206. THE IDIOTS ARE TAKING OVER - Is Culture Getting More Stupid?
Last week I was too busy to write a new Philosophy Unleashed, and like many students these days, wondered for a minute if I could just get AI to do the job for me.
I’ve already attempted this before for Philosophy Unleashed and was not thrilled with the results. But that was a long time ago now, and AI has moved on. Maybe this time I could get away with it?
Also, unlike my students, I was going to ask AI to write an essay in the style of ‘me’. Stealing my own intellectual copyright as it were, rather than lazily getting the machine to do all my work for me. I was going to ask it to tell me everything it knew about Philosophy Unleashed and DaN McKee the philosopher, which is basically to say feed it years of my hard work, and then feed it a particular topic and ask it to write something “in the style of a Philosophy Unleashed post by DaN McKee”. This wasn’t getting the AI to do my work for me at the expense of my own learning. This was to be my cashing in on years of hard work already existent in the public domain by getting the AI to do the dogsbody work of actually writing up the idea I have had and done the initial thinking about by mimicking the style I had personally created through my own legitimate writing. Somehow, I told myself, this was different than a student cheating to meet a deadline.
Ironically, the topic I was toying with getting the thing to write was a post about how culture is getting dumber and dumber. Ironic because one cause of such potential dumbness was relying on AI to do things for us instead of doing them for ourselves. This, after all, is one of the significant problems of kids using AI in schools. Teachers like me, already educated in the way to write an essay or research something, use our prior and existent learning to assess the quality and validity of any artificially produced response, as well as to guide it with some well-considered prompts. Students, meanwhile, often use it to avoid hard work in achieving the initial state of being educated, which is necessary for being judicious about what the AI can produce. They become reliant on the quick fix, with no skills to evaluate and analyse the quality of what is produced, and without gaining the depth of understanding that comes from working through the problem themselves. AI is a short cut to the end of education that exposes a lack of understanding that the journey is more important than the destination. The end in itself is meaningless without the process that goes into achieving it.
One of the problems with our exam-obsessed education system is that the focus on end grades for pieces of work has obscured this fact. In most cases the finished product of a course in school is merely a maguffin fabricated as a means for students to engage with certain ideas or information and get to grips with it. The finished essay is not the point; the process of researching and writing it is. Getting the AI to do all that most valuable bit just so that an empty, but ‘done’, piece of homework can be handed in shows a student population who have completely missed the point of their education. Not that this is their fault. We teachers have promoted this misunderstanding because of our own obsessive focus with terminal grades instead of process. Students are often sanctioned for missing a deadline. The pressure to hand something in is therefore becomes more prominent in their lives than the pressure to actually learn something. When ‘learning’ is merely seen as the stepping stone to the final grade, and discussion around learning takes the form of the language of ‘targets’ and ‘attainment’, why bother with actually learning anything if the final grade can be achieved without?
We teachers are complicit in any increased “dumbness” our culture is showing because we are often the ones dumbing things down for the next generation. If education becomes merely about achieving certain grades, and getting students those grades becomes the defining focus of our jobs, then it becomes our mission to bring students to those grades within a specified timeframe regardless of corners cut in the process. Just ask a teacher working today how frequently they are setting students lengthy written work to read rather than abridged and easily digestible version of key texts, targeted at a depressingly low reading age. Ask how many of us have heard the words “they wouldn’t be able to manage it” in staff rooms across the country and truncated our expectations accordingly. If high challenge in the classroom increases the likelihood of ‘failure’ in achieving the highest grades, then challenge levels plummet and tasks become prescriptive and easy. An undemanding jigsaw of I do, we do, you do: follow the leader and join the dots. Asking students to figure out creatively their own pathway to the end rather than prescribing a pathway, directly instructed, that breaks the task down into easily achieved min-tasks, is to ask students to do something the bulk of their education has now left them grossly unprepared for. You can call it ‘research-informed’ education, but that distorts what the research is about: memorisation and regurgitation. We are largely educating students these days in dependency on teacher instruction instead of how to think for themselves, and we are getting the culture that naturally follows from the poverty of low expectations.
My most recent prompting of this thought, which I intended to put into Chat GPT last week, was after playing my A-level class the famous radio debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Coplestone and, not only asking them to follow it (something in my own teaching career of 15 years I have seen students find increasingly challenging), but asking them to think about how different entertainment was in 1948 compared to now.
