"The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won"
Dr. Keith Parsons has kindly given me permission to publish his review of Charles P. Pierce's important new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.
I grabbed the title to this post from Amazon's description of the book.
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
by Charles P. Pierce: A Review by Keith M. Parsons
Mike Judge is one of the most incisive commentators on the dumbing down of American culture. He created the cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead, two dimwitted adolescents who sit around watching music videos and providing moronic commentary (e.g., “He said ‘butt.’ Heh, heh, heh”). To many viewers, myself included, Beavis and Butthead at first looked like an instance of that dumbing down rather than a commentary on it. Later I realized that Judge was poking fun at some of the very viewers of MTV who were watching his show. I wonder if any of them recognized themselves in the maunderings of Judge’s two meatheads. Later, Judge produced a film Idiocracy which portrays a world in which intelligence has been banished and idiocy rules. Judge set his movie 500 years in the future. According to Charles P. Pierce in his hilarious and trenchant book Idiot America, Judge was far too optimistic. Pierce says the future is now. It is the dawning of the Age of Asininity.
Pierce notes that America has always had cranks. In fact, America’s free speech traditions have always made it a great place to be a crank. Only, Pierce says, it used to be a lot harder to make a living at it. As long as they remain outsiders, cranks play a valuable role. They mark the boundaries of rational discourse, as the dragons on old maps marked terrae incognitae. Besides, every now and then, they have an idea that turns out right. But when cranks are mainstreamed, then, for all practical purposes, there is no mainstream—and no cranks either. All discourse is worth its market value. If it sells, it is legitimate. Rationality, logic, evidence, and all the old values of objectivity are irrelevant. Science becomes just someone’s opinion. The expert’s judgment carries no more authority than a radio loudmouth’s. The operant definition of “true” becomes “fervently believed by many people.”
Pierce says this is what has happened. Nuts that would have been relegated a corner soapbox before—if not a psych ward—now have primetime shows and their books head the bestseller lists. Kooky ideas that were on the fringe not long ago are now promoted in the halls of Congress, touted by mainstream media, and promulgated by innumerable ideologically driven “think” tanks, which, flush with corporate cash, promote any kind of obfuscation that adds to the sponsor’s bottom line. Where formerly a certain level of deference to scientific consensus was respected by all parties in public debate, we now have Senator James Inhofe (R—of course—Oklahoma) denouncing the findings of climate scientists as a hoax. Inhofe also offered a list of 400 alleged “experts” who supposedly dissent from the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real and human caused. It turned out that these “experts” had done little or no research in the relevant fields and even included a few TV weather reporters. Even politicians used to have to meet some minimal standards. Candidates for high office were expected to be able to exhibit a certain level of competence or at least coherence. The Republicans of fifty years ago would have laughed Sarah Palin off the stage.
How did this happen, how did bay-at-the-moon lunacy come to occupy a more prominent place in our public discourse than textbook science? How, indeed, has it ever come to be thought that there is still a scientific debate over evolution, or that pluperfect nonsense like creationism, and its dressed-up cousin “intelligent design,” are worthy of a hearing? How did there come to be a multi-million dollar “creation museum” in Kentucky, with full-scale models of dinosaurs fitted out with saddles?* How is it that the Texas State Board of Education can prefer the propaganda of extremist, ax-grinding cranks over the recommendations of hundreds of qualified scholars—and not be unceremoniously tossed out of office by the voters? How can a presidential administration censor and adulterate science for eight years (see Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science) without being savagely mauled in the media? Who let Glenn Beck get off his meds and onto prime time?
Obviously, as Pierce notes, a lot of the reason for the eruption of nonsense has been the rise of religious fundamentalism since the early 1980’s. However, this only invites the further question of how fundamentalism, which had looked down if not out for decades, rose to prominence in American politics and culture. It is hardly a coincidence that the rise of the Moral Majority and the recrudescence of creationism coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “Movement conservatism,” after its disastrous loss in the 1964 presidential election, rose to ascendancy in only sixteen years. To accomplish this, the Republican Party had to be remade. Teddy Roosevelt was the “trust buster,” but his GOP successors found it far more profitable to carry water for the rich. They still do. The most honest thing George W. Bush ever said was this: When addressing a gathering of the wealthy, “the haves and the have-mores,” as Bush called them, he candidly noted that they were “his base.” Yet the wealthy are a minority, and as long as the Republicans were identified with them and their interests, they seemed doomed to remain a minority party.
