/lit/ - Literature

I'm wondering the same thing

Consumerist culture and social media made everything and everyone shallow and superficial. Add in also the sexual revolution and fag propaganda which completely destroyed the entire concept of interpersonal relationships. Nobody has the initiative of talking about themselves to someone else, and deep friendships between guys get labeled as "gay"

Some anon posted journal entries of some distant ancestor who was traveling from England to Australia. He was 17 at the time and the writing is so much more advanced than what you'd expect from any student today. I'll post some pages. I hope that anon is around and and give us an update.

>>18648366
yes

>>18648366
Maybe. Consider also that those who were not "eloquent and introspective" either did not write letters, or wrote letters that were not placed into the compilations which you are reading.

>>18648366
Yes of course.

>>18648413

Probably less "entertainment" to fry your brain with a dopamine drip. Probably a lot of time to think about stuff when you're marching across the country, too.

>>18648413
>>18648421
Can you tell us anything about the upbringing of this person? What sort of family was he from?

>>18648418
Do you think a same percentage of modern soldiers would be able to be so "eloquent and introspective" today?

>>18648421

>>18648428
>>18648418
It doesn't matter if they're eloquent or introspective, what matters is that they're willing to die for our overlords from Israel. Am Yisrael Chai.

>>18648366
Back then almost all of your schooling was centred around literacy and Latin grammar, with STEM like subjects being mostly ancillary to that. That's why people were so eloquent back then. School was essentially just grammar school. Somewhere along the line, we decided that hair-splitting over the "thematic material" or what this or that author meant by a certain phrase was more valuable than how to construct a proper sentence.

>>18648366
Cleverness was encouraged while the truths were unable to be found and trickery did not require much effort
Cleverness is not an encouraged trait after the circumstances changed and it allowed the cattle to find and understand these truths
There are many animals that would show themselves to be unironically more intelligent than the average westerner, were they able to speak and hold tools

>>18648445
>STEMfags unironically believe this

>>18648428
Something like a fifth of the US population was illiterate at that time.
https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/lit_history.asp

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or write in any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

Year Total White Black and other
Total Native Foreign-born
1870 20.0 11.5 – – 79.9
1880 17.0 9.4 8.7 12.0 70.0
1890 13.3 7.7 6.2 13.1 56.8
1900 10.7 6.2 4.6 12.9 44.5
1910 7.7 5.0 3.0 12.7 30.5
1920 6.0 4.0 2.0 13.1 23.0
1930 4.3 3.0 1.6 10.8 16.4
1940 2.9 2.0 1.1 9.0 11.5
1947 2.7 1.8 – – 11.0
1950 3.2 – – – –
1952 2.5 1.8 – – 10.2
1959 2.2 1.6 – – 7.5
1969 1.0 0.7 – – 3.6 *
1979 0.6 0.4 – – 1.6 *

>>18648426
Can't remember exactly but I recall the anon emphasizing that they weren't learnt and just average laborer's who moved to Australia

Check out this book OP, it argues that our general intelligence is decreasing because less smart people have offsprings and bc of other causes

>>18648366
Supposedly SAT scores have been steadily dropping for a while, and this began even before our wonderful demographic shift, heh.

I think people back then, even common soldiers, read far more than we do. Reading people like Swift, Dickens, Shakespeare, etc. was expected among commoners. A highly educated person today can write good English and quote people like Fanon and Marx; a highly educated person in the 19th century could write good English, French, and Latin, and they could quote many classical and contemporary authors by heart. Standards, both for the people and the elites, were higher.

>>18648366
First TV made everyone retarded and then social media gave everyone outright dementia. We've past the point of no return I think

>>18648421
>>18648429
this is really interesting, not only because it's very well written for a 17 year old, but also because you can sense the relative inexperience of its writer. It's like he's intentionally trying to emulate the style of authors he has read, but doesn't quite have to ability to pull it off. The self-consciousness makes it interesting, because I can imagine the boy labouring with the letter, almost like stuff you'll find on lit sometimes.

