Man is Becoming Less Knowledgeable Daily

Is it any wonder that our teenagers have, in many cases, opted out from formal education? It’s perhaps not so much the cost and the fact that no jobs are guaranteed at the end of their studies anyway, but the very ethos of learning so much information and tucking it away in the grey matter seems unnecessary when another “brain” spews out all they need to know at the touch of a button.

Today, all you need be is a proficient button pusher and Google or Wikipedia provides your long-term memory, (now in their cell phones!)

I mean, however much anyone studies, they become progressively and relatively more ignorant during every waking day.

And none of this esoteric stream of facts and figures gives a life-form what it wants anyway.

Take Ray Mears. How many of us are going to need his advice on how to survive in emergency situations in the wild?

I personally love Ray, even though he’s got fat as butter and has trouble these days stooping to rub two boy scouts together and make a fire, much less dig an igloo or have sex with a female moose.

But with “the wild” becoming yesterday’s news, how many of us will trek into the Amazon rain forest when there’s as many trees as you find alongside a British A road? Park the car in the UK; head into that inviting thicket and two trees later you wander into another motorway.

How many of us will leap into rafts to ride the wild rivers which have become trickles as they wash lamely against a huge dam?

Man - or any bunch of particles calling itself “life” - still only really needs the good old “sex, food and shelter.” All the frills, as orchestrated by our complex cerebral cortex, we could do without, much as their loss would pain modern man.

Our kids, at some basic level, realize this and they get what they want in a simple manner, often using a language as mystifying to us as listening in to Martians.

Ask your teenager daughter if she is having sex. Her reply will leave you no clearer as to the real situation…not really because she minds you knowing (late teens anyway) but she has not the words to explain to mum. (dads could care less these days). Why ask anyway, of course she is!

It is doubtful love will be mentioned. Kids don’t seem to expand on this even amongst themselves. But I don’t want to go down this path too far, mainly because I am as mystified as anyone else. I will say, though, that having sex today amongst a group that adds metal all over their bodies to aid in stimulation, is treated with callous indifference indeed, by the oldie’s standards.

What interests me is the concept that we are becoming more and more ignorant, if you like, when compared to the sum total of human knowledge.

Once upon a time man could amass the sum total of all human knowledge. Each and every person on the planet, say, 500 years ago, could easily store all that everyone else knew, if they could have contacted the source. (There were no books apart from parchment porn available to monks).

Today: in 2012, one person rarely knows everything there is to know about a blade of grass, never mind a significant percentage of the other torrent of information about man and his universe out there somewhere.

“Nonsense,” you scoff. “I know all about grass, the gardens full of it: photo-synthesis and all that” (from biology 101).

OK, put your listening ears on, as Judge Judy is fond of commanding.

Did you know grass - all grasses - are “Graminoids?”

That they are “Monocotyledonous?”

You may well have known grass is herbaceous, but did you know that “True Grasses,” (in contrast to those libidinous stems who cheat on one another), are from the “Poaceae Family?”

Then there is a whole other related family of Sedges and Rushes. Moses even knew that!

Did you know that grass, as well as being the stuff of your lawns and (some) sports fields has representatives which tower over lesser family members” True, we call them “Bamboo.” We know grass has been around a while…how? It has been found in fossilized Dinosaur dung from the Cretaceous Period.

OK, I’ll stop being a smart ass. I knew little of the above, either, I did what the smart kids do and called up Wikipedia.

But we only scratched the surface of the plants called “Grass.” You could fill books and websites with all there is to know and you could never remember 1% of it.

And that’s just one thing: Grass. We are surrounded by, inundated by, suffused by a suffocating miasma of information, nearly all of which will have not one iota of influence on our lives.

No wonder I want to chuck the computer out of the window and go and live in my cave in Baja!

Maybe our brains, despite their huge capacity - as if evolution had forecast this imperfect storm of facts and figures - are becoming so stuffed that the pure doctrine of survival and needs are contaminated. Is this is why we seek the wrong nutrition, end up with incompatible partners, build houses in danger zones all over the world? Are we just so confused by our ancillary “brains” …computers?

I mean, not only are we supplied with information on anything that attracts our fancy, so much of it is contradictory and argumentative.

Have you ever looked on Google to find out about a medical condition you have - or might have? One site turns the other on its head and vice versa.

How often do you come away with clear thinking on your problem saying, “Great, that’s exactly what I’ll do!” Not often I bet. It would be interesting to do a study on how many lie in graveyards world-wide as a direct result of a “cure” they found on Google.

Don’t worry, your doctor’s been looking on the Mayo Clinic site, too! That’s why your on so many pills, not because he actually put his hands on you and made a “Diagnosis!” Doctors in that huge fraud called the NHS these days don’t do that, it might end up in a law suit!

Doctors in the main do what their drug company reps tell ‘em to do. Put you on another pill and hope for the best.

Well, enjoy your weekend and SWITCH THAT INFERNAL MACHINE OFF…YOU DON’T CARE WHY THE LAWN’S PATCHY!!!