harsh...but i think he's right...

[acroyear]

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Atheism, Churchgoing and Morality:

A corollary to Socrates' maxim, perhaps, is that the majority of people, regardless of whether they profess theism, atheism or something else, will live an unexamined life and there's not much anyone else can do about it. Let's face it, the majority of people in the world are too busy trying to survive to spend their time contemplating ethical dilemmas or the nature of reality. Philosophy is an artifact of relative luxury and wealth.

And even in nations like ours, where we ostensibly value education and abstract thought and have the luxury to engage in them, the majority of people exist as little more than automatons - programmed by the mass media culture, manipulated by advertising to play their appointed role as consumer (mostly consuming useless things, of course), easily led by the exploitation of their insecurity and the use of shallow catchphrases.

Incidentally, this is why I shrug when a survey says that some huge percentage of the public thinks evolution is false. Okay, so 47% of the public thinks that humans have only been on earth a few thousand years. Then again, 80% of the public can't tell you what even the 4th of July is intended to celebrate and 45% of the public still wonders why Knight Rider was cancelled. If you hear someone talking in a faux-righteous tone about the "wisdom of the people" you can be pretty sure that they are in the process of exploiting the ignorance and credulity of the people for their own gain.

The average person, regardless of their church attendance or lack thereof, has no interest in discovering new ideas; they care far more about who Jessica Simpson may be screwing than about learning something they didn't know before. They're far too busy obsessing over whether they'll look good in a swim suit this summer to consider whether they have obligations to their fellow man and, if so, how to fulfill them. Such matters elude the average man today just as surely as they eluded him in times past.