>>18648366
They were one standard deviation smarter than today. Most people don't descent from them but from the proletariat, the most stupid and genetically sick underclass.

>>18648467
Brainlet take on brainlets
How fitting

In Dutton's other book, The Genius Famine, he argues that it began after the industrial revolution when modern medicine allowed people to live who would have otherwise been naturally selected out of the gene pool ie the better we are at keeping people alive the more dysgenic we'll get.

>>18648560
okay, I'll bite. Whats so brainlet about it?

>>18648467
>>18648573
The ironic thing is that these books have some of the worst writing I've ever heard the displeasure of laying my eyes on, thus proving the author's theory.

>>18648583
ever had*

>>18648583
...and also proving the theory of those authors you mongoloid

>>18648593
Why are you repeating verbatim what I wrote, and then calling me a mongoloid?

>>18648602
I drank some rice wine and its hot, dont judge me

>>18648411
based truthsayer
latest generations can't communicate verbally let alone through writing

>>18648366
There were more than a million combatants during the Civil War, did you read letters from a representative sample of at least a few hundred thousand people? Of course not, you probably read letters from a book called "Letters from the Civil War", thus forming an opinion on an extremely restricted and unrepresentative sample size. It's like claiming that well-written screencaps are representative of the post quality in this shithole.

>>18648467
>because less smart people have offsprings and bc of other causes

When have those of high intelligence in society ever had large families? Dumb motherfuckers always breed exponentially, smart motherfuckers don't, been this way since forever

>>18648634
>When have those of high intelligence in society ever had large families?
>“Between the 1400s and the mid-19th century, in every generation, the richer 50% of the population had more surviving children than the poorer 50%.[7] As economic status and intelligence are positively correlated this led to us becoming more and more intelligent every generation.”

>>18648659
I was born in the wrong generation...

>>18648583
It's honestly a hard topic to talk about without coming off as a bit of a douche yourself.

>>18648678
fuck interpersonal relationships, truth is above them. What else do we have? We are mostly losers on here

>>18648366
americans are dumb

>>18648366
>'they were so intelligent and introspective!!'
>enslaves minorities

>>18648765
as if enslavement of minorities was a mark of low iq

>>18648765
>enslaves minorities

how were blacks minorities in africa?

>>18648765
>smart people can do no bad thing

What did she mean by this?

>>18648765
makes you ponder, doesn't it

>>18648765
>'they were so intelligent and introspective!!'
>treats women like cattle

>>18648366
No we are smarter overall even a basic high school education today is miles ahead of what they had 100-200 years ago.

>>18648903
so then why?

>>18648912
cultural degradation
but also because of the internet, used to be when you're retarded your retarded opinion stays unaired, but now anyone can say what they want and it'll have the potential to reach millions of ears

>>18648912
Becaue you associate archaic prose with intellect.

>>18648492
>First TV made everyone retarded
TV only made people with potential not to be retarded, retarded
everyone else remained a subhuman peasant, the only difference is they went from illiterate to functionally illiterate
this is why everyone can read but people would rather waste bandwidth to have people read shit out in a dumbed down version on youtube

>>18648903
This anon is right, education improved significantly on the 60s onward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education#Recent_world-wide_trends

Some soldiers probably had to ask someone to write/read letters. And considering this:

>Today, 1 in 6 adults — approximately 35 million Americans — possess reading skills below the level of a fourth-grader. Studies show that adult literacy rates have not improved over the past 25 years, but many believe that this is still a marked improvement from where we were before the creation of the public school system. There’s a common misconception that Americans were illiterate before the 1830s. But in reality, that’s not quite true.

https://readcenter.org/literacy-rates-improved-since-1776/

And mind you that public education definitely changes a lot on how things work. I don't live in the US, but my country developed a public educational system somewhat recently (1934), but I would consider that it was consolidated around 10 years ago, when they introduced a financial aid to families in order to diminish child labor.

