. Longtime correspondent U. Doran alerted me to the book via this story link:
Susan Jacoby: Bemoaning
an America that values stupidity. |
Softpanorama |
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
|
Further, separating junk science from the real thing requires considerable subject matter knowledge.
As for politics,
situation is more complex and intellectuals in politics
might be more dangerous then useful. In a wya this might be the only area were
some level of anti-intellectualim might make sense. Too many intellectuals are
radicals in politics often with negative bian like involvement as a waste of
time - "nothing changes," "they all lie," and "only big donors have input."
On the other hand, it is troubling to see how readily
misinformed Americans acquiesce to acceptance of
non-thinking ideology and major misdirections in
American governance. And it hurts to see those pathetic
performances on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader,"
and U.S. pupils vs. foreigners.
It might make sense to
make it academically much more difficult to enter
college, as it is in Asia, and adding a requirement for
understanding logic and statistical reasoning. Finally,
lawmakers should demand that PBS provide additional
documentaries, and encourage ABC, CBS, NBC etc. to do
likewise.
It is no coincidence that the world's first great popularizer of totalitarianism was also the first great spokesman in the West of Philosophical Idealism, the doctrine which preaches that the everyday horrors with which men beset mankind are of no real consequence or significance, are indeed nonexistent, illusions, figments of our own perverted outlook created by our blinded, crippled senses. It was Plato who advocated the "Noble Lie," the lie the ruler, the Philosopher King, would broadcast to the ruled, always of course for the ruled's own good.
Rulers of church and state, the sempiternal Establishment of this world, have always seen things in this congenial light, the light that Plato ignited for them 2,400 years ago. No doubt they still would have if Plato had never lived, but with Plato as their Authority, the argument that pain and injustice are unreal, mere images and imaginings, gains repute, upstanding, righteousness, and, above all, philosophical status.
All dictatorships that have emerged in the West since 350 B.C. are a mere exegesis on Plato, the man who wrote that laughter is undignified, who chose Sparta rather than Athens; and on Philosophical Idealism, which is nothing more than an attempt to divide Existence itself into two unequal parts, external appearance and Inner Truth, The Good Essence and its bad shadow, the Divine Inexpressible and the sublunary meat and potatoes. As Bergen Evans reminds us in The Natural History of Nonsense, "Obscurantism and tyranny go together.... The mist of mysticism has always provided good cover for those who do not want their actions too closely looked into."
This danger inherent in obscurantism is not merely of theoretical interest. Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Konrad Lorenz, Alexis Carrel, Ezra Pound, Louis Ferdinand Celine, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot were all highly intelligent and, at least two of them, humane, kind, and thoroughly decent men. Yet all experienced no trouble whatsoever in embracing a strong element of fascism to his heart, this after a lifetime spent in the contemplation and evocation of obscurantism. Once one has developed the habit of abjuring the rational in favor of the willfully obscure and mystical, the descent to the bottom of the night is an easy ride.Obscurantism is ten parts humbug, and humbug is Tyranny's first name, the one it has chosen for itself and by which it is known to all its closer acquaintances. Was there one honest tyrant ever, was there one, who said, I have taken charge and mean to keep it for the good of myself. Not for the sake of the People, nor the State, nor this Faction nor that Party, nor God, nor the Holy Mother Church, nor the Prophet of God, nor Right, Freedom, Equality, Justice, and the Brotherhood of Man but for myself, for my own good, because it pleases me to do so.
Only in the name of humbug shall Tyranny declare itself, at least in its more public utterances. Privately, in its own house, Tyranny may unbutton its vest, put on its slippers, and call itself honestly enough, though even of this we cannot be sure. But whenever it broadcasts its message it uses only its first name, humbug, just as any king or emperor, as if it had no parents, no ancestry, but had sprung, full-panoplied, out from the skull of God.
But it is not only obscurantism that forms a smokescreen behind which tyranny can hide. There is also the little matter of dividing all existence into two, and just two, totally opposed, totally opposite categories. People from whom we might expect better reasoning processes to be in evidence surprise us by their unexpected lack in perspicuity.