The genius of Republican strategy was to enormously expand the GOP’s base by adopting a faux populism (see Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?). To attract the great mass of disaffected hoi polloi, Pierce notes, the GOP had to at least give lip service to all sorts of strange dogmas and loopy obsessions. To attract the tens of millions of fundamentalist Christians, candidate Reagan had to make creationist noises, and he complied by characterizing evolution as “only a theory.” To keep the loyalty of the pew-sitters, Republicans have had to endorse the agenda of the religious right; they had to at least appear to be antiabortion, anti-gay rights, anti-sex education, anti-church/state separation, and, in general, pro-“family values.” To attract the hard-right anti-tax and anti-big government group, they had to espouse supply-side economics, a crackpot theory that stands in relation to real economics as creationism does to real science. To appeal to the tinfoil-hat paranoiac constituency (millions of people), it had to at least tolerate true weirdoes like the “birther” nuts and Glenn Beck. To get the support of xenophobes and racists (many millions) it had to promise to crack down on “illegals” that came here to take jobs picking lettuce and processing chickens away from us Real Americans. So, the GOP made a Faustian bargain with irrationality, and started winning elections.
By the way, you have to feel a little sympathy for the religious right (Okay, a very little sympathy) for the way Republicans have played them for chumps. Pierce tells a remarkable story about David Kuo, an evangelical Christian who worked on “faith based” initiatives for the George W. Bush administration and later wrote a tell-all about that experience. Pierce quotes Kuo’s account of an encounter between Don Willett, who had headed the initiative, and Karl Rove who wanted an up-and-running program without actually doing anything to support the program. I won’t reveal the punchline, but, suffice it to say, it shows that “Turdblossom” was far too kind a nickname for Rove. It also shows the complete cynicism of the big shot Republicans in exploiting their born-again supporters.
The moronization of the Republican Party is not the only reason for America’s slide into dementia, though that certainly has been a factor. The media also have a large share of the blame. The media have given much undeserved and free publicity to nuttiness. Worse, in the name of a bogus idea of “fairness” it has lent a specious appearance of legitimacy to the most grotesque nonsense. Every issue has two sides, so it is only fair to make sure that each side of a controversy has equal and unbiased coverage, right? So those who say that President Obama was born in Kenya deserve equal time with those who don’t, right? And those who say that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs should have the same access to media coverage as those snooty scientists, right? Surely, too, flat-earthers should have ample media space to counter the dogmas of round-earthers, right? By treating wildly irrational claims as merely one side of the debate, you give cranks a free ticket to the mainstream. Yet even media malfeasance is not the deepest reason for the great dumb-down.
To see the deepest reason, Pierce tells us we have to follow the money. Big tobacco created the reigning paradigm for massive public obfuscation. When in the 1950’s evidence began to mount that cigarettes cause cancer, the tobacco companies were facing a crisis. When science says that you are selling a dangerous and addictive product that is killing many thousands of your customers yearly, yet you are reaping profits beyond the dreams of avarice, what do you do? You attack the science. The cartoon Dilbert shows how easy it is: The evil Dogbert employs an agency called “Rent a Weasel.” “I need three bitter and unsuccessful scientists and a hundred lazy journalists,” he demands. The weasel complies and in the final frame Dilbert is reading a newspaper headline stating “studies show toddlers thrive on pollution.” So, it was a cinch for the cigarette manufacturers to get together a respectable-looking body of “researchers” who challenged the findings linking tobacco to cancer. The aim was to create doubt in the public mind, so that those who wanted to smoke would not be deterred and so that lawmakers would delay imposing restrictions.
The tactic worked incredibly well. Planting doubt about the effects of smoking kept the money rolling in and forestalled serious regulation for years. Then, in the 1990’s, a new scientific threat to business arose: global warming. Restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions would hurt big oil and big coal’s profits, so, what worked for big tobacco, was put to work for the big polluters. The Union of Concerned Scientists has produced a document titled Smoke and Mirrors that details how big oil adopted the obscurantist PR tactics of big tobacco. The results have been astonishing. These tactics have worked even better for big oil than they did for big tobacco. As of this writing, the summer of 2010, while the eastern United States is broiling in record heat, Congress has failed to take action controlling carbon emissions. Mere science is helpless in the face of great PR and vast amounts of money poured into politician’s coffers. Money has so compromised Congress that the Capitol dome should be festooned with corporate logos. Add to this that, as noted earlier, corporate money funds many ideologically-driven “think” tanks that are more than happy to spew out slick, media-savvy obscurantism. The Inquisition could not hold science down, but big money just might.