But getting back to my point, what you notice as a degeneration on education are those would be illiterates from the past. People are reading and writing more as time goes by, consider the amount of reading someone does in social media. I find that it would be hard to make a case that everything worsened overall.

>>18648903
Retard. We're not talking about the quality of education. You can teach any dumb monkey tricks. I'm sure if you took the child of a 19th century farmer and gave him a modern education he'd do just as well as a kid born today. The point is inherent genetic potential and intelligence. Which by a lot of measurable metrics is currently having a downward trend.

>>18648366
>Are Westerners dumber than they were 100-200 years ago?
Yes, and they're also less white. This is not a racist statement, but an objective one. Even white Americans have a higher percentage of Hispanic / Native American in them today compared to then. Intelligence is highly heritable.

Modern amenities and advancement in medical fields means that we are no longer filtering out the weak and unfit

>>18649036
Also, my dad who was a physician and studied in a school that was one of the 'good ones' (in a time not everyone would get into school) isn't anywhere near my levels of literacy. While he could read Portuguese and maybe some Spanish, I'm able to read Portuguese, English, French, some Spanish and Japanese. That is because I had access to resources my dad wouldn't even dream back when he was a child. Some people in here also romanticize the past and say such things that things were better and that they are getting worse, but this observation definitely doesn't hold to reality.

>>18649145
Are you a retard? We were always doing that. Do you think that natural selection halted just because medicine improved? That men is finally free from nature's yoke?

>>18649173
the criteria has changed

Of course we are. We put effort into keeping poor and uneducated people alive. I'd put in a more bold statement: democracy decreased the average intelligence, later on so did socialism, and the current globohomo agenda will only further that. We can all see where this will lead I presume - thankfully I'll be long gone before our demise

>>18649163
You could probably observe that considering your own parents. Are you more or less /lit/ than your parents?

>>18649163
you have to keep in mind that there are two perspectives. One is optimist: things are getting better materially, as you point out, we have access to things that out ancestors didnt even dream about. Alright, but this process is reaching its end, even the Flynn effect (increase of iq in western developed countires) have reached its stop point ant is reversing in some cases. The pessimist line of thinking is: our age made it almost impossible for smart people to reproduce. Also a lot of unfit people are reproducing due to avancements in medicine. Both of these wolrdviews can coexist simultanouesly. At some point our material progress will start to stagnate and will show its bad side effect more clearly. But it is going to be too late.

>>18648574
Genetic determinism is the shiniest badge of retardation a midwit will eagerly adopt in his own ignorance and frustration.

>>18649183
Yes, I'm not being optimist, anon. I'm looking at the past and the present, I'm not thinking that it won't stagnate ever. I'm sure this will happen, but that isn't the case nowadays, maybe our children will suffer that. I'm considering my niece, she is fucking 2 or 3 years old and knows a lot of alphabet letters (not even sure if all), and she can read some words that are the name of her toys. But that is definitely a thing, it got dramatically expensive to raise children, as in my niece costed a lot of money, but I'm somewhat skeptical in considering that she costs more than my sister, because education improved in the sense of efficiency too.

>>18649036
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education#Recent_world-wide_trends

Means very little. Formal literacy and the formal existence of compulsory education.

If this is to be believed: https://www.wyliecomm.com/2020/11/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/
>Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level.
then "the amount of reading someone does in social media" is also pretty much meaningless as it is mostly equivalent to the babblings of school children.

the cruel and dumb will eventually replace the smart
it's over
the age of men is long gone, and americans are to blame.

>>18649202
why? are you against it from the factual angle (it is factually incorrect) or morally (only wrong type of persons adopt this position)?

>>18649224
The age of orcs is upon us.

as a rule, people wrote more eloquently back then. there was a greater distinction between speech and writing — surely if we communicated only through written letters and not via text messages, instant messengers and Uzbek sweater-weaving boards, we would also express ourselves more eloquently.
the formality of written language has, I would assume, been preserved in languages like Arabic and Tamil whose vocabulary differs enormously in formal versus colloquial situations. we Anglo fucks just don't value formality any longer — that's all it comes down toEA

>>18648366
They lived in a world where boredom was permitted, we don't.

