How To Beat Brain Rot
Combat the Word of the Year
Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,
In case you missed the big news that recently came out of the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary anointed their “word of the year” for 2024. As a clear indication of the decline in English standards as well as an ironic demonstration of the concept itself, the TWO words of the year crowned were: Brain Rot.
Defined as, “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging,” its win perhaps represents the descriptive work of the OED, rather than prescriptive expectations.
Either way, it’s a term that accurately portrays a phenomena we’ve all experienced, either first hand or witnessed in those around us...and I’m sure it’s not contentious to assert: it's on the rise.
You’ll be relieved, however, to learn that the term is not born out of a TikTok trend or a hashtag twitter... it actually originated from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, proof that stemming the encroachment of triviality has been at least 171 years in the works.
“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Classics lovers may think of similar complaints from the ancients, such as the comical but not authentic line misattributed to Cicero:
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.'
While sadly the one above is most likely a modern invention, Cicero did still lament societal decay. In his First Oration Against Catiline in 63 BC, he rues:
"O tempora, o mores!"
— ("Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!")
Now, if Cicero were alive today, I suspect he would be hesitant to use the term Brain rot, though I’m sure he would agree with its presence. I think he would also argue (along with the other greats) that the best way to stave off such a mental affliction is to disregard the fake, the vapid, the noise that we are bombarded with and to focus instead on intellectually challenging endeavors.
We should aim to read, to listen to ideas and to study the wisdom that came before us... and as we discussed during last week’s look at Stoicism and Cicero, we shouldn’t learn from just one author or school of thought. We have in humanity’s great possession, a profound wealth of insights from the Essential Greeks.
It is these ideas and minds, from Homer to Aristotle, that we will discover in our Essential Greeks Course, starting THIS Wednesday at Noon EST.
This 10 part course covers the epics, the tragedians, the historians and the philosophers, all presented by a charming Australian man (my husband) and completed with original texts to read and tests to review.
If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up for this year’s class, beginning January 15th, and stop brain rot in its tracks:
All the best,
Anya Leonard
Founder and Director
Classical Wisdom
P.S. We are still offering this course at $50 off, so enjoy this discount and secure your spot here:
I absolutely love the Thoreau and Cicero quotes! what a way to bridge ancient/classics to modernism!
Not a thinker of the classical era, however, an undisputed lover of classics, Petrarch, in various pieces, laments such a 'brain rot':
{also, I tried to collect some of his more salient and relevant input on the matter only to realise that I collected 3 pages worth of material, so instead I include here only two key/relevant passages}
In his Letter to Boccaccio
‘O inglorious age! that scorns antiquity, its mother, to whom it owes every noble art—that dares to declare itself not only equal but superior to the glorious past’ (Robinson, 1970, 208; Hainsworth, 2010, 223.
And in the same letter, he continues lamenting the attitude of his contemporary thinkers,
“Such are the critics of today, as I so often have occasion to lament and complain—men who are innocent of knowledge and virtue, and yet harbour the most exalted opinion of themselves. Not content with losing the words of the ancients, they must attack their genius and their ashes. They rejoice in their ignorance, as if what they did not know were not worth knowing. They give full rein to their licence and conceit” (Robinson, 1970, 213; Hainsworth, 2010, 236).
In this clear despondency from Petrarch, he is mimicking Socrates, or rather learning from his teachings and attempts to follow by example. He is critiquing his contemporaries for exhibiting the same arrogance and ignorance that Socrates advocated against; he is castigating and chastising them for neglecting, discrediting, or even attacking what came before them or what they do not know instead of trying to learn from it; in other words, he is attacking his contemporaries for living an unexamined life.
Of course, he also attributed a lot of the lost works to the limited number of copyists (people capable of discerning and copying such difficult material),
“It is a state of affairs that has resulted in an incredible loss to scholarship. Books that by their nature are a little hard to understand are no longer multiplied, and have ceased to be generally intelligible, and so have sunk into utter neglect, and in the end have perished. This age of ours consequently has let fall, bit by bit, some of the richest and sweetest fruits that the tree of knowledge has yielded; has thrown away the results of the vigils and labours of the most illustrious men of genius, things of more value, I am almost tempted to say, than anything else in the whole world…” (Letter to Lapo da Castiglionchio, Robinson, 1970, 275-6).