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.
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. Perhaps you should tell that to the two million people a year in Africa who die of malaria thanks to DDT being banned at the instigation of environmental groups. Stalin only managed to kill a half a million a year at the hight of his killing spree.
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.
And even more good. Is the world more free now or was is more free before? The answer is that it is more free now. Your argument of maybe they did not do much harm in Britain but they did elsewhere is invalid because it is because it was there that the reading occurred and there that the damage was less. In parts of the world where reading and studying for the common man was not promoted (China, Russia and so forth) the damage was greater.
There is something to be said for not seeing life through such idealistic glasses.
Except for the fact that it is human nature especially young human nature to do so. You might as well as us to quit breathing. You throw out idealism and you throw out all desire to advance. We go back to scraping under logs for grubs.
And of course there is reason to mistrust what is commonly taught. Not reading, learning and questioning leads to great social ills. The difference is today that it is being taught in such a way that reading learning and questioning are discouraged. George Orwell had it right in Animal Farm. The Sheep knew only one thing and that one thing was the wrong thing. Because they never read thought or questioned they became a force for great destruction.
Now days in the Environmental movement you find the same sheep and they are spouting the same unthinking line. "Four legs good, two legs bad." It is present in video games, movies and TV shows. It is swallowed with little or no thought because of the medium in which it is presented. Far more destruction has come of it and it has the potential to be far more deadly then anything we have faced in the past because it is a suicidal philosophy.
In Islam you find much the same destructive force and much of the same lack of thought, studying and questioning. It is also a suicidal philosophy. For all of it's deadliness communism never was suicidal.