this is what they took from you

I’ve been obsessed lately with the screenshots—mostly from Twitter—of adult human beings discovering the existence of the Odyssey for the first time. If you haven’t seen any of these posts, they were made after the announcement of Christopher Nolan’s latest project, an Odyssey adaptation with a star-studded cast. Here’s a representative example from 23 year old influencer and TikTok star Matt Ramos:

Ramos has over 300,000 followers; as you can see in the screenshot, over 12.8 million people viewed this tweet. Many of them viewed it to make fun of it, which is how I ended up seeing it in the first place.¹ Ramos’ post and others sparked the usual sort of debate about kids these days and our rotten education system, and whether it’s classist and snobbish to say that there should be a literary canon, and what even goes in that canon, and hey, what’s even the point of books, given AI and podcasts and whatever.

Discourse bubbles like this one tend to pop pretty quickly, leaving behind a sour aftertaste and a lingering feeling of threat, usually directed at the kids these days. And many of the more notable ignoramouses here do appear to be young adult Gen-Zers, mostly meathead influencers with no time or incentive to know anything anyway. But their popularity as influencers and a whole lot of other data points have worked together to freak me out: we seem to be rapidly tipping toward a much dumber culture, a culture that both rewards ignorance and has no idea of its ignorance. When Nolan announced Oppenheimer just a few years ago, I doubt everybody knew who J. Robert Oppenheimer was off the top of their heads; yet, I don’t recall a similar wave of posts commending Nolan for digging up such an obscure historical figure or insisting “actually it’s okay to not know everything about history.” What’s new in these weird giggling void-days after Trump’s second victory is the absolute happy ignorance, and the ignorance of ignorance. I don’t think shame is an ideal motivator, especially when it comes to education: but it’s weird that there’s no shame here.² In fact, the shame is getting directed the other way: aren’t you the asshole for bringing it up? Aren’t you just making normal (a.k.a. stupid but it’s rude to say it) people feel bad?

These kinds of conversations often get hijacked as being about class and class snobbery, and I want to head that off right now. A lot of people from privileged backgrounds, who went to good schools and hold impressive degrees, are fucking pig-ignorant and proud of it, too. Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, the son of U.S. Representative Lawrence Hogan Sr., attended private Catholic high schools and has a bachelor’s degree from Florida State; he also recently claimed that mysterious lights in the sky were drones (they were in fact, stars in and near the constellation Orion.) This once again unfolded on Twitter, the idiot machine and the real leveller, the place where many people still go to get their education and their opinions, to bask in the joyful terror of their own stupidity. And if you point out that they’re ignorant of basic factual information then it’s snobbery, it’s class prejudice: if you insist on the universal right to and importance of human knowledge you’re making the morons feel bad. Once again, this is irrelevant to the actual class status of said morons. Elon Musk, perhaps the dumbest bitch on earth, promoted his Cybertruck by claiming that “Bladerunner” would drive it, a character who does not exist; and I’ve seen about three Cybertrucks in the wild now, all looking like escaped video game artifacts; and yet Musk remains the richest man in the world, the real winner of the era. He’s also currently getting sued for using AI-generated Blade Runner 2049-like images to promote his new robotaxi, but he has more money than God so who cares, what good is knowing or paying attention to or remembering anything anyways?

It’s genuinely difficult right now to explain why it’s important to be familiar with the Odyssey, to recognize basic constellations, to know who Oppenheimer was, and to actually watch movies like Blade Runner with your eyes and not just junk it for promotional parts. To be clear, I believe that these things are extremely important, just that the discursive space in which to make these explanations has been completely subjugated by grindset bullshit. To a Gen-Z influencer type, it’s perfectly appropriate for Christopher Nolan, a wealthy and successful director, to have read the Odyssey and an Oppenheimer biography—these are things he can use to make himself wealthier and more successful; they are grist for the mill of himself. I don’t think that’s remotely why Nolan does it; I think he wants to make movies. But a desire to make art for the sake of art has become a foreign concept. Obviously in 2024 and beyond, the point of making things is solely to be rich and famous; and the point of being rich and famous is to be richer and more famous. This country has a fatal case of winner psychosis. It has no idea it’s even sick.

Arguments in favor of of “useless” cultural knowledge—or at least the kind of knowledge that isn’t instantly transferrable into direct marketable skills—usually end up grounding themselves in usefulness anyway: i.e., you need to know the basics of what the Odyssey is about or what Orion looks like in case you’re in an important social situation and it comes up, and you don’t want to be embarrassed. But these arguments are as dead as higher education and the concept of shame itself. It’s no longer an advantage to know these things, or rather, it’s a disadvantage to know them as anything other than widgets you could maybe use someday. The point of education has become, at best, networking and management training. In fact a high school teacher included in a recent article about the reading crisis in higher education (i.e. that many incoming college students don’t know how to read a full text) explains that she uses selections from the Odyssey along with TED Talks to teach her students about “leadership.” I really hope that her point is that Odysseus is a bad leader, but I doubt it.³ I also doubt that the Odyssey is a particularly fun read as a business text, but again, that’s not the point: the point is to make the Odyssey useful and justifiable in a winner-take-all world. The goal of education is simply that, usefulness; you can’t really blame the kids for this one, when everything in the culture tells them that culture doesn’t matter in itself, that lol nothing matters.

To be clear, many people think nothing matters. I don’t. I also think “many people think” isn’t a particularly meaningful divider of information, even though it’s become the arbiter of truth. There were lots more people making fun of the posters who had never heard of the Odyssey before than there were original posters themselves. But while mockery—and cynical despair—is an understandable response, I think it misses that this is fundamentally sad. These kids have been robbed. Maybe they’re complicit in their own robbery; maybe they didn’t pay attention in their literature classes, or have always mentally skimmed over any allusions to “sirens” or “cyclops” that they didn’t understand and never wondered about it. (If you’re literate, and have read even a few novels, it’s genuinely hard to have never run into a reference to the Odyssey.) But this is bad, not because the Odyssey could be useful for these kids’ careers or in social situations, but because everybody in the world has a right to know that story. World literature belongs to everyone! Anyone who says otherwise is selling something (usually racism).

I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything. But I appreciate that this is a tough sell when the dead cultural tide is flowing in the other direction; and the places where everybody gets their information are algorithmically designed to tell them to win and advance at all costs. I don’t know, sometimes when you enter the realm of fatally disruptive noise you have to tie yourself to the mast and stop your ears and refuse to hear it. I think there’s a story about that.⁴

1. I’ve been off Twitter for years but people send me things. It’s probably important to keep up with what “many people think” but not to be resigned to it as immutable facts.

2. I posted some thoughts about this situation earlier on Bluesky and have already seen at least one person quoting me to brag about how they don’t know anything about the Odyssey besides the title, and this is kind of what I mean about the lack of shame. Literally just google it! You don’t have to post that you don’t know! You don’t have to post every little one of your idiot thoughts! Get offline!

3. The teacher in question wrote a follow-up piece to the article in which she claimed she was misrepresented, but not quite how.

4. I wasn’t taught the Odyssey in high school or college—I read it later, on my own. Everybody can do this! I appreciate it’s hard to find the time.