Pierce makes all of these points with great panache. H.L. Mencken said that one belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. Pierce gives us the arguments and the facts, but he gives us the belly laughs too. Is this a problem? Isn’t one deplorable feature of current discourse not only that it is dumbed down, but that it is so uncivil? Doesn’t Pierce’s mockery just further coarsen the discussion? But there is no discussion. The forces of organized and militant stupidity don’t discuss; they do not debate, certainly not in the sense that Socrates debated. There is no exchange of ideas. Their “arguments,” even when couched in the language of science, are appeals to what Pierce calls “the Gut,” your inner idiot, the way you think when you are gripped by powerful emotions like fear, anger, or resentment, and your critical faculties melt down. Each of us has an inner idiot, and the purveyors of stupidity are very adept at manipulating it. In fighting the armies of the night you don’t need to employ the shoddy, manipulative rhetoric they always use, but the ridiculous deserves ridicule.
It is particularly ironic that the forces of fatuity have grown so strong in America. The United States was founded by intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Pierce focuses on James Madison, a man of small stature but enormous intellect who, along with Jefferson and the other Founders, had deep respect for science and equally deep suspicion of every form of superstition and fanaticism (see Brooke Allen’s Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers). No country has achieved more in science and technology than the United States. It is astonishing how often Nobel prizes still go to American researchers. American graduate programs in engineering, mathematics, and natural science are still the envy of the world, attracting top students from every part of the globe (just not enough from our part of the globe). Think of the great names in our history: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison, S.F.B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Wilbur and Orville Wright, George Westinghouse, Robert Oppenheimer, E.O. Lawrence, Richard Feynman, Claude Shannon, Linus Pauling, George Washington Carver, Edwin Hubble, Harlow Shapley, George Ellery Hale, Thomas Hunt Morgan, James Watson, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and Walter Reed. Think of the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the splitting of the atom and nuclear energy, The Saturn V rocket, lasers, television, the transistor, the microchip, the personal computer, nanotechnology, numerous vaccines and breakthroughs in medicine, the discovery of the expansion of the universe, and innumerable other world-class accomplishments in every field. This magnificent legacy is now at dire risk, threatened by the forces of ideology, politics, and big money.
What is the worst thing about the decline in the national I.Q.? What is the real danger of believing nonsense? Voltaire expressed it long ago: “Whoever can get you to believe nonsense can get you to commit atrocities.”
----------------
*In case this understandably mystifies you, the saddles were so that Adam and Eve could ride the dinosaurs around the garden. Since they were naked, they really needed the saddles. Could you imagine the chafing from riding a Triceratops bareback? Yeow.
I grabbed the title to this post from Amazon's description of the book.Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
by Charles P. Pierce: A Review by Keith M. Parsons
Mike Judge is one of the most incisive commentators on the dumbing down of American culture. He created the cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead, two dimwitted adolescents who sit around watching music videos and providing moronic commentary (e.g., “He said ‘butt.’ Heh, heh, heh”). To many viewers, myself included, Beavis and Butthead at first looked like an instance of that dumbing down rather than a commentary on it. Later I realized that Judge was poking fun at some of the very viewers of MTV who were watching his show. I wonder if any of them recognized themselves in the maunderings of Judge’s two meatheads. Later, Judge produced a film Idiocracy which portrays a world in which intelligence has been banished and idiocy rules. Judge set his movie 500 years in the future. According to Charles P. Pierce in his hilarious and trenchant book Idiot America, Judge was far too optimistic. Pierce says the future is now. It is the dawning of the Age of Asininity.
Pierce notes that America has always had cranks. In fact, America’s free speech traditions have always made it a great place to be a crank. Only, Pierce says, it used to be a lot harder to make a living at it. As long as they remain outsiders, cranks play a valuable role. They mark the boundaries of rational discourse, as the dragons on old maps marked terrae incognitae. Besides, every now and then, they have an idea that turns out right. But when cranks are mainstreamed, then, for all practical purposes, there is no mainstream—and no cranks either. All discourse is worth its market value. If it sells, it is legitimate. Rationality, logic, evidence, and all the old values of objectivity are irrelevant. Science becomes just someone’s opinion. The expert’s judgment carries no more authority than a radio loudmouth’s. The operant definition of “true” becomes “fervently believed by many people.”