>>18649173
Have you compared any statistics on child mortality rates recently?

>>18649145
how the fuck is nut allergy still a thing

>>18648912
Democracy and egalitarianism through socialism. Democracy is race to the bottom decivilization in promotes short term thinking which leads to less intelligent investment. Egalitarianism also reduces the struggle to grow and hinders the success one can achieve. Socialism does not give you freedom to take risks.

>>18649315
> what is abortion and contraception

I'm interested in how /lit/ would solve the problem of decreasing intelligence.

>>18649390
plato republic has already solved it

>>18649390
increase obstacles
we only grow by facing challenges
clearly as most have said life is too cushy for modern men.

>>18649403
Making obstacles to fix them doesn't improve anything.

>>18649419
it's not about making obstacles, since by creating an obstacle ourselves we'd be influencing our evolution
we must encounter a disaster that is a genuine threat to humanity's continued existence

>>18649390
>>18649183
>>18649163
>>18649036
>things are getting better materially, as you point out, we have access to things that out ancestors didnt even dream about
This is true, but it also coexists with 1) the trivialization of every single field of culture that isn't STEM, because STEM is supremely useful to the technological-industrial society and everything else acts to its detriment. It's obvious that if you have extensive love of literature and have read all the classics and can have an articulate discussion about philosophy you're still seen as a worthless moron by 99.9% of human beings but if you say you are an engineer or a scientist you're automatically an extremely valuable person. That's because people associate you with new ways to extend life or produce better goods more efficiently which means that they get more "value" out of their life thanks to you. Doesn't matter if your actual field of research is using legal carcinogens to make food colorants or ass implants that don't move out of place when you twerk.
2)The cultural implications of being articulate. In this era of rampant intellectualism it's uncool to talk big. There's a whole lot of pressure to act and talk like a retard. If you CAN speak articulately and you do so in public, you'll be seen as posh. This is why otherwise well-educated, intelligent people will default to ebonics in a social context. I think many Twitter soibois who post retarded stuff on Twitter are, paradoxically, intelligent people who are very well capable of higher reasoning and articulate talk. Their intelligence is just taken over by the enormous pressure to fit into a society that makes deceptively rigid behavioral demands.

>>18649517
*rampant anti-intellectualism

>>18649390
Deport non-whites. It’s really not that complicated.

>>18649390
Give me a harem of cute little girls to breed. I won't take anything older than 13.
>>18649538
I bet there are millions of shitskins, spics, sandniggers and chinks that double your puny IQ score. That's also why they took your jobs.

>>18649565
If browns and blacks were capable of creating countries like the United States, then they would’ve done so by now. Instead, they made countries like Venezuela and Nigeria.

>>18649583
and here we have real evidence of why the country is in ruins, a dumb illiterate monkey using the achievements of his superiors to justify his existence

>>18649565
>Give me a harem of cute little girls to breed. I won't take anything older than 13.
based

>>18649596
as nature intended

18649590
18649565
dude why do you have to come here and post bait this shitty
it's not even that much of a trainwreck of a thread, why do you have to ruin it

>>18648366
no. survivor bias. the literacy rates are much higher compared to previous centuries.
you've been reading the writings of the ones who has been selected amongst the literate ones, and published because they are better.

>>18648788
It unironically was. The Africans stayed south of the Sahara (barring the odd trip to Mecca or whatnot), and generally left the rest of the world alone. The genuine idiots who imported them from Africa doomed the Americas to centuries of violence and ethnic tensions, not to mention ruining the lives of tens of millions of Africans. And to top it off, the European powers had the need to go to Africa and conquer the place. Why the hell would you do that? Why would you willingly go to Africa? The Africans were over there, they weren't coming to Europe. The West should have left that continent to its own devices, but nooo. They had to go there and civilize them, and in the process lead to population explosions, ethnic warfare, and the mass exodus of Africans to Europe and elsewhere. It makes me so mad bros. We could have had the Americas free of racial tension, an African continent without all the misery caused by colonization, and a Europe free of mass refugee movements and illegal immigration. But these Europeans were too lazy to harvest their own crops, and here we are.

