More Money Than Brains Read Online Free Page A

Ms. Real World is too sharp to be hornswoggled by some fraudulent, futile major like literature, history, philosophy, or women’s studies.
    Occasionally Mr. Real World will cap his argument by insisting that he has read the compleat works of Lofty Classic on his own time, to unwind from the rigours of reality. If he can do some poncy English major’s alleged job on evenings and weekends, it is hardly real work. Culture may well beelevating and all – that’s why he reads Lofty Classic instead of the trash his office mates prefer – but it remains secondary and adjacent to the real world.
    We can surmise from such speeches what is not real. The real world is not made of words or art or the past or idealistic theories about equality. Where is this real world and what is it made of? Most people who use the phrase “the real world” are referring to entities like the economy and jobs and money. That makes this particular tenet of reverse snobbery absurd. What newspaper have they been reading throughout the crashes and recessions of the past few years? The
Pie-Eyed Optimist Times?
The
Hooray for Everything Herald Tribune?
    Economic turbulence causes real suffering. At the same time, though, it is loopy to deny that vast tracts of modern capitalism are notional, speculative, crazy-brilliant conceptual constructs made up of digital bits and jargon and math that are every bit as imaginary and actual as Hamlet. The word
real
has been besmirched by prefixes such as “keepin’ it” and suffixes like “-ity TV .” When it appears between
the
and
world
, it becomes a rhetorical cudgel, a club to clobber thinking that has no immediate practical value – or at least none that Mr. or Ms. Real World can ascertain.

5. Nerds are living in the past, hung up on defunct ideas .
     
    We often point to our magnificent technological achievements as evidence of our triumph over those benighted primitives who preceded us. I definitely get this vibe from my students. “Why do we need to read this old stuff?” they grouse. It’s, like,
old
, from the back-in-the-day times whenpeople shat in buckets and were too stupid to invent cool stuff like cellphones. The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer, and iPod.
    Anything that happened before the students were born is part of the same undifferentiated mass. Sporadically the void spits up costume movies and video games that make youngsters hazily aware of periods such as the toga times and the era of men in silly wigs and skin-tight breeches. Much of their historical knowledge is actually pop-cultural. They recognize evil Nazis and surly, embittered Vietnam vets from Oscar-bait and action movies and games like
Call of Duty
. But they do not have a very robust sense of when things happened, or what came before them.
    Sometimes this ignorance of history expresses itself in the form of backhanded compliments. My English undergrads seem surprised when something old turns out to be interesting. Even though we have much better scary things now, like the
Saw
franchise, Poe is not boring – or at least not as boring as
Macbeth
. They cannot quite believe that a rickety claptrap machine like “The Tell-Tale Heart” still functions in spite of its advanced age. And nineteenth-century lit is not really even old in nerd years.
    This notion is a testament to the way that technical and economic reasoning elbow out other ways of thinking and dominate student expectations, regardless of their major. If it’s new, it’s more likely to be true and to falsify or negate whatever came before. Reading-intensive subjects such as literature and philosophy, and history itself, suffer under this paradigm, since books and lectures have become antiquatedknowledge-delivery systems, consigned to the scrap heap by the predigested info globs of PowerPoint slide shows.
    Retention is being outsourced to our prosthetic brains. Why clog your head with tedious facts about the past when you can