How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America

[kliljedahl]

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2008.

Sad but true: Intelligence is a political liability in the US. Author of" The Age of American Unreason" Susan Jacoby explains why.

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as "elite," implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack. Susan Jacoby confronts our "know-nothingism" -- current and historical -- in her new book, The Age of American Unreason.

A former reporter for the Washington Post and program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, Jacoby is the author of five books, including Wild Justice, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. Her political blog, The Secularist's Corner, is on the Web site of the Washington Post.

Terrence McNally: Have things gotten worse? How were things different as you were growing up?

Susan Jacoby: Well, I have just been told that all of my memories of growing up are wrong, because memory is absolutely inaccurate. It's only a "narrative."

I'll give you an example of how stupid this country has become. I'm one of the village atheists on Faith, a panel sponsored by the Washington Post and Newsweek. In a recent post I wrote that when I was 7 years old, I was taken by my mom to visit a friend who had been stricken by polio and was in an iron lung. Polio has basically been eradicated, but I grew up when polio was still a real threat to children, before the Salk vaccine.

This childhood friend had been playing and running only three weeks before, and now he was in an iron lung. And I asked my mom, "Why would God let something like that happen?" And to her credit, instead of giving me some moronic answer, my mother said, "I don't know."

After posting this on Faith, I received an e-mail saying, "All childhood memories are unreliable. We construct narratives to justify what we now think."

Of course it would be stupid if I'd said I became an atheist at the age of 7. But I hadn't said that, only that I remembered this childhood experience as making me begin to question what I'd been taught. The whole tone of the e-mail was that nobody's memory about anything could possibly be accurate -- no fact could possibly be true.

More here: http://www.alternet.org/story/95109/

[maat]

Thanks for posting it.

[kliljedahl]

I read all of her books voraciously as soon as I can get my hands on them. I highly recommend Freethinkers if you want an accurate history of secularism in this country.

[PraxMan]

Rant on

Funny -- most intelligent people would think that when the word 'elite' is capitalized in context it actually means "A group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status".

When the word is left in lowercase and used as an adjective -- it can mean -- um -- well I'll leave it to to the terribly intelligent person to explain:

SJ: Elite simply means "the best," not the political meaning that's been ascribed to it. If you're having an operation, you don't want an ordinary surgeon. You want an elite surgeon. You want the best.

...oh not the political meaning.

Anyway I will continue to use it properly when describing people like Washington Post blogger and author Susan Jacoby and 'top Yale law school' graduate, Shillery Clinton.

(three questions to push semantics -- that is smart!)

LOL!

1)
Next gem from an Elite Media Thinker©

TM: I recall the book The Sound Bite Society (by Jeffrey Scheuer, 2000) said that television inherently prefers simplistic arguments, simple solutions, simple answers.

SJ: As we're talking, I happen to have my computer on. News stories are flashing and off the screen. If they're on for two seconds, you're going to miss a lot, and that's the problem with video culture as translated through computers.

No, people who run the Media are elitist pigs and CONSCIOUSLY produce content that delivers value to corporate shareholders through the modeling of consumer addictions. But I am not sure what internet the woman is using, but mine is text-based and that DOES require reading and comprehension skills to which the 'public education' system has utterly failed top provide.

Hey Sue -- could be simplier? You live in a totalitarian society in which the ONLY education people ever received in the lower classes was just enough to figure out their hourly wages, read a TV Guide, keep track of the fish they gutted and purchase propaganda like the Washington Post? In other words, could be that the US in pursuing exceptional American strategies like the Dewey model, might have damaged it's ability to think?

Nawh...perish the thought. America is still the best and a model for the world.

2)
More deep thoughts from a thinker...?

TM: Having all that information at our fingertips is a plus. What's the negative?
....
Garbage in, garbage out. The Web's only as good as our ability to ask questions of it. The ability to access information means nothing if you don't have an educated framework of knowledge to fit it into.

LOL!! Get it...you can't learn anything by yourself on the internet, Sue believes you still need the 'educated framework of knowledge'?

Of course that educated framework might only consist of warm-over business slogans and the 'Team Capital' mantra of virtually any business school and thus is not really education, let a lone a framework for anything...but Sue only SEES places of higher learning as dynamic pluralistic idea factories and can't bear the thought that they might simply be propaganda mills outfitting the 'next' elite class with imperial lies. Perish the thought.