“This is their version of a Joe Rogan podcast” I joked. Only, I realised I wasn’t joking at all. And as I watched the students’ faces as they tried to follow the two old intellectuals tell each other off philosophically, I saw them struggling to keep their attention focused. This despite the fact that, unlike the general radio audience of 1948, these students actually knew the more difficult terms and arguments being cited by the old professors.
Afterwards, I asked them about it. The most surprising thing about the debate, they said, was that no matter how heated things got, the two philosophers remained cordial with each other. Neither spoke over the other. Neither tried winning a shouting match. They relied instead on the power of their ideas to get their point across. A faith that reason would win out. “That’s just not what would happen these days.”
Would I just be proving my own point, however, by getting AI to write the post about the stupidity of the modern age for me, or was this somehow OK? The argument already made by me in person, with that A-level class, and the computer merely writing things up; the same way a twenty-first century academic might get a junior researcher to write up the journal article expressing their findings? Had I already got anything of real value out of my thinking, and my interactions with my students, and was this just the empty end-product needed to ‘pass the course’, or meet the deadline of my own silly blog?
Hundreds of people read this blog every month you know, but the analytics show me that even the causal reader of a philosophy blog demonstrates evidence of the growing stupidity of culture. You guys probably, for example, won’t have read this far, because the most successful posts on here - as with most blogs - are the shortest. Long, rambling, reads are skipped over. Too long, didn’t read.
Worryingly, I suspect some readers of PU never get past the homepage. Analytics show me people staying on the homepage for a while, but not clicking the links. Is it possible they are mistaking the brief quote of what lies inside as the whole thought? It is actually highly likely!
Anyway - why didn’t I just get Chat GPT to do my post for me? Some guilty sense that not only would I be adding to the general dumbing down of culture - producing content for content’s sake rather than because the content is any good - but I would be being inauthentic? Passing off work that wasn’t my own as if it were? A tacit endorsement of the practice I would chastise my students for?
Part of the job of the teacher, surely, is hoping your students will be steered away from the pitfalls and vices of the generation before them. Hence the existence of PSHE education about the perils of drugs and over-drinking frequently taught to students by a staff eager for the weekend and a few too many pints down the pub. Staff who did their own drugs back when they were their students’ age? Relationship education from teachers whose own string of former partners suggest that they are no expert in this field. We perhaps teach such topics from a position of our own self-awareness: a wish that someone had been there to tell us what not to do before it was too late.
While, as a straightedge non-drinker or drug-taker, that particular hypocrisy has never been mine as a teacher, and my long-lasting monogamous marriage perhaps puts me in position as exactly the sort of relationship schools are hoping to promote, I find myself preaching from that same position of self-contradictory hypocrisy when it comes to the use of phones and social media. At our school these days, phones are banned from use during the school day. Locked away and not released until the final bell. And I wish someone had done this for me as I tap at my own screen during down moments in the day like a rat in a cage hoping for a piece of cheese and experiencing only electric shocks. Sometimes I find the phone in my hand with no recollection of even picking it up, like an alcoholic waking up in the gutter after a particularly bad bender.
Teachers are imperfect humans. Do as we say, not as we do. In fact, according to my own small sample of students from my junior Philosophy Club, that is precisely what gives us our value. Asking the question of whether human teachers should be replaced by sophisticated, personalised AI which is far more knowledgeable, far more effective, and far more likely to lead to better educational results, every student in that group made similar versions of the same case: there is more to school than getting grades. Perfect attainment and doing everything the ‘right’ way would be boring. The best moments of school are the moments where they see teachers fail, be vulnerable, make mistakes, be human. They acknowledged that the actual professional side of the profession was entirely replaceable. What wasn’t, was our humanity. The moments where professionalism breaks down.
This was echoed recently when I asked a small group of Year 10 students (those left behind as the majority of the year were off on a geography field trip) what their favourite ever lesson in their lengthy school careers had been. Every single student recounted a tale of a lesson where a teacher was absent and a cover lesson meant fun and off-topic shenanigans could occur, or a time when their actual timetabled teacher did something off-piste and memorable which meant no actual learning took place but a lot of fun was had. If we were replaced with AI, would a student’s favourite lesson be the times the AI glitched and needed repair? The modern equivalent of a snow day in a world where being unable to physically get into school no longer means school has to pause?