Pierce says this is what has happened. Nuts that would have been relegated a corner soapbox before—if not a psych ward—now have primetime shows and their books head the bestseller lists. Kooky ideas that were on the fringe not long ago are now promoted in the halls of Congress, touted by mainstream media, and promulgated by innumerable ideologically driven “think” tanks, which, flush with corporate cash, promote any kind of obfuscation that adds to the sponsor’s bottom line. Where formerly a certain level of deference to scientific consensus was respected by all parties in public debate, we now have Senator James Inhofe (R—of course—Oklahoma) denouncing the findings of climate scientists as a hoax. Inhofe also offered a list of 400 alleged “experts” who supposedly dissent from the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real and human caused. It turned out that these “experts” had done little or no research in the relevant fields and even included a few TV weather reporters. Even politicians used to have to meet some minimal standards. Candidates for high office were expected to be able to exhibit a certain level of competence or at least coherence. The Republicans of fifty years ago would have laughed Sarah Palin off the stage.
How did this happen, how did bay-at-the-moon lunacy come to occupy a more prominent place in our public discourse than textbook science? How, indeed, has it ever come to be thought that there is still a scientific debate over evolution, or that pluperfect nonsense like creationism, and its dressed-up cousin “intelligent design,” are worthy of a hearing? How did there come to be a multi-million dollar “creation museum” in Kentucky, with full-scale models of dinosaurs fitted out with saddles?* How is it that the Texas State Board of Education can prefer the propaganda of extremist, ax-grinding cranks over the recommendations of hundreds of qualified scholars—and not be unceremoniously tossed out of office by the voters? How can a presidential administration censor and adulterate science for eight years (see Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science) without being savagely mauled in the media? Who let Glenn Beck get off his meds and onto prime time?
Obviously, as Pierce notes, a lot of the reason for the eruption of nonsense has been the rise of religious fundamentalism since the early 1980’s. However, this only invites the further question of how fundamentalism, which had looked down if not out for decades, rose to prominence in American politics and culture. It is hardly a coincidence that the rise of the Moral Majority and the recrudescence of creationism coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “Movement conservatism,” after its disastrous loss in the 1964 presidential election, rose to ascendancy in only sixteen years. To accomplish this, the Republican Party had to be remade. Teddy Roosevelt was the “trust buster,” but his GOP successors found it far more profitable to carry water for the rich. They still do. The most honest thing George W. Bush ever said was this: When addressing a gathering of the wealthy, “the haves and the have-mores,” as Bush called them, he candidly noted that they were “his base.” Yet the wealthy are a minority, and as long as the Republicans were identified with them and their interests, they seemed doomed to remain a minority party.
The genius of Republican strategy was to enormously expand the GOP’s base by adopting a faux populism (see Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?). To attract the great mass of disaffected hoi polloi, Pierce notes, the GOP had to at least give lip service to all sorts of strange dogmas and loopy obsessions. To attract the tens of millions of fundamentalist Christians, candidate Reagan had to make creationist noises, and he complied by characterizing evolution as “only a theory.” To keep the loyalty of the pew-sitters, Republicans have had to endorse the agenda of the religious right; they had to at least appear to be antiabortion, anti-gay rights, anti-sex education, anti-church/state separation, and, in general, pro-“family values.” To attract the hard-right anti-tax and anti-big government group, they had to espouse supply-side economics, a crackpot theory that stands in relation to real economics as creationism does to real science. To appeal to the tinfoil-hat paranoiac constituency (millions of people), it had to at least tolerate true weirdoes like the “birther” nuts and Glenn Beck. To get the support of xenophobes and racists (many millions) it had to promise to crack down on “illegals” that came here to take jobs picking lettuce and processing chickens away from us Real Americans. So, the GOP made a Faustian bargain with irrationality, and started winning elections.
By the way, you have to feel a little sympathy for the religious right (Okay, a very little sympathy) for the way Republicans have played them for chumps. Pierce tells a remarkable story about David Kuo, an evangelical Christian who worked on “faith based” initiatives for the George W. Bush administration and later wrote a tell-all about that experience. Pierce quotes Kuo’s account of an encounter between Don Willett, who had headed the initiative, and Karl Rove who wanted an up-and-running program without actually doing anything to support the program. I won’t reveal the punchline, but, suffice it to say, it shows that “Turdblossom” was far too kind a nickname for Rove. It also shows the complete cynicism of the big shot Republicans in exploiting their born-again supporters.
