Our culture isn't getting more ignorant, there's just more of it.
Every day, there's more things other people know about that you don't. That's convenient!
Apparently, there’s a surprising number of adults who don’t know about The Odyssey. I learned this today because Christopher Nolan announced he was doing a movie adaption of it, and some people were open on social media about not knowing the source material. And then other people were openly horrified by this revelation, and eventually this lead to me reading this article from
from a few days ago.Gold is in the horror camp:
And many of the more notable ignoramouses here do appear to be young adult Gen-Zers, mostly meathead influencers with no time or incentive to know anything anyway. But their popularity as influencers and a whole lot of other data points have worked together to freak me out: we seem to be rapidly tipping toward a much dumber culture, a culture that both rewards ignorance and has no idea of its ignorance.
I’m not. On balance, I think this is good news, even though it means a smaller audience for my Odyssey fan-fiction.
Matt Ramos is a complicated man
Gold gives this tweet as a representative sample:
I had never heard of Matt “Supes” Ramos, but he’s reasonably well-known; Gold describes him as a 23-year-old influencer and TikTok star with over 300,000 followers. So I looked him up on TikTok. He has a popular “spam account” where he talks about whatever he feels like, and a main one that’s mostly about comic books and their screen adaptions. Most of the spam account videos are about sports, but maybe 1 in 10 are like this instead:
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This is what my TikTok would look like if I had one. It’s structured the way a lot of my articles are— “Here’s something I randomly got curious about this morning and did a deep dive on! I will now try to make it entertaining!”
And here’s a video from his main account:
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This seems to be his real brand—getting excited about adaptations of comic book stuff and bringing in context from the original. In another video, he shares a tweet celebrating that WandaVision inspired more people to go back and read the classic comic books it draws on.
His tweet about The Odyssey is a fusion of those two styles—he’s openly ignorant, sharing stuff as he learns it, and being excited about an adaptation of a classic. Only now, it’s a classic he’s excited to be learning about for the first time.
I think it’s a mistake to classify Supes with the “meathead influencers with no time or incentive to know anything anyway.” He’s clearly a curious person who knows how to do a little research, and like most influencers he has a very strong incentive to know things—in his case, comics.
I am nobody
It’s not just Supes’s ignorance that Gold finds horrifying—it’s that he isn’t embarrassed about it.
What’s new…is the absolute happy ignorance, and the ignorance of ignorance. I don’t think shame is an ideal motivator, especially when it comes to education: but it’s weird that there’s no shame here.
…
Literally just google it! You don’t have to post that you don’t know! You don’t have to post every little one of your idiot thoughts!
But being shamelessly ignorant is an essential cognitive skill, now more than ever. You can’t go around being ashamed that you don’t know who the Teen Titans are or when toothpaste stopped being made out of soap. The amount of knowledge in the world grows exponentially, while the capacity of a human brain has stayed the same. Before Homer wrote The Odyssey, it was impossible to be ignorant of it. So we are all, necessarily, more ignorant than our ancestors were. There’s so much more to not know.
I’m not ashamed that I’d never heard of Ramos. Sure, he has 300,000 followers, but that’s only (hold on while I google something) 0.00375% of humanity. I can’t possibly know about everyone with that level of fame.
More to the point, there’s very little social shaming for almost every kind of ignorance. Ramos got some abuse for his tweet, but I’m not expecting any censure for any of the many ignorances I’ve revealed so far in this article. Including the implicit ones, like calling his videos “sports” videos rather than something more specific, and the ones I don’t even know I’m ignorant about. I’m an elder millennial writing about a Gen Z influencer on an app I don’t have; I’ve probably made some mistakes.
Everyone expressing surprise at Ramos’s tweet is doing their own version of going HOLY SHIT and telling on themselves. We didn’t know that his culture didn’t know about Homer. That’s a more difficult gap to close than him not knowing the Odyssey’s pub date. We were blithely assuming something false about our shared artistic touchstones, a mistake that creates more distance.
