O mundo está ficando mais inteligente

De um dos textos mais interessantes que li recentemente, The Age of Mass Intelligence — na Intelligent Life, que tem a Paris Hilton na capa:

Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season’s opening night from the Royal Opera House. “I like hip-hop and opera,” he says. “Not a big deal.”

(...)  

Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. 

(...) 

This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.” 

(...) 

“I was a judo journalist,” Soames says, “and when I visited judo groups I found that everyone wanted to learn. The -do in judo means ‘the way’ and the concept inculcates in those doing the sport a strong desire to learn. These people would never sit down and read Dante or Joyce. But they would listen to them if they were read well enough. Now we know there is a group of people I call self-improvers who want a wide range of intelligent stuff, including the classics.” 

(...) 

what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.