The moronization of the Republican Party is not the only reason for America’s slide into dementia, though that certainly has been a factor. The media also have a large share of the blame. The media have given much undeserved and free publicity to nuttiness. Worse, in the name of a bogus idea of “fairness” it has lent a specious appearance of legitimacy to the most grotesque nonsense. Every issue has two sides, so it is only fair to make sure that each side of a controversy has equal and unbiased coverage, right? So those who say that President Obama was born in Kenya deserve equal time with those who don’t, right? And those who say that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs should have the same access to media coverage as those snooty scientists, right? Surely, too, flat-earthers should have ample media space to counter the dogmas of round-earthers, right? By treating wildly irrational claims as merely one side of the debate, you give cranks a free ticket to the mainstream. Yet even media malfeasance is not the deepest reason for the great dumb-down.
To see the deepest reason, Pierce tells us we have to follow the money. Big tobacco created the reigning paradigm for massive public obfuscation. When in the 1950’s evidence began to mount that cigarettes cause cancer, the tobacco companies were facing a crisis. When science says that you are selling a dangerous and addictive product that is killing many thousands of your customers yearly, yet you are reaping profits beyond the dreams of avarice, what do you do? You attack the science. The cartoon Dilbert shows how easy it is: The evil Dogbert employs an agency called “Rent a Weasel.” “I need three bitter and unsuccessful scientists and a hundred lazy journalists,” he demands. The weasel complies and in the final frame Dilbert is reading a newspaper headline stating “studies show toddlers thrive on pollution.” So, it was a cinch for the cigarette manufacturers to get together a respectable-looking body of “researchers” who challenged the findings linking tobacco to cancer. The aim was to create doubt in the public mind, so that those who wanted to smoke would not be deterred and so that lawmakers would delay imposing restrictions.
The tactic worked incredibly well. Planting doubt about the effects of smoking kept the money rolling in and forestalled serious regulation for years. Then, in the 1990’s, a new scientific threat to business arose: global warming. Restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions would hurt big oil and big coal’s profits, so, what worked for big tobacco, was put to work for the big polluters. The Union of Concerned Scientists has produced a document titled Smoke and Mirrors that details how big oil adopted the obscurantist PR tactics of big tobacco. The results have been astonishing. These tactics have worked even better for big oil than they did for big tobacco. As of this writing, the summer of 2010, while the eastern United States is broiling in record heat, Congress has failed to take action controlling carbon emissions. Mere science is helpless in the face of great PR and vast amounts of money poured into politician’s coffers. Money has so compromised Congress that the Capitol dome should be festooned with corporate logos. Add to this that, as noted earlier, corporate money funds many ideologically-driven “think” tanks that are more than happy to spew out slick, media-savvy obscurantism. The Inquisition could not hold science down, but big money just might.
Pierce makes all of these points with great panache. H.L. Mencken said that one belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. Pierce gives us the arguments and the facts, but he gives us the belly laughs too. Is this a problem? Isn’t one deplorable feature of current discourse not only that it is dumbed down, but that it is so uncivil? Doesn’t Pierce’s mockery just further coarsen the discussion? But there is no discussion. The forces of organized and militant stupidity don’t discuss; they do not debate, certainly not in the sense that Socrates debated. There is no exchange of ideas. Their “arguments,” even when couched in the language of science, are appeals to what Pierce calls “the Gut,” your inner idiot, the way you think when you are gripped by powerful emotions like fear, anger, or resentment, and your critical faculties melt down. Each of us has an inner idiot, and the purveyors of stupidity are very adept at manipulating it. In fighting the armies of the night you don’t need to employ the shoddy, manipulative rhetoric they always use, but the ridiculous deserves ridicule.
It is particularly ironic that the forces of fatuity have grown so strong in America. The United States was founded by intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Pierce focuses on James Madison, a man of small stature but enormous intellect who, along with Jefferson and the other Founders, had deep respect for science and equally deep suspicion of every form of superstition and fanaticism (see Brooke Allen’s Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers). No country has achieved more in science and technology than the United States. It is astonishing how often Nobel prizes still go to American researchers. American graduate programs in engineering, mathematics, and natural science are still the envy of the world, attracting top students from every part of the globe (just not enough from our part of the globe). Think of the great names in our history: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison, S.F.B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Wilbur and Orville Wright, George Westinghouse, Robert Oppenheimer, E.O. Lawrence, Richard Feynman, Claude Shannon, Linus Pauling, George Washington Carver, Edwin Hubble, Harlow Shapley, George Ellery Hale, Thomas Hunt Morgan, James Watson, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and Walter Reed. Think of the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the splitting of the atom and nuclear energy, The Saturn V rocket, lasers, television, the transistor, the microchip, the personal computer, nanotechnology, numerous vaccines and breakthroughs in medicine, the discovery of the expansion of the universe, and innumerable other world-class accomplishments in every field. This magnificent legacy is now at dire risk, threatened by the forces of ideology, politics, and big money.
