Whining like this is part of the reason I left the teaching/research side of the Academe:

For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

First off, let me state that as a graduate of the school filled with scary conservatives- we had nothing on Wheaton. Talk about theocrats in expensive clothes, and the whitest of the white bread.

But kicking lesser schools aside, let me also say that this article is yet another coin in the purse we're holding, a coin bought in sweet, sweet fear. Every time I read another "serious" thinker telling people that the Blogosphere is a scary, dangerous place is another time I'm convinced that we're on to something out here, and that we're winning.

I feel really sorry for such a gentle, genteel, esteemed professor- I hope his feelings didn't get hurt too badly. sound of the world's smallest violin playing a very sad song After all those years in the classroom, where I'm sure you let your students interact in the fullest and most respectful manner as you instructed them, it must be tough to come out into the world of the unwashed masses, and hear the F-word so frequently. Your poor ears!

But forget sarcasm, and let's talk about his one valid point: the kind of discourse found on many right wing sites (for surely he's reading a lot of them and fewer left wing ones given the overall tone of his piece) really is filled with violent rhetoric, hate laden invective, and frequently direct threats. That is, when they allow comments. There is a great deal of anger out there, and one important element to the blogosphere is that it allows people of all stripes to express it.

I have to laugh at how cowardly many of our "intellectual" and civic leadership are proving to be, running away as they do at the first sign of profanity. This guy should give Joe a call.

Smart people don't waste a lot of time getting angry about the fact that many lazy minds like to use curse words, rather than wax pedantic about the obvious elements of psuedofascism or rising theocracy or the tanking economy. But it is the nature of the blogosphere to be more direct, shorter in argument and elucidation, and more immediate and confrontational. Some of us aren't afraid of that at all.

It's a fallacy to think that the human mind must somehow be in Highbrow Theoretical Critical mode all the time, in order to be right. Further, it seems to me that the Blogosphere is hardly responsible for the dumbing down of the American public mind: decades of television have done that just fine, combined with crumbling standards and practice in public education. In fact, I'm losing more respect for the good professor with every passsing second: he has the brains to see the parallels of our age and past ages of civil wars and upheaval, and his response is to...run away back to his faculty offices and cocktail parties? Yeah, because that's where the leadership came from in every successful movement of social change- from behind. Not.

This is a deliberately lazy post, because I think most here already understand my point. There are good reasons to be a Pissed Off American right now. There are good reasons to say, "now is not the time to honor the established forms of discourse and exchange," not the least of them being the history of Congress and the rule of law for the past six years. There are good reasons to see that a shrinking audience of static elders isn't exactly the same as a growing number of American members of the public at large, many of whom don't even know who CS Lewis really was, who are turning to "alternative" sources of information. Not to mention the fact that many people who blog are as educated or more so than the good Professor himself.

As a public intellectual, one has a choice: embrace that public and communicate with it in ways that make your communication more effective, or write for a tiny, self-selecting audience of people with whom you already mostly agree. Yes, I'm soaking in the irony of that. Weak minded folks like the Professor shame the project of becoming overly educated, what's the point of knowing more if you're too upset by the characteristics of ignorance to share?

But I'm sure his next book of Lewis apologia will be on the best seller list.