(Posted by John.)
A data point for Ezra's "treat government like it matters" thesis:
I was looking the other day at one of the new Pew Center polls about"what Americans know." Americans in general aren't that interested in,or aware of, the outside world, and increasingly even our elites don'tseem to put much stock in that kind of knowledge either. We don't have[enough] Arabic speakers; the number of foreign correspondentscontinues to shrink. Compared with the Greeks, the Romans were notpassionately interested in the outside world. And they were often takenby surprise. The great disaster suffered by Varus in Germany in A.D. 9,when three entire Roman legions were annihilated, stemmed partly fromignorance about the tribes they were up against.