What is the worst thing about the decline in the national I.Q.? What is the real danger of believing nonsense? Voltaire expressed it long ago: “Whoever can get you to believe nonsense can get you to commit atrocities.”
----------------
*In case this understandably mystifies you, the saddles were so that Adam and Eve could ride the dinosaurs around the garden. Since they were naked, they really needed the saddles. Could you imagine the chafing from riding a Triceratops bareback? Yeow.
28 comments:
The dinosaur saddles just might be the opportunity to start a counterattack. Since we are told there was no death in Eden before the Fruit-Poaching Incident, and no labor either, all we have to do is ask, “What were the saddles made of?” and watch the schism begin.
This is the reason I've lost all hope for the future. As I said in the other thread, the Republican/Evangelical Axis of Evil will be the end of all of us.
And, yeah - Rove and Cheney are probably two of the most evil men of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Gee, it's just **so** surprising that you only find idiocy on the right. I never would have suspected that.
GMPilot.. you read my mind, I was thinking the same thing.
But it's actually easier than that, you don't need the saddle to start this conversation... how the heck did Adam and Eve EAT anything.. digestion, decomposition etc... all requires death.
Did Adam S#!T in the woods?
Cipher,
Finding the idiocy on the left is just as easy. Just go take a look at the "living" or "religion" sections on the Huffington Post to see it in spades.
The difference between the idiocy on the left and the right is that left wing has been less organized and generally less successful at mainstreaming it. While the right has been focused not just on being well organized, but also institutionalizing it.
The left is really only just getting started in doing this on their end of the spectrum. But it is there and people like Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, and Jenny McCarthy are big purveyors of it.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that left wing woo hasn't impacted our politics to the degree that it has on the right. It is there to be sure, but it is not (yet) nearly as bad on the left as it is on the right. Unfortunately, the left is learning how to do it though.
Steven,
Doesn't matter - the Right has done us in. It's too late for the Left to get in on the game.
Woops, Cipher, I meant that as a response to Crowhill. Sorry. But yeah, I agree with you. The sillyness on the left is small potatoes compared to what has been going on among the conservatives for the past 40 years.
The telling thing is that by the end of his career, Barry Goldwater was strongly distancing himself from the conservatives of the time, and he often criticized Reagan for cozying up too closely to religious conservatives.
Barry Goldwater...
If he could see what's going on now...
I have a small hope that Sam Harris' ideas of a moral landscape will take hold and help lift us out of it. I love the idea of using actual knowledge and science to help us clarify the decisions we need to make about right and wrong. It's rebuke of accommodationalism and vitriol against moral relativism are a huge added bonus.
1. 93% of NEA lobbying dollars went to Democrats.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/tax-dollar-dependent-nea-lobbying-senate-for-edujobs-99778064.html
2. 42 million Americans (generally the product of public schools) can't read. I'd love to see some illiteracy stats on Christian schools.
3. As the review said, Republicans are generally the "haves and the have mores."
4. Illiterates generally are the "have-nots."
Dumb as hell as the Republicans may be in matters concerning religion, they're the least of our worries. I'd think a Republican six-day creationist generally knows more about science than a Democrat who's unable to read.
America has had this problem for generations. Ferdinand Lundberg in his 1968 book,The Rich and the Super-Rich, writes:
What is evidently the case is that a large section of the population is dependent-emotionally, intellectually, economically and politically--and is unable inherently or by conditioning to function in its own behalf under free institutions. A large section of the population, indeed, if it is to be properly served, should be regarded as public wards, ethically subject to rather close highly informed benign guidance in making life dispositions. No doubt much of this dependency arises from its conditioning, from its unreasonably inculcated faith that provision will be made for it, if not by man then by some remote deity.
ismellarat,
Are you implying that Christians schools have a better literacy rate? You *might* be right, up to a point, anyway.