Gods and Titans
Is Ramos’s specific ignorance a particularly bad one to have? The Odyssey is super important to the history of Western culture, and is referenced all the time. It’s definitely a useful thing to know about, and a sign that you’ve made an effort to engage with the fiction you’re consuming.
Is it better than Teen Titans? I don’t know, because I haven’t read or watched Teen Titans. I am being dead serious about this. I do not consider myself qualified to compare the two. But, just from the gulf of time between them, I can make some educated guesses (and then google for supporting evidence). Despite being a children’s cartoon, the 2010 series is probably more emotionally mature than Homer’s work. I can’t imagine Penelope telling Odysseus that after being apart for so long, she’s grown into a different person who no longer fits in their relationship.
But that’s kind of beside the point. Not having watched Teen Titans just means I’m old. Gold argues that not knowing about The Odyssey, at age 23, shows that Supes has been “robbed,” has lived a life that closed him off from humanity’s shared cultural heritage. I think this is empirically false. He has an infectious enthusiasm for mass media—that’s kind of his whole deal at the moment. He loves what he loves in part because he has so many people to share the experience with. It took him a bit to find out that The Odyssey falls into that category, but when he did, he was delighted. And it is delightful. Christopher Nolan is making a big-budget adaptation of a 2800-year-old Greek poem. If you already knew how omnipresent the work is, it’s harder to notice the delight, until Supes shares it with you.
Honey, wine, and blood to summon the spirits of the dead
That HOLY SHIT CHECK THIS OUT energy isn’t the only way to appreciate media, but it’s quite helpful for the task of resurrecting the past. The Odyssey wasn’t written to be studied as an ancient artifact. You’re supposed to find out about it when your buddy, his eyes sparkling, tells you you have to come listen to this amazing new epic poem.
It’s almost always how I write about history. A good chunk of this blog has been me discovering in real time that Mary Shelley’s dad is a really big deal. I’m sure I look a little ridiculous to long-time scholars of Godwin and his crew. But I think it’s valuable to show a little naive enthusiasm. If nothing else, it’s more fun to read than if I were pretending that everybody already knew about him.
The ancient texts have been winnowed and curated by time, and woven into everything that comes after. Everybody should have a chance to come to them eventually. But I think we’d be worse off in a world where everyone reads the same things in their teens. When I learn about something, I’d prefer it if the person teaching me has been an enthusiast ever since adolescence.
Also, cultural diversity fosters cognitive diversity, which is good because we have a million different jobs to do and problems that need to be looked at from many angles.
To benefit from this environment, you just need to stay open and respectful. Someone who hasn’t read the Great Books might be harder to understand, but that doesn’t mean they have nothing to teach you, and it doesn’t mean they’re not interested in what you know. We’re all on our own voyages, having different adventures, collecting tales from strange islands, and then coming together to share the best ones we’ve found.
Based on the title I thought you were going to talk more about how teachers have so many more significant works to cover and have to make choices. I think about it in terms of history/social studies. When I was in middle school I remember my history textbook ended with a couple paragraphs on the Vietnam War. This would have been around 1990. In high school my history classes focused on European history and some early American history. I never learned about things from when I was born (1976) through the current day, I never even had lessons that went into the Nixon/Watergate stuff, and I never learned about Asian, African, or South American history. I remember coming across the fact that at some point in my adult life high school students of the day were learning African and Asian history to some extent, like a student mentioned an upcoming test. This sort of helped me understand why the younger generations don't know much at all about the Holocaust, we spent time on it because they weren't covering all this other stuff. I think English classes have an even harder time because you have so many significant books you could cover, but it takes time so they have to choose. I'm sure the list of AP English books that I had in 1995 has some overlap with the list today but there are so many other, more modern books that would have been added that of course they won't know the Odyssey or something else because they actually learned about books written by non-White guys and gals along the way (which I pretty much didn't, maybe one or two White women, that's it).