>>18649618
the only mistake america made was not having the will to finish what they started

>>18649618
>We could have had the Americas free of racial tension
The sad fact is that most of humanity's greatest achievements were built on exploiting someone else. If people followed your ideas then America most likely wouldn't have existed to begin with. Without all those Slavs and Italians and Chinamen and Irishmen things wouldn't have been made. Our whole world economy is built on exploiting third world wagies and selling into richer countries. It's inevitable to have this back and forth.

>>18649649
>The sad fact is that most of humanity's greatest achievements were built on exploiting someone else
They didn't have to be

>If people followed your ideas then America most likely wouldn't have existed to begin with
Honestly, you're probably right. If I was in charge of a colonial empire, I would have constructed cities dotted along the coast and left the inland to the Native Americans.

>>18648618
I am a veritable autist, but even I have better social skills than a lot of zoomers. They can't into eye-contact, basic manners, etc. even when they're working service jobs.

I get this is said about every generation but I think it's especially bad now due to social media and smart phones mainly.

>>18648673
kek

>>18649663
>I would have constructed cities dotted along the coast and left the inland to the Native Americans.
Lovely but yeah someone would have stabbed you in your sleep pronto.

>>18648659
Modern medicine was a fucking mistake, nature was taking care of dumb unwashed people who shat in the streets just fine

>>18648765
Yes, makes you wonder really...

>>18649163
All depends on the subject also; we are miles behind in Classics, indubitably. The average classics graduate back in the day had a proficiency that only certain academics had now. Admittedly, he would not be able to split hairs quite as much, but that's not really a great gain, although an understandable evolution, due to the very nature of the field
t. Classicist

>>18649427

Even a made-up one like Corona?

>>18649583

>Venezuela
Communism was invented, applied and exported as an ideology by whites, don't forget.

>>18649887
Oy vey, those pesky whites am I right.

Many of the soldiers could not read/write. Therefore, they paid people to write letters for them. Some of them would be so stupid and lazy, so incapable of formulating correspondence, that they just told the literate guy, "Would'ja write somethin' nice for me?

>>18649899
>>18649749
>>18649618
>>18649608
>>18649602
>>18649230
Itt to many crying racist chuds

>>18649899

On the other hand, whites also invented fascism so a balance is reached.

>>18649887
>whites
Fuck off kike

>>18649916
and one seething brainlet, apprently

>>18648366
People today write as they speak. High schools don't expect any more than that. Back then the literate would learn Latin, philosophy, rhetoric, etc

>>18649517
Yes, that is definitely true, but it isn't like people aren't aware of the problems in scientism and that things like anti-vaxx and some other crazy stuff aren't a symptom of it. That is where rhetoric comes in, and a profound mastery of language is probably among the most precious skills one can have nowadays. Considering that almost anyone is able to reach a lot of people virtually.

And these cultural implications you mentioned are mainly due to who you are talking to. That is also one of the reasons why scientific journalism is a thing on the first place, you can't talk make a discourse filled with jargon and expect it to reach the non-specialist public. But being proficient in a language implies that one is able to use different types of language that is definitely the reason why people will default to ebonics or whatever when speaking to someone. It is not even about pressure, but mainly the nature of language itself, the one who is able to master either will make the change.

>>18648366
>Are Westerners dumber than they were 100-200 years ago?
Yes.

>>18648366
Yes, especially in america where more and more whites mix with blacks

>>18648366
My grandma, who is still alive, and was a cook by profession, writes really beautifully as well. I think everyone had to learn to express themselves better back then, because you couldn't send a picture like you can now, you had to describe stuff. And postage was expensive, so when you sent a letter you made an effort to write it well.