I'll be the first to admit that public education is a sticky problem. It's so sticky, in fact, that I would say that your NEA statistic is meaningless. And the reason it is meaningless is alluded to in the second sentence of your second item... I would ask the question, how many of those 42 million illiterates could have afforded to go to a Christian school if they wanted to? And your assumption that these are mostly democrats would be false as well, but that's a different issue.
In my experience, as someone who worked in the science education field for about 10 years, and it was part of my job to look at education disparities. I found that the biggest indicator of student success wasn't necessarily what school a kid goes to, but the degree of importance that parents put on education in the first place. If the student took their education seriously, they did much better than those that didn't, the amount of money and the stability of the learning environment had an impact as well, but student attitude was the most significant indicator.
The fact is, the performance of students that go to public schools where the schools are well funded, and the parents instill a sense of the importance of education and discipline are as successful as the best students around the world. These students consistently score into the top percentiles on all those international tests that show that the average scores in the US are abysmal in comparison to other countries. (As a side note those international scores are skewed in other ways as well, in most other countries only their very best students take those tests in the first place, so they aren't valid comparisons anyway). Public education is not the horrible failure that conservatives make it out to be (although they are doing a hell of a job at making it worse, which does explain your NEA statistic).
And as for 6 day creationists knowing more about science than "illiterate democrats," as someone who has had the displeasure of having to deal with such people, they actually don't know more about science than the illiterates. They may be able to read and write, but they have no sense of what science is, how or why it works, and they are entirely incapable of thinking critically. They are just as lacking in science literacy as those students who never had or applied themselves in a science class.
Concerns about the literacy of voters were exploited in rather ugly ways in the history of the USA.
ismellarat:
I sense that you were trying to make a case for equal idiocy and ignorance on both sides. If so, you failed.
Most liberals or democrats who know little about solid science will not present themselves as knowledgeable or authoritative in it.
However, most conservatives (especially the religious ones) who know little about solid science will talk and preach till the cows come home about global warming and evolution as if their beliefs are based in scientific fact.
Wesley, I'm sure an otherwise ignorant person deserves points if he says, "I'm ignorant, and I know it," versus believing he's not, but I'm not sure if this affects the bigger picture much, of the idiots having won the culture war - which is much bigger than the debates over creationism.
I only mentioned creationists because they seem to get a disproportionate amount of attention when "idiocy" is brought up, as if we weren't facing much, much bigger problems.
I'm not sure how you can say "I sense that you were trying to make a case for equal idiocy and ignorance on both sides. If so, you failed" after what I pointed out. (Actually, I'm making the case that there's more ignorance on the other side! :) )
I guessed the 50 million functional illiterates we have are mostly Democrats. Do you disagree with that?
I guessed the 50 million functional illiterates we have are mostly Democrats.
I would certainly disagree. The Republicans have spent the past thirty years convincing the working classes and the underclass that they're their best friends. Certain ethnic groups who have always identified with the Democrats - African Americans, Latinos - have largely resisted this trend (and even that isn't as sure a thing as it used to be), but I think that poor whites, especially in rural areas, are pretty much in the Repubs' collective pocket these days.
They believe pretty much whatever the Republican machine and their pastors tell them (that's why it's called "authoritarianism"). The imbeciles who went to McCain rallies to support him, but ended up booing him when he told them Obama wasn't a "Mooslim", are an example of this phenomenon.
Which presumably would have nothing to do with social disadvantage? Define "mostly". Are you talking about 51%? 75%? 90%? Also, coming from a UK perspective, to say that someone "is" a Democrat or "is" a Republican seems very quaint.
Almost like saying a child "is" a Catholic, or "is" a Muslim.
John, that was a very good post. We are seeing a similar phenomenon in Northern Ireland, where our *culture* minister FFS is a creationist, and wants museums to display creationist nonsense as "an alternative theory" alongside the science, and has darkly warned that any attempt to place it into a mythological context would be viewed as a "calculated insult to Christians". These are the sorts of fools we have to deal with.
We are seeing a similar phenomenon in Northern Ireland, where our *culture* minister FFS is a creationist, and wants museums to display creationist nonsense as "an alternative theory" alongside the science
That's very depressing. I keep barking to my friends and family about how much more enlightened than we you Western Europeans are. Go ahead; make a liar out of me.
I wish I could keep up with all these posts, Shane. If I'm wrong on that, please send me a link, so I can laugh at the Republicans instead. :)
...but that would be hard to explain, in light of the Republicans being the "haves and the have mores." How do so many illiterates manage to make it in life? Maybe literacy isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The Republican power brokers are the haves. The lower classes comprise their base. They've spent the past three decades engineering this.