But of course she just stated in this interview that even a hopeless liar like Clinton, who graduated at the top of her Yale law class and who knows better, isn't going to tell the truth as she sees it anyway -- so what the fuck IS THE POINT of having an educated framework of knowledge, then? If educated politicians who graduated at the top of the most prestigious universities on the planet, are lying, then what the hell is the point in educating people? To listen to OTHER EDUCATED PEOPLE lie to them but make sure one has the skill's to detect the lie? Kinda cross-purposes and not really the role of 'education' or 'rationalism' actually. Education can help you lie just as easy as being truthful.

Public figures who LIE are by definition elitists. They think they are better than the people they lie to, because they don't think that the people they LIE to, can handle honest truth. It's even more disgusting and indefensible when it is done in a democracy. One expects dictators and priests to LIE; not elected reps who are representing the People. Huge fucking difference that has nothing to do with the educational standards of the people being lied to.

3)
More intelligent bon bons -- actually no -- ideological drivel from someone too bias that rationalism is beyond her reach!!

TM: Why America? Other countries have television and the Internet.


There's also something else: We've always had more faith in technology than other countries. One of our problems with computers is that we believe in technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems. Not knowing is a non-technological problem. The idea that the Web is an answer to knowing nothing is wrong, but it's something that Americans -- with our history of believing in technology as the solution to everything -- are particularly susceptible to.

Load of crap? Proof? Or do rationalists do rational proofs anymore? More faith that in technology than 19th England and the Industrial Revolution? More thatn the fanatic obsession with engineering and technique than the Bismark's Germany? Surely not more than the entire fatalistic attraction of Stalinist Russia with FORCED industrialization as being the key to 'scientific socialism'? Jeez I guess even more than the entire industrial design of Japan's imperial Meiji class and the [link:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Geese_Paradigm|flying goose] model?

In other words, in spite of an education, this person places America and ONLY America at the center of her world. Maybe that's problem with America and it's intellectual morass? Is the rest of the world suppose to forget that 'intelligent' Amerika hasn't bothered adopting one of the many many delivery models of health care that actually work?

Is America slow or are Americans just as bright as anyone else and it's their scummy, greedy filthy lying politicians that continually defy the publics' will. How much education does one need to see that bit of irrationality on the part of ELITES like Jacoby that don't want to take responsibility for their educated theories anymore?

4)
Or this bit of horse shit

TM: Our universities and particularly our graduate schools are still the envy of the world, but with the education available to everyone, that's no longer so.

SJ: Right, and to call arguments like mine elitist is wrong. I think that the basis of a society is what people with normal levels of education understand. That means we need to be concerned about elementary schools, secondary schools and community colleges -- not what people at Harvard and Yale might be learning.

Oh beg to differ -- it is VERY important to find out exactly what people at Harvard and Yale might be learning because they are the ELITES that make all the decisions...that's why I want to know if fashionable theories like 'antisemitism' or race eugenics or fascism or noblesse oblige are making a comeback among our socio-economic warlords. Who the hell cares about 8 years old learning division? The only people obsessed with the education system, tend to be 'social experimenters' like old school liberals and religious bigots, who tend to think that a good education results from constant ideological incursions into basic practical pedagogy.

5)
Now the stuff at the end of the interview is mindbogglingly nuts...

Again with the semantic...

SJ: No. I don't actually recognize these different forms of intelligence. Emotional intelligence depends largely on whether we are brought up to empathize with other people. But it doesn't matter if you're kind to others and you understand them if you don't know anything about your society and history.

These are actually different things, and my point is, one doesn't substitute for the other. They're all important. In terms of society, having emotional intelligence without knowledge is useless. And, of course, having knowledge without emotional intelligence is also useless. But they're not the same thing.

What the hell is "emotional intelligence"? Ethics, morality...values? Um...and why wouldn't an intelligent person simply say that instead of using a vaguely stupid term that defines NOTHING?

Key to understanding intellectuals -- when they invent 'new' terms, you know they lost the argument. It's like in the 50s, when American sociologists invented the word 'societal'. The real word is 'social' of course, but elites in American universities at the time were afraid that they might be labelled communist and so they started to substitute 'new words' for existing ones just like George Orwell proposed in 1984.

