government and power and manipulated by political operatives who know only too well how to deliver a message aimed at their fears and insecurities.

He claims that if you look at American history, it’s clear that there has been ‘a constant tension between faith in The People and contempt for them.’ The Founding Fathers, he notes, were very careful in the beginning to limit the influence of the people at the ballot box based on their fear that ordinary people would use their votes to confiscate the wealth of the many and give it to the few. If Shenkman’s argument is beginning to sound more than a bit elitist, consider the words of Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention when he was arguing against universal suffrage. “…the people when they have been un-checked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king…” Shenkman is a piker compared to Hamilton and his conservative cronies.

And that’s one of the most interesting arguments in this provocative book. Conservatives have historically—until recent times—evidenced a constant mistrust of the wisdom of the people. Liberals, on the other hand, have tended to blame a variety of bogeymen, including Wall Street, corporations, the lobbyists and sinister behind the scenes power brokers for our problems. Shenkman describes this as ‘brilliant politics’ because it leaves the people off the hook whenever bad things happen.

He goes on to say that Liberals are dismayed because they tend to be held in bad repute in what historically has been a liberal democracy. The twin causes, he claims, are the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement. In his words, “Voters punished liberals at the polls not necessarily for what they had done wrong but what they had done right. This rankled.” It also left them shaking their heads because it put them at odds with their own belief in the people’s wisdom and good faith.

After stating his case, Shenkman closes with a heavy dose of hope. In the end he points to the Internet and blogging as hopeful signs that people can be engaged. He argues strongly for courses in civics and weekly testing of college students in current events as ways to raise the political IQ of Americans. He also urges that more people get actively involved in the party system where they can learn the actual working of politics and power.

As I watched the lobster boats slip over a tranquil blue ocean and past the Maine cottage, I wondered what all of this means and implies for two things I care about—first the current election and where it will take us and second what it also implies about internal communication and our need to conduct ourselves with ever more regard for the truth and the resolve not to manipulate people in the workplace as we have in the broader society.

by Roger D’Aprix

The July-August issue of The Atlantic features a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” by writer Nicholas Carr. His thesis essentially is that our online proclivities are short-circuiting our powers of concentration and affecting our ability to focus. In his words, “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading, immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. ..Now my concentration starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Carr blames the fact that he’s been spending too much time online although he calls the web ‘a godsend to me as a writer.’ He adds, however, that the blessing of ready online information comes with a price. He observes that the net seems to be robbing him of his powers of concentration and contemplation. Again in his words, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

That he is not imagining his loss is evidenced in the work of developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf from Tufts University. She’s an expert in the neurology of reading who claims we are ‘not only what we read but also how we read.’ In her work she’s discovered that when we read online we tend to be ‘mere decoders of information,’ a tendency that limits our ability to ‘interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction (italics mine.)

Carr ends by quoting the words of the playwright Richard Foreman in a view that resonates totally with me. He says, “I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my) ideal was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. I (now) see within us all…the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’

If the end result of our powerful, and now essential, technological tools is the loss of the ability to think beyond the mere information given, we are in serious trouble as a democratic society.