If people and language are getting dumber, does that mean that T.S. Eliot is not as literary as Milton? That Nabokov is not as worth while as Shelley? Are we going to rate the value of literature based on age, or worse, sentence length? It seems a little far-fetched.
Just throwing this out there: it's kind of interesting that you bring this up, because I had been thinking about the same thing for a while until I took a couple psychology classes and they discussed the Flynn effect: namely, that as a whole, the average IQ scores have been increasing since the 1920s. What the data suggests is that people are actually getting smarter as time goes on. Although this doesn't have a direct relationship with literature per se, it does give an interesting point of view to the idea that people and language have been becoming less intellectual as time goes on.
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