Anti-intellectualism @ MindSay

The Dallas Morning News printed a piece by Susan Jacoby who recently published “The Age of American Unreason.” She writes that, “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.” Her specific bête noir is video, and although there is much evidence to suggest that she is correct, her analysis is shallow.

There is little doubt that technology has contributed to the dumbing-down of America. The first assault may have come with the hand-held calculator which has almost extinguished Americans’ knowledge of arithmetic, not to mention higher mathematical disciplines. But technology in itself is not the monster. When technology becomes commercial, it becomes available to everyone—saints and sinners, decent people and scoundrels. It’s the old story about guns which don’t kill people; the people who use them do. And so it is with all technology.

What can we do to stop people from using guns to kill other people? Some suggest that we take the guns away, which if feasible, might work, but it isn’t. Some unscrupulous people will find ways to get guns to other unscrupulous people and the killing will go on. Smuggling and black markets are, after all, common forms of economic activity.

The only alternative is to reform people. What’s needed is serious and comprehensive moral and civility training. But societies today have abandoned that task.

It was once assumed that the place for such training was the family at home. But the institution of the family has been weakened if not destroyed by economic conditions and cultural changes. Today, parents themselves are just as apt to be scoundrels as others, and scoundrels cannot be expected to teach morality and civility.

The churches sometimes like to claim the moral arena, but they have not seriously promoted morality and civility either. In a Christian society, the morality is not a priority of churches, salvation is. And as someone once said, the promise of forgiveness and salvation guarantees bad behavior.

The upshot of all of this is that morality and civility are taught nowhere anymore, and people everywhere have become uncivilized and immoral. When we put guns and any other kind of technology in the hands of such people, the result cannot be other than bad.

The advance of technology cannot be stopped, not even retarded, and unless we get serious about morality, there is little hope for America or anywhere else.

Dumbing people down is easy; the hard part is smartening them up, and unfortunately beating the technology beast will not help, because that ass does not respond to whipping.

Propaganda and the Political Right

The President is again mounting a campaign in defense of the war in Iraq by reiterating the discredited claims he has made in the past. In response, others are accusing him of being out of touch with reality. His repetition, they claim, “only underscores how utterly removed from reality he is.”  But perhaps it is the critics who misread reality. Perhaps they fail to realize what is happening in this country.

From the days of its founding, America has had a strong anti-intellectual bent that stems from the fact that most early colonists were European exiles espousing one or another of frowned upon religious sects. What characterized these people was their firm belief, made popular by the Protestant Reformation, that each person not only had the right but also the ability to interpret Scripture for himself. Neither education, training, nor scholarship was required. It is that climate of belief that has given rise to the abject nonsense that everyone has the right to his own opinion and that every issues has two sides.

Both of these claims, although widely accepted by Americans, are utter nonsense. Try telling your bank that its opinion is not one that you share when it sends you an overdraft notice. Try telling a physicist that you don’t share his opinion that H₂O is the chemical formula for water. Try telling a physician that you do not share his opinion when he tells you you have appendicitis. Where knowledge exists, opinions have no place.

And it is the American tendency to hold these two principles that lead us into so much inconsequential debate. Because we believe that there are two sides to every issue and that each of us has the right to his own opinion, facts do not matter. There should be no debate over global warming. We should not be debating whether or not to teach “intelligent design” as a scientific theory. Yet these debates go on and will not be resolved, because the facts are not important. We are living in a kind of  “dark age” in which, regardless of the facts, America is the center of the universe and it revolves around us.

This anti-intellectual bent of ours is a nonsense generating machine. The press has so-called pundits who write opinion columns. We have “news forums,” such as Meet the Press where know-nothings iterate biased opinions over and over again. So much so that if you know who the pundits or guests are, you need not read the columns or watch the programs, because you already know exactly what these pundits and guests will write and say. Who doesn’t know what position a Congressman will take on any issue once you know his party affiliation? Who doesn’t know what George Will will write on any topic?

The President and his advisors know this reality about America very well. His critics do not. The President and his people know that most Americans have but a meager acquaintance with what is going on, not only in the world, but even in this country. The main source of news for most Americans is network television and talk radio. Americans not only don’t read books, they hardly read newspapers.

So the President believes he can count on this ignorance, that he can reiterate the same old lies over and over again and nobody will ever notice, and that if he reiterates them often enough, people will even tend to believe them—regardless of the truth.

By promoting Protestant beliefs, the right has promoted and preserved American anti-intellectualism, the result of which is a new Joseph Goebbels’ age of propaganda. We are assaulted by it from every angle. And since we lack a respect for fact and truth, there is no defense against this onslaught. Its refutation will come only with the failure of the policies enacted by the ignorant right. And they will fail, for there are not two sides to nature’s coin.