Wonder what happens to the elite American mind, when they use the same English language as everyone else, but then substitute 'semantics' in order to pass muster for stupid people?

I bet they are trained to lie a lot ;)

some of the stupidest people I've ever met were at university...of course the problem is that when a bunch of elites spend 40k for a piece of paper, they are likely to break ranks

Rant off

[Scarabus]

Douglas Hofstadter published Anti-Intellectualism in America a couple of decades back. Al Gore published Assault on Reason a year or so back. Susan Jacoby published The Age of American Unreason just recently. And the corporate media yawn. The dumber the nation, the better for them.

So who ya gonna call? Wish I knew.

Fanatically fundamentalist Muslims beyond our borders; fanatically fundamentalist Christians within our borders; the mortgaging of our nation's future to the oil despots and to the awakening dragon, China; the sapping of our nation's military strength in Iraq and Afghanistan; the trampling of our nation's moral and diplomatic capital, stature, and credibility because of our naked aggression; the blind eye turned toward the disintegration of our nation's infrastructure, system of education, system of health care, integrity of our voting system....

And the band known as the "4th estate" plays on: Which female celebrity has most recently flashed her beaver? which celebrity couple has most recently either adopted or welcomed the birth of a baby (or babies)? which celebrity has most recently assaulted a police officer? which bride, having had second thoughts, has most recently bugged out? which baby has most recently gone missing from its mother? (It's usually the mother, right? As with Susan Smith?)

Oy!

Just this afternoon I watched yet again the wonderful clip of Buster Keaton's standing at attention on his boat as it slides down the ways for its maiden voyage, descends beneath the surface, and settles on the bottom. Only when he's forced to wade or swim does the imperturbable Buster wake up and realize that he's screwed.

When will we Americans wake up? Not until the ship of state has slipped beneath the surface and become mired in the deep muddy quicksand? (Yes! Allusion to the great Pete Seeger. His song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" should be playing every day on every progressive outlet in the country.)

P.S. Good on ya, Keith!

[Virgil]

When I see the "Elite" I equate it with the power elite, whoever they are. If I did not use "Wealthy Rulers" I might use "The Elite." But that is what happens when words get hollowed out and emptied of meaning. I do not know what the "Right" is given the Christian Right has come to be the Right, where I equate the Right with the lowest possible taxes on the rich and their passive incomes of dividends and long term capital along with the lowest corporate taxes possible and the least regulation possible. I call the Right that has deep captured the agencies meant to regulate them and captured the government that is to take them the "Reich." A lot of why we have problems is because we are doing a kind of babbling where people do not know what are meant by the words and things are so twisted up is down and people that resist our terrorism and conquest are terrorists.

Not to dwell on that, you may like this TED talk on education, because education in this country is not education, but industrial training and programming of how to be an obedient-to-the-government citizen when doing that is the opposite of citizenship in our Age of Treason. ("Treason" by the way has a common meaning of "betrayal of trust" and we do have that as seen in so many things done by government.) Link = http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/k...reativity.html

This link best introduces what TED Talks is about with the first entry carrying the load- http://www.google.com/search?q=TED+T...ient=firefox-a The above TED Talk is in the Top 10 link in that first entry- http://www.google.com/url?q=http://w...62V5ys6NALzgwA

[kliljedahl]

Bill Moyers and Susan Jacoby review her book, "American Unreason."
They discuss the current state of American education and discourse, and our failure to produce informed citizens.
We "get the government we deserve."
Regardless of political party or religious conviction, we should demand better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY8JynFxUko

[PraxMan]

OK

children and dancing?
Herbert Marcuse, T Rozacyk,

practical vocation to teach science?
The Continental method... Teach kids how to build a house and they will learn all there is to know about applied math, physics, etc etc
Peter Kropotkin is good

creative/non-cognition symbol recognition transference models vs. Traditional non-applied Subject-Object Relational Models?
Paulo Freire is better, so is Rousseau's Emile for the former...pfft...Locke 'Human Understanding', Dewey, Whitehead...Montessori seems like a weird hybrid of both approaches. Lots of Authoritarian models? Ethiopian Marxists in the 70s? Grab every kid over age 8 and put them all in the army? That would provide a 'educated framework of knowledge'? But admittedly, not a very good one.