>>18648765
The crime rate was a lot lower. They bought the slaves, their fellow Africans did the enslaving.

>>18649182
I am more /lit/ than my parents but I'm also a shut-in with no friends or other hobbies.

>>18648366
post these letters, where did you download from??

>>18649916
>to

>>18650691
https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/civilwar/search

>>18650710
I cant understand wnything

>>18648366

About 20 years ago there was a comedian who made this exact same observation in his routine. He "read" a mock Civil War letter with beautiful erudition in a southern drawl, then read a purported Iraq War shitpost with intentional mispronounciations, misspellings and malapropisms. "It is very hot out here in the DesSert."

It may have been Pablo Francisio but I'm not sure. One of those standard one-man Stand-up specials on Comedy Central.

>>18648366
Yes, we are heading to Idiocracy.

>>18650727
You're a functionally illiterate imbecile who does not even proofread what they write, so your inability to comprehend anything written by a literate individual should come as no surprise.

>>18649390
Understand the reason that caused people to get dumber and then just undo that if it's realistically possible

>>18650761
>write
Wrote*

>>18648765
Africans were a majority in the south for a long time during slavery

>>18650761
im not english and they write bad

>>18650761
Chill out dude. I'm the one who created the thread and even I'm not that mad.

Virginia Dec. 11, 1864

My dear Clara
I have just this moment received yours of the 9th and send you as requested the slips sent me by sister.
I wish you would go or send to Hamilton & Lovering's Photograph gallery to see if the plate of Churchill's photograph was not preserved. Usually the plates are kept. If this has been have more of the photographs taken. If not I will send you send you down the only remaining one

Virginia, Dec. 18, 1864

My dear Clara,
I have recd yours of the 15th inst enclosing the letters of James. I will show it to Nannie this evening and then forward it to Aurora as you request and have it returned to you.

That letter is a consolation, far more than anything that has reached me. It is something to know that our boy sleeps in our country, and that he is honored & loved as he should have been.

These are the amazing letters that anons feel like getting back? Seriosuly? Sounds like a regular whatsapp audio someone would send to his wife.

>>18650891
>That letter is a consolation, far more than anything that has reached me. It is something to know that our boy sleeps in our country, and that he is honored & loved as he should have been.
More eloquent than 99% of modern literature.

>>18650891
>Sounds like a regular whatsapp audio someone would send to his wife.
I don't know where you live, but I am sure it's somewhere far from where I live

>>18648366
i feel they had to write with greater specificity back in the day. nowadays what do you need to inform people about? it's all memes and macdo.

>>18651302
I used to have fun with pen-pals via snail mail when I was younger and there's a certain effort that goes into a letter that is simply lost in instant messaging. E-mail can be a working surrogate but it doesn't have the same weight. When you write a letter by hand you're making something that will take time and effort to deliver and that needs to be worth reading once it gets there. It needs to cover a relatively long period of time. People's lives were also richer in general so you're right on the memes, but the medium itself matters a lot here.
And receiving actual letters especially from a girl is one of the nicest feelings.

>>18650946
illiterate hands typed this

>>18648430
Oy vey... shut the goyim down! Don't look into the marriages of my kids or how many are in my cabinet...

>>18648366
consider that you're even asking the question and find your answer

>everyone is getting dumb
Honestly >>18648445 nails it. Back then, 99% of the world was interacted with solely through human language. Part of our linguistic focus has shifted to things like the usage of devices (yes, using a computer is language), or math, and other sorts of things.

For example, at this time, fictitious machines talk and interact with the world by speech. This older view of the world carries up from the Indo-European view of the world fundamentally operating according to Words From Horseback. The Hindus believe the world to be "coded" by the Gods in Sanskrit. Odin knew the songs that worked the world. The Olympians breathed Pneuma into things, and it gave them life, the greatest example being Hepaestus golden babe-robots that helped him in his forge, and how did they know what to do? Why, Hephaestus TOLD them!.

