THE WORLD IS GETTING SMARTER?

The current cover story in Intelligent Life magazine has generated quite a lot of excitement. John Parker's argument that we are living in an age of mass intelligence--that we are hardly "dumbing down" but apparently wising up--was greeted with pages and pages of heated comments from readers. Some of you argued that just because we are consuming more culture doesn't make us more intelligent ("People take these things like medicine and develop no appreciation for high culture"); others embraced the popularising of "high art", which has liberated such things as opera and classical music from the preserve of the moneyed few ("Reading a book just because Oprah recommends it can be a great thing, particularly if it makes you start your own journey of literary discovery and enjoyment").

The debate continues, now on Economist.com. In one corner we have Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life magazine, who is defending the house proposition that "the world is wising up". More of us are going to university than ever before, and today's graduates are cultural omnivores. "It's not culture that is in retreat here", he writes, "it's stuffiness."

In the other corner is Susan Jacoby, an independent scholar and author of "The Age of American Unreason", who sees no reason for us to congratulate ourselves. She argues that "we are increasingly unwilling to devote time and attention to reading books that hold the key to our past. It is not a question of whether people read Dickens and Tolstoy, as opposed to Dan Brown and Barbara Cartland, but whether they read anything longer than the text bites that constitute "reading" on the web."

Guests such as Donald Wood, professor emeritus of media studies at California State University, are chiming in with their own two cents. Readers can vote on the proposition and comment on the arguments, en masse, intelligently. ~ EMILY BOBROW