Are we all becoming better informed – or is it just me?

18 February 2012

The difference between the debt and the deficit, I quite often find myself telling people, is like the difference between your overdraft and the gulf between what you earn and what you need. Even if you could reset the former to zero, somehow, the latter still be there, forever dragging you down.

‘But aren’t you the guy who writes a whimsical made-up diary in which you pretend to be Cheryl Cole, or tell sex jokes about Silvio Berlusconi?’ they’ll frequently reply. And they’re right, because that’s exactly who I am. But I’m bloody clever, too. I know loads of stuff. Lots of us do. More, I increasingly think, and more.

I never expected to know stuff. I never thought I was the sort. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I’d have thought that devolution max was a cough drink, or that Sunni and Shia were the couple who sang ‘I Got You Babe’. Yet here I am, all of a sudden, broadly understanding what a Higgs Boson is, aware of why it matters that Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun, and liable to not even snigger, at least half the time, when I hear the name ‘King Bhumibol’.

This isn’t just me showing off, you understand. Not wholly. I might be kidding myself, I might be wrong, I might be doing that unforgiveable thing that so many journalists do, in which they blithely induct the universal from a clutch of homogenous berks at a dinner party. But I think we’re all getting a bit smarter, aren’t we? There’s just so much news all the time; so much more than there used to be. It gets flung at our collective consciousness, like mud against a wall, and some of it surely sticks.

I’ve been asking around; hardly anybody still thinks quantitative easing is a laxative. My taxi driver the other day was discussing the sectarian make-up of Syria. ‘Wouldn’t want to be an Alawite, mate,’ he was saying. This honestly happened. A year ago, I’d barely heard the word myself. Next time I go to the hairdresser, I half expect the bloke in Crouch End Toni & Guy to explain that he needs to cut the top to make it grow via an analogy about expansionary fiscal contraction.

Maybe life has always been like this, and I’ve only just started noticing. Maybe 20 years ago it was all ‘Danish Maastricht referendum’ this and ‘Boutros Boutros-Ghali’ that, even in the changing rooms at Topman. But I don’t quite believe it. A couple of months ago, I read about somebody or other’s theory about Leonardo da Vinci (everybody will know about it soon) which held that part of the reason the chap seemed so damn clever was that he lived at exactly the last point when it was possible for one person to know everything that anybody else did.

These days, there simply isn’t the time. But while there is ever more and more that most of us don’t know, surely the upward drift of the sum of human knowledge drags the rest of us in its wake. Doesn’t it? Or do I just spend too much time reading crap on Twitter?

So there goes Sean Penn, denouncing British colonialism over the Falkland Islands. What can he be on about? He’s not a stupid man. He’s a spoon-faced humourless self-loathing pseudo-socialist twit, sure, but he’s not a moron. So what does he mean? What does he mean?

I’ve never understood the Argentinian claim to the Falklands. It’s not just that I disagree with it, because I appreciate that might be, you know, national bias. It’s that I don’t understand what it is. Certainly the various spats that the British, Spanish and French had over the islands were colonialist. That was rather the idea. But if colonialism had never happened, who would be living there, exactly?

Or, to put it another way, where the hell does a South America-dwelling, pale-faced Spaniard called Cristina Fernández de Kirchner get off calling Britain ‘colonialist’? Tell me, where are the Incas, Cristina? Where are all the dudes with the pointy heads? Hmmm?

They must have a point, these people. I’m not suggesting it’s a good point, but it must exist. Hillary Clinton pointedly referred to ‘the Malvinas’ a couple of years ago, but she didn’t explain why, either. So what’s the argument here? By what logic does a man who lives in a state nicked from Mexico, and a women who leads a country in which nine out of ten people are ethnically from somewhere else, claim the anticolonialist moral high ground?

We couldn’t keep India, because it was full of Indians. Hong Kong was, alas, full of Chinese. America had lots of people in it who didn’t want to be British, and Kenya… do you see where I’m going with this? Whereas the tiny number of people on the Falkland Islands… look, I know it’s an obvious point, but that’s its strength. What’s your point? Have you got one? I know you’re convinced, but why? Spell it out for me, because I’m just not getting it. But not in Spanish. I don’t speak that.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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