Sociologists and psychologists tell us about "dominant" or "leader" types, "dominated" or "follower" types, implicitly or very often explicitly inquiring of us which we would rather be, implying through it all that of course our choice, assuming nature allows us to have one--which is another kettle of red herring--should be to lead, to command, to dominate, to impose our wills and our concepts on others, for their own good of course, to win friends and influence people. This "either/or" insistence by supposedly intelligent and mentally skilled professionals is deeply worrying. It never seems to occur to these highly trained experts on human behavior that the only sensible answer to the query, Do you wish to be a leader or follower, a master or a slave, is: What sane person would want to be either.
Dividing everything into two is all right in the monkey house, the sandbox, and the digital computer, but one can only wish this binary reasoning, this plus-or-minus-and-no-nonsense-please approach to things applied in social situations, would end somewhere between our twelfth and sixteenth birthdays.
The ability to see the world, its meaning, and its humanity, in strict dualistic terms, as two, and only two, distinct and mutually exclusive entities, forms the backdrop and backbone of almost all religion, philosophy, politics, economics, law, sociology, psychology--indeed virtually every human enterprise that has led to disintegration or petrification of society or the individual. Plato or Aristotle, St. Augustine or Descartes, Calvin or Torquemada, Freud or Jung, Nietzsche or Baudelaire, Eysenck or Skinner, Stalin or Hitler, no matter in what specifics they may have differed one from the other, agree that everything is to be divided into Two, which, whatever they choose to call them, can be reduced to a common denominator: the saved and the unsaved, those on God's side and those on Satan's, the abstractions of the pure reasoner and the concretisms of the pure observer, the totally sensory and the completely analytic, the blessed and the damned, the holy and the infidel, the material and the spiritual, the mind and the heart, wave and particle, holism and reductionism, nature and nurture, the Hellenic and the Hebraic, the superman and the herd, the Romanticist and the Classicist, the representational and the symbolic, the exploited and the exploiter, the gifted and the dull-witted, inductive analysis and hypothetico-deductivism, the justly rich and the deservedly poor, the black and white, Us and Them. Pluralism remains a luxury that only a few minds can afford, or even window-shop for.
February 17, 2008 | Washington PostCall Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
Susan Jacoby's latest book is "The Age of American Unreason."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Mayberry Machiavelli is a satirically pejorative phrase coined by John J. DiIulio Jr., Ph.D., a former staffer of the George W. Bush presidential administration who ran Bush's Faithbased Initiative. After he quickly resigned from his White House post in late 2001, DiIulio told journalist Ron Suskind, describing that administration, as published in Esquire magazine: "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
The phrase is meant to invoke infamous Machiavellian style power politics coupled with a prejudicial sense of regional backwardness and incompetence in the American south as supposedly exemplified by the fictional, small, rural, North Carolina town of Mayberry R.F.D., from The Andy Griffith Show which ran on the American television network, CBS, from 1960 - 1968.
The phrase, seeming so felicitously apt, was picked up and virally repeated by many critics of the George W. Bush presidency.
“The trouble with most folks ain’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so.”“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”—Meslier, Voltaire, Diderot?What a world of contradictions. A world of many dead ends. Today I celebrate with anger the birthday of revolutionary Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., mourn the death of jazz musician Alice Coltrane (a convert to Hinduism), and commemorate the birthday of a pioneer of freethought and the Enlightenment:
Jean Meslier (January 1664—1733): Priest, Materialist, Atheist
Here in the USA of course we are preoccupied with the threats of the Christian Right and fundamentalist Islam. More generally, we are known to complain about the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—and more generally still about theism. But that’s only the half of it. The rest of the world is as bankrupt as the half we know.
Some of us also have an interest in Eastern religions and mysticisms and are concerned with their validity or invalidity. Then of course there are African belief systems which outside of their areas of origin only have a significant impact on segments of the black diaspora.
It’s a world of ignorance, superstition, and savagery.