Al Gore? human ecology? Biomorphic models. What was wrong with Bookchin and 'deep ecology'. That is far more influential in hindsight. A lot of the organics and the 'new' 100 mile diet types and the anarcho aspects of the libertarian movement come from that...

Not Sir Fuck doing schtick sponsored by BMW!!
I did like his bit on the stifling assembly line approaches (see above) and how there might be talent out there, but the system is incapable of finding all these Einsteins...but then again, that might be simply a plea for more 'niche' skills at a reasonable market price...it's kinda weak

This guy is a recycler and a good entertainer...

All of these approaches to education pale in comparison to small unregimented groups of children of 'various' ages interacting with knowledgeable informed adult educators employing all those methods in healthy communities where actual parents become part of the education process in which BOTH learn from each other...it's almost a crime what we do to our children. Sir Ken agrees with me ;)

We already know that the most spectacular years of whole growth and development, especially in intellectual growth, is in the first 14 years. Known that for thousands of years and that is why elites bring there children up in a fully regimented environment under the tutelage of the military, the clergy, old guys from the Lodge, Courtesans, Intellectuals, etc. The whole idea is to parse loyalty from home to group. Kewl for the elites, but we be little people...so we can't do that.

In those formative years, we learn about three quarters of what we know, but most of it is the behavioral stuff and the value stuff and the cultural stuff and we tend to view, as a culture, the intellect stuff as having value and utility.

It's not just education...look at the way we separate book reading.
Fiction and Non-Fiction.
They are not the same.
You might get an education from both.
But one is 'storytelling' and one is 'factual'.
Yet we equate the two as having equal validity to education. Bullshit! That's just the publishing industry and 'religion'.
If you read nothing but fiction (or the Bile), you will never be educated.
That's cultural!
That ain't education or intelligence. That's lack of opportunity caused by a society that is hostile to non-fiction and inquiry.
Fiction lapses into pop culture which lapses into post-literate visuals which lapses back into itself as political discourse as 'fiction' and storytelling. No democracy is possible. No public intellectual climate will ever develop when the smartest minds of a society spend all their time out shinning each other with stories.

Here's my best educational system:

1) no school between 0-12
2) small community based resource folks to assist parents; teachers, educators, elders, role models, practical community based goals and quiet time with the family to reinforce basic pedagogy
3) Public school 14-20 (veritable)
4) all year, longer days, rout, focused, practical tasking, hard skill, hard sciences, travel, no fucking ideology, lots of critical reasoning, everybody gets full exposure to culture, religion, tech, biz, etc etc and EVERYBODY gets a fucking education or at least to some basic standard which is way above whatever passes these days
5) vocational tracking during public school
6) higher education? Hopefully that will bring up a population to first year university standards and then let 'whomever' provide the dollars for education after that point can do so. Everyone is free to make their own priorities and hopefully 'education standings' will be less important than what is actually said by people claiming to be educated.


But the bottom line is that we should get beyond the teacher-student paradigm (and stop using words like paradigm ... ;)

[Livid_Liberal]

It's just "teaching to the test" nowadays, with the NCLB Act. :(

[PraxMan]

and I couldn't give rat's ass about what Bush has done to an already degenerated mass education system ...since you didn't invent market driven education, there is NO reason to discuss some partisan nonsense regarding an idiot from Texas who scammed ratepayers to make a ton of cash for his buddies in the retarded shadow co-education movement called 'Christian brainwashing' (or those old lefty liberal projects about 'reading being fundamental') or any other America educational fads.

I did say healthy community...!

Move on and start thinking differently...your country is fundamentally fucked.

You can STILL buy military weapons at a pawn shop and the press can operate freely, so under Amerikan standards of education, that means you Rawk!!

American is great. I love America.

Sorry If I offended you with my shorthanded comments about education and why people should be more involved with it.

[Livid_Liberal]

Stop spouting BS!! The RW wants to abolish public education with the NCLB Act and the defunding of programs and the 'charter schools'... "School Vouchers" and it's all a load of crap!!! You'd look a lot smarter reading about all that has happened before you spout Right Wing propaganda and nonsense!!! :grr:

[Terwilliger]

all those people dropping out of HS or not going to college...they were paid by the Pukes to drop out!

Our educational system is not that great. There need to be serious reforms, and I don't mean NCLB.