We as Anglos also have the fun phenomena of our language slowly becoming increasingly analytic. Niggers take this to its logical conclusion when they say garbage like WE'Z BE FINNA BOUTTA GUN WUZ BEIN GOIN TO DUH STO, which is actually a complicated aspectual sentence that has repurposed tense and plurality in order to convey aspectual information. Mandarin also works like this, for example. There's no truth to inflection making a language more complicated (otherwise the most BASED and TRAD languages are actually Classical Nahuatl and/or Zulu depending on whether you lean towards agglutination or fusion), but within the context of the Anglo world, it's easy to see the slow slide from the Classics to Chaucer and Shakespeare to, well... Today.

>>18649390
Forcefully breed the most intelligent of a generation

>>18649390
mandatory fasting

>>18650520
>westerners
negro culture and technology are making people retarded but that graph says "world (average) IQ" so it should also be overlapped with a graph that compares world population by race over the same time

>>18652421
you are getting dumber
Asia is picking up the pace so that average doesn't get dragged down too fast.

>>18648413
>Fredrick Wilkerson
the forefather for the Malcolm in the MIddle family?

this is kinda why i've always wanted to start a journal over the years. maybe some day

>>18648366
19th Century writing, including newspaper articles, was flamboyant by design. Usually written by overly descriptive ivy leaguers and consumed by their friends. If you wanted to be literate you had to read stuff like that and, as a result, you would write like that as well. Obviously that doesn't make anyone back then more intellectually capable, although they certainly knew more SAT words. I would say they were more eloquent but not necessarily more introspective -- at least the literate folk. Keep in mind we only save the writings that are worth saving. I'm sure out of the ones that could read and write there was plenty of trash to go around. That being said, the average local newspaper article from 100 years ago *seems* like it was produced by a better writer than the average NYT or WSJ journalist today. I would say that the average reporter today is much better at getting his point across than their predecessors, even if they are unable to "eloquently" describe their thoughts with superfluous adjectives and adverbs.

On the other hand, Nietzsche did warn us about this, and while the predominant plain-speak in today's writing is more accessible and perhaps more clear, it does result in a dumbing down of the language. It's why we're susceptible to the typical problems Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language, or why political actors so easily manipulate and degrade the language as described in this article:

https://www.ft.com/content/d36eed7f-f68c-4ee9-a5cb-2b3b58b91c0a

>>18648765
What are you trying to say

>>18648659
>>18649740
Modern medicine has been a disgrace for the human race.

>>18648366
No, but the rich probably are.
Jim Flynn's research (which has been mentioned offhand a couple times in this thread as the Flynn Effect) has shown that, based on real iq, the average American has gotten significantly smarter in the past century. Average real iq in 1910 was about 76, which would be considered retarded by modern definitions. However, the increase in real iq has not been equal across all demographics. It's been almost exclusively among the poorest and stupidest. Among the richest and smartest, iq has completely stagnated for the past century (or even declined). So, when you look at some of these letters, they do display a level of intelligence which isn't common in the modern day, but, at the same time, they aren't representative of their times.
Basically, we are in aggregate getting smarter but our smartest are getting stupider.

>>18649183
>our age made it almost impossible for smart people to reproduce.
WHAT????
Wtf, man? What are you talking about?

>>18648765
Being morally questionable by today's standards doesn't mean they were retards

>>18649390
>I'm interested in how /lit/ would solve the problem of decreasing intelligence.
Me repRoducing aLot

>>18649583
>If browns and blacks were capable of creating countries like the United States, then they would’ve done so by now.
See you in Singapore.

>>18648448
Do you have an example westerner?

>>18648366
The dumb soldiers in the civil war were illiterate

>>18652725
>I would say that the average reporter today is much better at getting his point across than their predecessors,
I think this is debatable, of course it's easier to make a point if you've dumbed it down and stripped it of all detail, which is what modern journalism does.

>>18653851
Perhaps the absence of adjectives and flowery language just makes journalistic bias more insidious and no less prevalent.

>>18648366
The scientific and industrial revolutions blind the uninitiated from the reality of cultural decay.

