“Without this advantage I never shou’d have ventur’d upon a third volume of such abstruse philosophy, in an age, wherein the greatest part of men seem agreed to convert reading into an amusement, and to reject every thing that requires any considerable degree of attention to be comprehended.”
(Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section 1)
No shit. 18th century people were paying to buy freakin’ philosophy treatises and read them for fun, and Hume was complaining (My dear good sir, is Moll Flanders not sophisticated enough for you?) Clearly even a mind as immense as his failed to envision an age, future or past, when people sit for hours in front of moving picture boxes watching windsurfing cats and immodestly dressed women with ample frontal endowments shake about to loud music of a variety never before heard in any concert hall of the time. It gets worse. Sometimes the women aren’t even dressed. Dear me, I hope Hume had a strong cardiac system.
Let me not mention the obvious analogy between Hume’s complaint of the intellectual laxity of his age, and that of contemporary scholars *cough* Susan Jacoby *cough* of our own age. Well, you know what, I’m doing it anyway. If intellectual rigorousness slips away at a constant rate, in 2310 people will receive exposure to culture via brain implants user-programmable to pick up signals from YouChip (or something) and transmit the whole thing to their visual and auditory cortices.
But of course, Wall-E beat me to it. As usual.