But it’s also important to note that there is a whole history of collusion of western and non-western obscurantism that began with the European penetration of China and India in the 17th century, i.e. linkages to the most reactionary inidigenous ideologies—Confucianism and Hinduism. Such collusion persists in altered forms in the present day, with Western postmodernism fueling Hindu and Confucian revivals, for example. Globalization, instead of harkening a new Enlightenment, is bringing us to the verge of a new Dark Age. The main culprits are the neoliberal economic order, neo-imperialism, and neo-fascist religious revivalism, but this barbarism carries on its work in the realms of theology and philosophy as well.
Here are a few links to show you what I mean.
First, you can keep up with other relevant writings of mine on my own blog:The permalinks for recent entries are:
On another front, see a blog entry from December:On still another, see: Swami Agehananda Bharati (1923–1991)In December I published a review in the Indian press:“Secularism, science and the Right”
[Review of Meera Nanda, The Wrongs of the Religious Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva], Frontline, Volume 23, Issue 24, Dec. 02–15, 2006.See also: Meera Nanda Online
“Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world.”
—Wilhelm Reich
Are Americans Inherently Anti-Intellectual? (February 20, 2008)
Is the U.S. a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-learning culture, and thus a
deeply ignorant one? Every few years comes a book which argues persuasively,
"yes." This year's entry is
The Age of American Unreason
A generation ago the book du jour chastising the dumbing down of America was
The Closing of the American Mind
I asked frequent contributor Michael Goodfellow for his take on the issue, and he responded with a number of fresh points of view:
This has been commented on a lot recently on the Net. I agree with some of the sentiment expressed here:There are more sources of information than ever if you want it. And it's not clear that we're really worse off in terms of intellectual health than before. American pop culture has been idiotic for decades, and people have moaned about lack of knowledge on the part of the public for decades as well. Interestingly, I remember reading a comment about 19th century England after the Sherlock Holmes stories were first serialized. The upper classes weren't celebrating that ordinary people were reading -- they were complaining that people who should be working were wasting their time reading novels!
Here's an analogy for you. If we were asking about American physical health, we'd be talking about increased obesity, lack of exercise, poor diet, etc. You could make the same comparisons about average American intellectual life, as the Jacoby article does. On the other hand, if you were asking about American athletics, you'd be talking about the increased numbers of serious athletic programs from grade school to college, the increased number of people who take athletics seriously, the improved training methods and broken records in practically every sport. In other words, nothing but serious improvement.
Again, you could say the same about serious intellectual life in this country. There's more and more to do and learn, better ways to do it, our best universities are world class, and there's never been more possibilities for making a living at intellectual pursuits. The results are obvious in science and technology. I'm not familiar enough with the arts to even guess at whether you can say there's been an improvement, but there's certainly more of it, from serious art to commercial art down to YouTube.
So overall, I'd say at worst, there's a widening split between the part of the country that enjoys intellectual activity, and the average person who doesn't. I really blame the school systems for that, not any increase in anti-intellectualism in the population. It's amazing anyone gets through K-12 public education in the U.S. and still wants to learn anything.
There is another interesting point of view I've heard on all of this. The story is that originally education was seen as "male" and had status. When mandatory education became widespread in the 19th century, and many cheap school teachers were needed, it was mostly women who filled that role. And so education became seen as "female", and its status dropped. For boys, education was some boring, spinster schoolmarm who slapped your wrist with a ruler if you didn't sit still. Within 50 years, the entertainment industry had converted the college professor from a "wise man" image to an overeducated dunce with no common sense -- a bit of a clown. The overall culture followed that same line, with women reading and men avoiding books.
“The old SDS dictum, ‘People have to be organized around the issues that really affect their lives,’ is really true… That is to say, that racism and imperialism really are issues that affect people’s lives. And it was these things that people moved on, not dorm rules, or democratizing university governance, or any of that bullshit.” —Mark Rudd, “Columbia—Notes on the Spring Rebellion”
Visit http://www.tools4change.org/wcr to learn more about and participate in the Week of Campus Resistance.
Asad Haider is a student and activist in State College, Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared on ZNet, Politics and Culture, Left Hook, Dissident Voice, and elsewhere. He can be reached at kingoffunk@hotmail.com.