{"id":32,"date":"2008-02-22T22:29:21","date_gmt":"2008-02-22T20:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/?p=32"},"modified":"2016-04-07T17:12:40","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T16:12:40","slug":"appalling-level-of-public-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"Appalling level of public discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What the affair of the Archbishop and his thoughtful talk on the Shari&#8217;a has underlined is the appalling level of public discourse in the media today. This applies to parliamentarians, journalists and writers, intellectuals, artists, and a wide range of public figures. They were simply incapable of handling his nuanced arguments, and I am not saying that I agreed with everything he said, but they did not even understand it. They disagreed before taking the trouble to understand. But what brought about this disgraceful conduct of people many of whom have high educational achievements? It is something more than ugly prejudice, although that certainly figured in the equation. It relates very strongly to our previous theme, for this is the information culture <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">par excellence<\/span>. Not only do people not know the difference between information and knowledge, but they would furiously deny that there is any difference. Knowledge and concepts in this society are second-hand. It is the difference between going to the tailors and buying mass-market clothing off the rack. Our intellectuals, with honourable exceptions, use ready-made concepts, which they have subjected to no scrutiny. They choose them on the mere basis of whether they suit their fashion, for this is the age of fashion. All that marks them out as intellectuals is the abundant supply of concepts on which they can draw and with which they play. This exposes the rottenness at the heart of the information society, the mediocrity of people who regard the intellect and culture as higher forms of consumerism, who go shopping for culture as they would for a good wine, but when the chips are down are barbarians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What the affair of the Archbishop and his thoughtful talk on the Shari&#8217;a has underlined is the appalling level of public discourse in the media today. This applies to parliamentarians, journalists and writers, intellectuals, artists, and a wide range of public figures. They were simply incapable of handling his nuanced arguments, and I am not &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/?p=32\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Appalling level of public discourse&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,16,15],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archbishop-of-canterbury","tag-controversy","tag-dr-rowan-williams","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1040,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/1040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bogvaerker.dk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}