It seems quite obvious to me that we do "live in the bubble of the present" at least in this country. And, while that's crucial to making our way through each day, it seems like a certain way to make the wrong decisions when it comes to political affairs. But, reading history isn't necessarily the antidote, because there is a lot of political literature that's bullshit, and even - or maybe especially - the textbook history every nation provides its children is heavily weighted to a nationalist view, and not necessarily a historically accurate (or complete) one.Despite the gains in IQ, [Flynn] worries that we aren’t engaging our minds effectively on the issues that matter. “I’m not being gloomy but actually the major intellectual thing that disturbs me is that young people like you are reading less history and less serious novels than you used to,” he says, arguing that we should have a background in the crises that have shaped world history before we form opinions on current politics. He chastises me for my lack of knowledge of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, for instance, which he believes has many parallels with today’s conflicts in the Middle East.
[...]
George Orwell, he says, painted a dystopia where the government rewrites history to control and manipulate the population. “But all you need are ‘ahistorical’ people who then live in the bubble of the present, and by fashioning that bubble the government and the media can do anything they want with them,” Flynn adds.
[...]
“Reading literature and reading history is the only thing that’s going to capitalise on the IQ gains of the 20th Century and make them politically relevant.”
BBC
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
h/t Gitari
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