Another group of Year 10s - my own GCSE Religious Studies group - recently had a lot of fun making board games themed around ideas of salvation in Christianity. The task, however, left them with very little subject knowledge. By their own admission, it was a poor tool for actually learning about what they needed to know for the exam. But when I asked them if I should omit that particular activity from next year’s GCSE, they told me it should stay. The fun - even with the wasted lessons and end-result of not knowing as much as they should - made them realise what they didn’t know, and catch up when revising. But without the fun, the knowledge might be there, but their enjoyment of the lessons, and motivation to do well in them, would not.
Last week I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. Did I ‘cheat’ with AI to meet a deadline, or did I just fail to meet the deadline? Either way, I would be imperfect. I decided instead to just do what I tell my students to do: be honest and admit I couldn’t make it. The blogger equivalent to asking for an extension (but with the added advantage of not needing to actually produce the work at a later date because it’s my blog and I make the rules).
Culture might be getting more stupid…but another way of looking at it might be that culture is getting kinder. To ‘dumb something down’ is a rather uncharitable way of framing ‘making something more accessible’. Who really listened to Russell and Coplestone in 1948 and enjoyed it besides fellow academics already well versed in the ideas? Was it popular culture even then? Probably not. People like me think people like Joe Rogan are dangerous for the ideas they let inside too many people’s vulnerable minds - but imagine what theists and atheists alike might have thought about the potential dangers of letting a Coplestone or a Russell corrupt the religious leanings of the vulnerable young people who dared to listen to their discussion?
The philosopher’s safest position, and yet the one we too infrequently take, is ‘I don’t know’. Maybe culture is getting more stupid, maybe it’s just evolving. Maybe even the exam-obsessed schooling I’m railing against could be seen as schools finally being honest about their limitations: we are not in the business of educating your children. That is the holistic responsibility of all of us. We’re here primarily to get them qualifications and allow you (parents) some childcare-free hours in which to work.
All I know, is that now you’ve read the real thing, in all its angular and unclear glory, you get to decide which you enjoyed more. The real deal, a week late, or the AI-generated ‘cheat’ I could have met the deadline with a week ago:
“**Has Culture Gotten Dumber? A Look from 2025**
By Dr. DaN McKee (actually by Chat GPT)
I’ve been accused, more than once, of being a curmudgeon. Perhaps I am. But I can’t help feeling that human culture in 2025 is, quite frankly, a lot dumber than it was in 1948.
Before you dismiss this as another tiresome “back in my day” rant, hear me out. Let’s consider one striking example: the legendary 1948 BBC radio debate between Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest and philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, one of the most influential atheists of the 20th century.
This wasn’t just a debate—it was an intellectual heavyweight match. Copleston and Russell tackled the existence of God, drawing on metaphysics, logic, and moral philosophy. The debate was broadcast on mainstream radio, and ordinary people tuned in, not just scholars or students of philosophy. In post-war Britain, a nation recovering from the horrors of conflict, the populace engaged with an hour-long, densely philosophical argument. Can you imagine such a thing happening today?
Fast forward to 2025. Our screens are filled with bite-sized content, algorithmically tailored to keep us scrolling, not thinking. Political debates are reduced to meme warfare. Cultural discourse often seems more about who can shout the loudest or virtue-signal the most effectively, rather than who can reason the best. A philosopher like Russell or Copleston today would likely be drowned out by influencers, clickbait headlines, or deepfake controversies.
The problem isn’t just technology. It’s what we’ve allowed technology to do to us. We’ve cultivated a culture where attention spans are short and where complexity is seen as elitism. Philosophy, once a public endeavor, is now often confined to academic echo chambers or reduced to Instagram quotes superimposed over sunsets.
Am I being harsh? Perhaps. But I believe there’s a difference between accessibility and oversimplification. The Copleston-Russell debate wasn’t for everyone, but it was there for those who wanted to engage. Today, finding real, challenging discourse often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack of noise.
I’m not saying we need to go back to 1948. The world has changed, and not all of it for the worse. But if we want a culture that values wisdom over mere information, that prizes critical thinking over knee-jerk reactions, we need to demand better. We need to reclaim spaces for genuine debate and elevate voices that challenge us, not just those that entertain us.
If we don't, we risk losing something vital: the ability to think deeply about our world and our place in it. And without that, what are we but the hollow echoes of a smarter past?”
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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