I frequent all sorts of art scenes and I can tell you the 'most fashionable' ones are filled with the most hollowed out human beings you can possibly imagine. It has been a horrifying descent.

>>18652725
The average reporter just spews propaganda. It's easy for them to convey their points because their points are simple and contain no nuance.

>>18648366
Without doubt, but it's aplicable only to general public. And you can observe the decline even in the last decade. They figured that drugs are making people dumber and meeker than alcohol, so they're being pushed. Arts and literature has seen especially drastic drop in quality in the last decade. Only thing that's still pushing it forward are old authors.

>>18649202
>Genetic determinism is the shiniest badge of retardation a midwit will eagerly adopt in his own ignorance and frustration.
filtered

>>18653433
>See you in Singapore.
yes mate, because singapore is not inhabited by yellow skinned asians but african niggers.

>>18653338
>Flynn Effect
yes but most of the "environmental part" is already maxxed namely nutrition(primarily iodine which) ,parenting(even bad parenting is a sign of low intelligence which is quite common in households with low iq irrespective of race) and education.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2016/01/are-we-underestimating-benefits-salt-iodization/

If you analyse reaction times, that are excellently correlated with g factor on a mass statistical level, we have become noticeably dumber since Victorian times (the earliest on which we have reliable data). Going by the current correlation with IQ, it represents a decrease of 13 points, nearly a standard deviation, since 1890. Which seems very high.
>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470

>>18653338
Not even Flynn asserts this anymore.

>>18649538
It is obviously a component, but in the long run whitey is also suffering from dysgenics.

>>18653338
Flynn effect is totally passé, fren, unfortunately

Older writing from even working class people is signifigantly better because they simply had to write more. you don't have to write anywhere near as much these days hence why people seem far less verbose.

But there are much more genuine psueds nowadays than there were back then.

>>18648366
tl;dr yes.

Modern people have outsourced thinking to TV and social media. Before either of them, people actually had to decide for themselves what they thought about things.

>>18654771
>Only thing that's still pushing it forward are old authors.
Am I insane for thinking like this? I really feel that the arts have pretty much died after social media took off. People always say that there is still quality art being made but it's all made by people who are old and were already innovating and making great things before the internet. It feels like all the newer generations of writers, artists and other creatives have just defaulted to the lowest common denominator and there's no fucking way you can break through doing anything else. People just don't give a fuck. The old guard is kept afloat by name alone.

>>18655064
>Older writing from even working class people is signifigantly better because they simply had to write more. you don't have to write anywhere near as much these days hence why people seem far less verbose.
That's obviously false. People have never written as much as today, daily. Unless you are mentioning handwriting of course.
You could do absolutely fine a mere century ago as an illiterate.

>>18655148
Yeah, I'm talking about handwriting. Letters could only be sent so often so the quality of text was generally higher as it had to be considered to a greater degree. I mean just look at the difference in quality between an average email and text. Probably a large part to do with the format as much as anything.

>>18655230
>Yeah, I'm talking about handwriting.
Good handwriting is not directly correlated to literacy. You could be completely illiterate and still produce fine calligraphy with training.

>>18655235
sorry. I meant Handwritten letters. Not just handwriting.

>>18648366
yes of course they're dumber. how do you not know this? are you a leftist? literally everything has been declining. everything.

>>18649060
leftism and democracy always result in dysgenics.

>>18648366
shift from a text-based culture to an image-based one. when the civil war was fought photography was in its infancy, and mass media could only spread crude etchings. civil war soldiers communicated the way we do now with image memes but solely in textual form. this is the same reason why poetry went into steep decline as the mass production of recorded music appeared

>>18648467
>implying living on gin lane doesn't look like more fun than a barrel of monkeys

>>18655480
>MUH LUBURULZ
>MUH DEMOCRASSEE
You need to go back, wignatty chud. Back to >>>/pol/.

>>18656646
>wignatty chud
Kek, not original anon, but wtf kind of insult is that, nibba?