[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Yes quickly. How long did it take to get rid of the bad idea of Feudalism? Movements take time to grow and you might notice that the places where they were successful were not the places where all of the reading was going on.

While you praise the short attention span you are actually praising the very thing that leads to groups like ELF and ALF which are doing and will do greater future harm. Their ideas are packaged in short sound bite that require no attention or thought. If they do not think about them then they are never questioned and become ingrained.

Because they never think their brilliant sound bite philosophies through and are not encouraged to do so by either their leaders and the medium in which the philosophy is presented and lack the attention span to listen to reasoned arguments against them they are a lot more dangerous and will result in far more damage then anything in the past. Prior generational philosophy were looking towards the future with man. This current one is looking toward a future with out humans.

[x]

While you praise the short attention span you are actually praising the very thing that leads to groups like ELF and ALF which are doing and will do greater future harm. Their ideas are packaged in short sound bite that require no attention or thought. If they do not think about them then they are never questioned and become ingrained.

ELF?

ALF?

I had to look those up (Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front). So far it doesn't look like they've done anywhere near as much harm as Rose's novel-reading Socialists or poetry-loving Communists. They may not be responsible for so much evil in Britain, but they have a lot to answer for in other parts of the world. And I doubt that the ideas of today's animal rights activists will be more permanent or harder to dislodge than those of 20th century totalitarians who tried to support their tyrannies with all the cultural prestige they could.

I'm not arguing in favor of illiteracy or ignorance, and I don't suggest that we burn all the books. Nor am I saying that we should never learn anything. I'm just pointing out that it would be wrong to idealize the generations Rose is referring to and malign people today out of hand for not sharing their tastes. Tied up with that fervor for education, there was also a passion to remake the world, to get it to conform to ideological notions that did much ill. There is something to be said for not seeing life through such idealistic glasses.

Maybe our only advantage is that we came later after the mistakes had been made, but still, there's something to be said for mistrusting the some of the notions people have had about art or culture or science. If reading really gave and gives these people a better understanding of the world and our rightful place in it that's all to the good, I'm just saying that one can be naive about the hopes one places in culture or education, as the history of Europe during the period Rose studied indicates.