[Katzenjammer]

Yeah, it was. It really was. I entered kindergarten in 1945 and I can tell you that the education I got in urban, working-class schools was nowhere near the quality of the edu kids with wealthy parents received.


What BushCo has done is make a bad situation even worse.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

primary purpose in the early 20th century was assimilating all those immigrant kids.

That meant English only, with punishment and shaming for kids who dared to use their home language, lots of whitewashed American history, and lots of flag this and military that, along with the reading, writing, and calculation skills that they needed for the average job.

[Katzenjammer]

The less-awful schools wouldn't do much to hinder higher aspirations, but they also wouldn't do much if anything to support them. Everyone got the same minimalist, pre-packaged "education" designed to produce quiet, obedient non-thinkers. (Grace Llewellen, an ex-middle-school teacher: "All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings. You do not speak unless granted permission. ... You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and pay attention, you had better {do it}. The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience -and learn- is the antithesis of democracy.")

[Virgil]

The state of NC should be able to produce its own material with all the academicians it employs instead of buying books in what I think is a book racket. Kids should have the material online so that they don't turn into book mules and even if there was need of carrying paper, subjects are studied in chapters and there is no reason to tote around tens of pounds of books. Like how stupid can you get? If content were online it would benefit the home schooled too. Like tell us right now what a high school education should require. Give us the pill. What is that link again.

Why aren't the best teachers recorded so that people can see the best and if you don't like the best teacher of Arkansas on algebra then you can watch the best teacher from Colorado. Check out the composite evaluation website or jump to the college lecturers on history and get some real Phd.

The need for memorization is stupid. All the contents of all the books from0-12 would easily fit on a keychain zip drive. Memorization is so Aristotle.

I have come to believe that abolishing schools is a good thing. That is not to say that there should not be a place of learning where people can go with their questions or listen to someone speak on a subject. The word I have for the situation with education offends some people because it is used against individuals in such a negative way, but the word for our education system is retarded.

I say it takes a thirsty horse to drink and this injecting learning into kids isn't the way to go. What people need are coaches that can inspire as well as quinch a thirst. The Internet has not yet spoken, but in the poorer countries of the world there has to be a lot of whisperig. I would love to see what a solar computer linked to a satellite does to the villages of the world that don't have electricity. I would think that is one computer that is not going to get cut off. Education is resisting revolutionary change all to serve testing.

[goobernator]

The deterioration of public education extends way back. With higher education being (having been) coopted by freeloading industrial corporate interests staking claims to publically funded research and patents, its FAR TOO SWEET A DEAL to stop or resist. More to the GHWB/GWB/Neil/any other Bushcorp familia publishing interest point, they have been scamming the big bucks from textbook contracts (rewriting history to their satisfaction) and testing regimens for God knows how many decades, so MAYBE you shouldnt make up from whole cloth the completely misbegotten notion that the "republicans" want to stop public education when its clearly one of the finest cash cows in the barn. Its plain as day.

Just thought you might want to rethink that one...

[maat]

She gets to engage in interactive online learning; BUT, then, I homeschool her. I am supervised by a credentialed teacher, with whom we meet once per month. She uses text materials that measure up to state standards, and she is tested every other month, and takes the state test once per year. We study critical thinking constantly, and practice it. Her test scores and abilities have been improving by leaps and bounds every since I started doing this almost two years ago. I just noticed that kids get left behind in the conventional classrooms. We go through a public charter school, and it reduces what the school would have to pay for administrators and facilities. The district loves it. I realize that my opinion might not be popular ... but I love the program. I know what she's doing ... because I assign it (before, the teachers seemed reluctant to let me know what she was assigned - and what she studied). I got very tired of that; so, now, I'm the instructor, and I make sure that she learns.

[soryang]

...and tyranny rule. It is an active policy and has more to do with authoritarianism and suppression of democracy than anything else. Ignorant people are easier to control and more susceptible to stereotypes, jingoism, propaganda, consumerism and other mythical claptrap.

[LoneWolf]

that I face in my classroom each year. Overcrowding, understaffing, policies that don't align with research, underfunding, a large number of students from dysfunctional, abusive, or just deprived family lives...all of that contributes.

The hardest thing for me to overcome, though, is the entrenched conditioning that devalues thinking and learning.