Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity

As Ed. told you earlier today -- see previous post -- [not the one with the video of the Swazi reed dance! Ed.] -- I am writing a review of Bill Bryson's latest opus The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Some people will call it a travel book, but in reality it's a trenchant commentary on the decline of culture and just about everything else, disguised as a travel book. One of the things decried by Mr. Bryson is the descent of modern society into a deep and abiding stupidity. He didn't write that; I did. Here's what he wrote, pages 226-227.

I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier [see previous post] and this got me to thinking about stupidity again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me.

So what I began to wonder was this: what if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgement or diminished taste? That would explain the success of Mrs Brown's Boys, for one thing.

We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them - 86 per cent, according to one estimate - have never been tested for their effect on humans.

Every day, to take just one example, we call consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea, but if you look at what's on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That's all I'm saying.