Pop Culture

Shut Up, My Brain is Full

The Australian, 30 December 1998

Recently I was telling a colleague about The Truman Show, that intriguing movie about a man living a good life, in a happy town, blissfully unaware that it's all make-believe.
"Have you seen that yet?" I asked.
"No, I don't watch movies," she said. "I haven't seen a movie since nineteen eighty... three, I think."
"You wait until they're out on video?" I presumed.
"No, Mark," she said indignantly, "I don't bother watching films because they're all the same."
"I think you'll find The Truman Show is a little bit different."
"I don't think it is," she said with a voice that, to the untrained ear, would sound like the words of an expert. In truth, she assumed that the movie was obviously something about the thirty-fourth US President - and considering that was Eisenhower, she was doing especially badly.
Nonetheless, she revealed her ignorance with pride - as people are doing around the world. Finally, after all these millennia, humanity has given up the quest for knowledge, and is on a quest to know as little as possible.
In the olden days, of course, being a know-all was a true status symbol. Knowledge was equated with wisdom. The King's scholar or wise man would command the respect of everyone in the kingdom, even the King himself. The scholar not only knew everything, but he had been everywhere, done everything, always had the best advice.
Now we have something called infoglut. Thanks to the internet, time management courses, package travel deals and virtual reality, everyone has been bombarded with information and enlightened by life-illumining experiences. In this environment, there's no point showing off your knowledge and experience. To prove your brilliance, you show off what you don't know, what you haven't done.
The real smart alecs have been doing it for years. The proudest person at a late-1980s dinner party was the one who boasted that he had never seen an episode of Neighbours, bought a Lotto ticket or caught so much as a glimpse of Halley's Comet. This immediately made him the most fascinating person at the table, though it effectively ceased most of the usual conversation.
In the late 1990s, to be truly cool, you have to go a few steps further. A friend of mine doesn't read any newspapers because "they're all rubbish", preferring to get his knowledge of the world from Blue Heelers and Hollywood comedy-dramas, usually starring Kevin Kline.
Perhaps he has a point. In 1998, the news media informed us that Kerry Packer died, that Cheryl Kernot lost the election, and that Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson broke up like any normal Hollywood couple. None have actually happened, and moreover, there is nothing to suggest that they will ever happen. (Packer will probably find a way out.)
Incidentally, despite what you may have heard, King John did not sign the Magna Carta. (He merely left his Royal Seal.) Thomas Edison did not invent most of his inventions. (His technicians did.) The greenhouse effect did not cause the hole in the ozone layer. (Different problem.) Nobody in Casablanca ever said "Play it again, Sam." Nobody in Star Trek ever said "Beam me up, Scotty." And most importantly, Eric Clapton is not God. (Have you ever listened to Thorn Tree in the Garden? Terrible!) Information has been wrong so frequently that it's a wonder we even bother with it.
As for experiencing life... This is still OK, provided you don't experience anything too common. Today's wisest people have somehow missed all the joys and simple pleasures that everyone else takes for granted. ("You know, I've never eaten a Mars bar. Never.") They have never even heard a Savage Garden song - and if they did, they didn't like it.
Most importantly, they have somehow avoided knowing the most unavoidable facts. This sounds fair enough. After all, how people's lives have been improved or enriched by, say, all this news about Bill Clinton's private life? The more we know, the more we say "I wish I didn't know that." The wisest people go even further: "Look, I just haven't been following all that rubbish because I'm simply not interested." Astounding! How can someone have so much self-control?
Nowadays, as most people know Leonardo as the cute guy from Titanic, Socrates as a bloke in a Monty Python song and Hawking as something done by door-to-door salesmen, it's clear that knowledgable people are clearly not treated with the same adulation as before.
At this rate, anyone with any brains will soon be scorned, misunderstood, pilloried or even executed, like many of the cleverest people in history: Sir Thomas More, Galileo, Darwin, Barry Jones... And fair enough too! If there's one thing that we don't need, it's an overdose of knowledge.
As someone said (but I'm not sure who it was), "Ignorance is bliss, and it's a folly to be wise." At least, I think that's what they said. I can't be bothered finding out.