I'm scared Veeky Forums, dark times are approaching. Of the millennial generation, few among us read...

Yes while the intellectual class is dead.

Society as a whole is improving, but culture and art aren't.

Not at all, it's always been a minority of people who are into this sort of thing.

The bigger danger is the distractibility engendered by spending so much time reading on screens and surfing the internet. A lot of smart people are poisoned by their own curiosity, becoming wiki-dilletantes because they can't focus.

The Classics have been dead for two hundred years because Latin and Greek are dead. In Erasmus' day, you learned to speak and compose the learned languages. Now, even the tiny minority who choose to pursue this noble study, never truly learn the languages. How can you say you know a language when you can't speak it, and can read it only with a dictionary at your elbow?

Nil moror. Nihil scire felicissima vita. Primus postator cinaedus etc.

pure ideology

We're just in the time where post-modernism is dying but the new thing hasn't showed up yet. It's the mid-18th century all over again.

Science and technology are the main interests of societies intelligentsia. Which is why people like op exist, aside from being misinformed, literature and the arts aren't as big as they once were.

>Of the millennial generation, few among us read
No reads more than this generation does, they just don't read for personal betterment. Why? Because it must first be argued to the bosses that knowing the classics is beneficial.

fascinating

I'd say the ideal of the modern intellectual is exactly the ideal of the ancient intellectual- studying all fields as much as one can through observation and listening to many opinions, before proceeding to expound wild theories about fields of knowledge one is not qualified to approach.
That sort of intellectual I can mark myself as.

I'd say the essence of being a wise man is a generous and open-minded spirit. You should know how little you know, you should grasp the futility of human ratiocination, but not so as to fall into a nervous paresis. Your ignorance should make you like an innocent child.

Socrates was the best.

And that is who I strive to be, and I know people of my generation who are the same. I don't think things are worse now than they ever have been. But every generation faces its own particular challenges, and ours is the distraction of "technologies".

>ours is the distraction of "technologies"

I, for one, await the perfect VR technology where I can be with my literary waifu.

t. women and gender studies major

It's true though. Look at all those stories about a modern highschooler getting transported into fantasy medieval ages. They immediately impress the locals with their knowledge.

intellectualism is on the decline to make way for critical thinking

what this guy said
intellectualism is just wrote memorization and just parroting the views of your most recently read author.

Lol you can't actually think this. This is being called the post-truth age mate

Goddamn, yes we are getting smarter as a whole, but that's only through untapped potential. Instead of having a bunch of serfs we have a literate working class peoples. So yes, the average intelligence/education is definitely increasing. But what happens when we have educated every individual? Well we reached that point long ago, and we have begun to regress in terms of peak education. It is practically unheard of to learn philosophy in high school anymore, at least in any rigour and as a mandatory part of the curriculum. This has been replaced in favour of reading what, a Vonnegut novel? Furthermore nobody really learns languages anymore, which I think is extremely necessary in order to be an intellectual. Hell, you don't even need Latin or Greek but a cultured man should strive to be fluent in at least a few languages. Pick up German or French, something that will have applications both in the real world but also for literature and philosophy.

>tfw intellectual will finally be treated like the gross mercantilist-manufactured word-ghost it is and finally be stamped out of the language like Tzar Nicholas the Second intended

spotted the engineering major

What the fuck, you're kidding right? Critical thinking? You're funny brah. We're going from people parroting people intelligent enough to be published in print to people parroting in an echo chamber all the boneheaded bullshit tweeted out in the last fifteen seconds. Say your prayers.

