NO matter how many times I've ranted against the damaging influence of lowest common denominator entertainment media and the spiralling of the world into wilful amnesiac ignorance, I finally have to admit it's not Jordan, Jade or Russell Brand who are the symbols and symptoms of stupidity – it's not the outside world that's getting dumber, but me. I have somehow, in the last year, become progressively, spectacularly brainless.
This has become apparent in a wide range of social contexts: a dinner party, a pub, a meeting with an old friend, an interview. In the arena of polite, enlightened, middle-class chatter about the usual range of subjects on which we are expected to
hold an opinion I have consistently drawn blanks. Perhaps I am developing senile dementia. Is this possible when I haven't yet started balding? Did I accidentally give myself frontal-lobe damage last month when I showed my son how I used to head-bang to AC/DC in 1982?
In an attempt to save myself from the onward plummet into lobotomy-like vegetation I have started to draw up lists of things I know nothing or embarrassingly little about. These include: the Roman Empire, the First World War, photosynthesis, how a mobile phone works, the correct use of semi-colons, and where, roughly, one can expect to find Malta on a map.
I have to do this so that I can avoid talking on topics that will publicly expose me as a fraud and ignoramus. In conversation last week, fearful that I had nothing to say on the subject of Polish food, I found myself rabbiting on about how Poland has very few fish dishes because it's a landlocked country – thus somehow overlooking the existence of the Baltic Sea.
There was an awkward silence and some pained facial expressions, then the subject shifted to something else I knew nothing about and so I started grinning and nodding my head, like one of those toy dogs in the back of a car.
Days later, during an attempt to prove myself a scholar of post-Marxism, I found myself using the word 'thingymybob-whatsisname-withthebighair' in place of the name 'Trotsky'.
Have I spent too many years absorbing fragments of media info only for the connecting fabric between those bits to decay, leaving each stranded alone to die? Is it because there's no financial value in having knowledge on anything beyond my immediate career and I tend to leave everything else up to specialists? Or is it that my generation knows more about Homer Simpson than Homer's Odyssey? Doh! The prospect of spending the next few decades in stupefied silence is terrifying.
But then it struck me – perhaps I am not alone in my ignorance. Maybe it's a widespread phenomenon and a closely kept secret. Perhaps middle-class conversation is nothing more than the art of hazarding 'educated guesses' over chasms of ignorance.
This makes me feel much better because now I look like I've got something to say on the subject of ignorance. I could become an ignorance specialist and wax lyrical about how stupid we all are. I could even quote that guy in the toga that said something like "the most intelligent thing to admit is that we know nothing". You know, whatsisname with the white beard and sandals who took the poison and was in the Bill and Ted movie. Doh!
