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Change in elite’s education ideals or deterioration of Collective Intelligence?

Ohmae Kenichi’s book of 2008 on deteriorating collective intelligence is a long collection of rants rather than a stringent scientific book, but these rants are informative and provide more food for thought than stringent scientific books, which few would read anyway. Many books are like that, and when critics attack an author on that account they usually are engaging in uninteresting personal or political fighting. The difference between personal and political being only that in the latter case the person is being defamed because he is considered a resource of the enemy.

Yet I am a bit puzzled by reading about deteriorating collective intelligence of the Japanese on the one hand side and about very similar phenomena of the US business elite which are portrayed as not deterioration but progress. In a chapter near the end, Ohmae critizes Japanese intellectuals for trying to stick to old ideals of classical education, rather than catching up with the world trend which is to talk about more practical social responsibility for the environment, the climate or the fight against poverty. On the other hand, near the beginning, Ohmae criticizes Japanese people for being less and less capable of reading sophisticated books, composed of complex sentences, like those of Maruyama Masao which previous generations really enjoyed reading, just as our German forefathers were fond of Heidegger still shortly after WW II.

I know that this apparent contradiction can be somehow resolved, but I am still impressed with how little care Ohmae takes to resolve it beforehand. This shows a certain bias toward giving positive interpretations to all anglo-american/global trends and negative ones to Japanese trends.

It is also nice to hear Ohmae praising Germans for being number 1 in the trend of trying to be a role model for saving the planet. However I am not sure whether this is really worth praising. If there is something praiseworthy in orienting the dinner debates to joint problems of humanity, then there is on the other hand side a real danger of doing it an a superficial way of “altruism signalling”, which in general tends to mean a combination of cheap collective altruism with radical individual egoism, a struggle to be seen as a god-like reincarnation of Jesus whie letting one’s compatriots pay the bill. Typically it means saving the world with policies of national self-abolition that are sold as “sustainable” while they are really the perfect example of unsustainability. The Swedish seem to be the real champions in this kind of hypocritical competition, even more than the Germans. Thinkers from the ancient Greeks onwards have been pointing out these pitfalls all along. In “On Reading” (Über das Lesen), Schopenhauer gives some good reasons why it is still preferable to spend time on old books than on the 10 most-favored Youtube videos that Ohmae finds essential for staying in conversation with today’s elites.