>intellectualism is just wrote memorization and just parroting the views of your most recently read author.
Speak for yourself, pseud

>people often don't agree with my opinions; therefore, people are dumb and don't care about the truth

>Intellectualism Is just wrote memorization
>wrote

Lmao

>calling me a pseud
>doesn't even uphold an intellectual's moral guidelines

>OP realizes there are less 'intellectuals' than commoners

>tfw in this age, both commoners and the elites are fucking stupid

Kek

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"I MISS BEING A 19TH CENTURY GENTLEMAN"—every snob faggot

"BACK IN THE DAY WHEN EULER WAS WRITING HIS THEOREMS"—senile academic

"MAN DA VINCI WAS DA BOMB"—anti-intellectual impossibly-nostalgic humanist

"START WITH THE GREEKS"—doesn't know greek

This. I earned a doctorate, expecting some high-tier reasoning and cultural exchange. More than half the profs didn't even bother to venture outside of territory ruled by simplistic mockery when they weren't shutting down discussions when someone was getting offended because they were getting BTFO.

Plus the system of accountability in the uni bureaucracy sucks.

*tips trilby*

I once watched part of a C-SPAN program with a female intellectual whose name I forget. I think she may have been living in or near the DC area, but maybe wasn't a politican as-such. Some sort of an intellectual. She had this cute/small living space with hallways lined with books so that you could barely walk through them, but very organized.

She made an observation which I've seen repeated among academic types, when questioned in a doom-and-gloom fashion along the OP's lines. "People don't read the classics, no one knows Latin, etc, etc. Is there any hope?"

Her reply was that the population which is learned and/or properly trained in such topics has always been a small minority. But whereas it was only several hundred or several thousand people an age ago, it is today many tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who are at least conversant in classical, esoteric topic X. Her point being that even if it is true that the percentage of people so educated is static or lower, it is still also true that the absolute number of people so educated is orders of magnitude larger. In other words, the capacity of living individuals who know classical topic X has increased, well, dramatically, in any event. And in every generation, there are a crop of people who are naturally inclined toward whatever variant you cherish most: literature, scholarship, that type of thing. And these people have blogs and regularly, routinely disseminate their viewpoints for a larger audience to digest.

In still other words, there is legitimate cause to be hopeful, if you are concerned about "culture", whatever you may exactly mean by that. We've weathered plagues and wars before, and certain information survived extant.

Are you sure you just aren't worried you won't receive that research grant to study Marxist influences in Joss Whedon's Buffy?

nigga LOOK AT HIS PANTS

It's like the French Revolution era all over again.

If intellectualism would take leftism with it to the grave, I'm okay with it.

>19th century
get a load of this pleb

Intellectuals were always a minority, don't know why you're acting like this is something new.

Without leftism, this world will fall into war once more, user.

You confused leftism with nuclear weapons, which are the only reason we haven't got WW3 yet and aren't going to. On the contrary, leftism decreases the overall stability of both the countries it takes its roots in and the countries the former interact with: all because it operates on a few ideological premises that are either directly or indirectly false.

>all because it operates on a few ideological premises that are either directly or indirectly false

Oh yeah, wanting the world to work together instead of going all nationalist like the old days is always wrong.

>american
>intellectual
the very definition of a contradiction in terms

Thanks for the example: the premise that the world as it is now can work together efficiently is very questionable.

Another one would be is that democratic form of governance is functioning and superior for any society. Which, as the Middle East example teaches us, is wrong.

>Another one would be is that democratic form of governance is functioning and superior for any society

That's a leftist thought though. The right wants the monarchy back.

I am talking about the leftists' premises indeed, and how they often bring war instead of peace.

>life long pursuit of ever greater knowledge
What exactly is the purpose of this and how it is different to "life long pursuit of Facebook likes"?

I'll have you know I do know Greek.

Kek'd hard at this though.

>people are smarter nowadays

Yeah, the democracy worshippers forget Hitler was voted democratically. German people were angry fucks back then.

And now look at Trump.

You're a fucking idiot.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure which presidential candidate personifies the flaws of democracy better. But this electoral cycle will surely go down in history.

Yeah, America is fucked.

I used to think my country's president choices were shitty. Now, they don't seem too bad compared to those two.