Steven, I mostly wrote what I did because the article seemed to heavily slanted in favor of the left.
I haven't seen literacy stats on Christian schools, but of course I'd welcome them. I can't see parents going out of their way to pay for school twice, and then to keep paying if the kid doesn't even learn to read. You may have heard of a court case home schoolers love to bring up, where a public school district was sued because a "graduate" couldn't read, and the court held that the primary function of a public school is "custodial." I wish I had a link handy. You probably know more about it.
I just brought up the NEA stat as food for thought. The left seems to be in charge, yet the right seems to get more of the blame.
If I'm wrong as to who has more illiterates, I'd love to see something on that. I'm just guessing: big cities are generally Democratic, and generally tax-eaters. And I guessed the level of literacy is lower in areas that demand a greater proportion of social services than others. Maybe that's not so, but I'd love to see some evidence.
No disagreement on student attitude as being a factor, but a good attitude is much harder to keep up in an otherwise bad environment. Who wouldn't worry if their kids were bused to Watts?
And I agree that better neighborhoods can have much better public schools. If I only considered the one I went to, I'd be wondering what all the fuss was about. I don't think mine had ANY illiterates. But the system as a whole sucks. 50 million adults are functional illiterates, of which 43 million can't read at all?! The mind boggles. I don't see how more funding is the answer. NYC spends tons of taxpayer dollars, but it simply doesn't get the results.
I don't get your last paragraph. A person can pass basic courses in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology and still believe that we were created 6000 years ago. You could learn and accept 95% of the material in a standard course and still think that. The question of origins just doesn't come up in a physics lab.
Sorry, I mostly meant cipher, not Shane, when he disputed who had the privilege of claiming the most illiterates.
ismellarat, I don't disagree that arguments of this type are slanted to the left, by those who are on the left. You are right to question it's objectivity if that is the case.
But what's got me scratching my head is the somewhat strange statement that "50 million functional illiterates are mostly Democrats". From your comments I presume you make that conclusion because most of the illiterate live in big cities. I'm happy to concede that illiteracy is concentrated in big cities, but it's another thing to assume they are Democrats. Most illiterate people I would assume to be fairly apolitical, and don't vote for the most part. Do you have any studies or links that would back up your assumption? I'm not being facetious at all, I would very much like to read this info if you have it . . .
Meh - the bottom line is that this is a nation of abject morons. We're the laughing stock of the developed world. The Europeans are so busy making fun of us, it's a wonder they can get anything done.
I was hoping you'd have more time to blow on this yourself, Wesley. :) I don't have a large-scale survey to point to, but anecdotal evidence I'm aware of seems to.
Republicans like to parade around maps of states, where the cities are Democratic, and the overwhelmingly larger (but emptier), more rural areas are Republican.
I guess you could say many or most are "apolitical" in a sense because fewer of them bother to vote, but who would they vote for if they weren't? Someone who tells them the checks are going to stop coming? Wouldn't a representative sample of those who do vote in the same neighborhood tell you?
I once saw a feature on inner city voter registration efforts. A journalist solemnly documented how some group was going door to door talking to people, some of whom by all appearances were too out of it to know their own names. The selling point was that their well-deserved benefits were at risk. And this wasn't even a right-wing propaganda piece. These people fully believed in what they were doing, trying to ensure that everyone was able to share in their vision of The American Dream, or whatever it was. I don't think they were Republicans, not that I am one, either.
ismellarat,
You probably know more about it.
Yeah, I'm aware of that case, as well as others that are equally as troubling, if not more so. Which is to say that you shouldn't take my previous post as some kind of defense of the idea that all is well and good in public schools. I don't think that is true. My point was that the issue is more complex, and I would argue that the worst of our educational problems are not well understood and arise out of broader societal issues that transcend anything that we can do collectively through government or via private schools. In my opinion, neither the left nor the right have good policies towards education.
As for the left "being in charge" of education, I'm not so convinced of that. At the national level, the left makes the most noise, but at the state level (where most educational standards get set), it is quite a mixed bag, where states like Texas actually have undue influence. For example, textbook publishers will generally not publish a textbook unless they can guarantee that big states like Texas will buy the book. This sort of thing has caused the teaching of evolution to be watered down for decades, and now states like Texas are trying to ram through their political ideologies as well (while also cutting public school funding). Overall, the left has a tendency to throw money at education without as much accountability, while the right tries to starve public education of funding, and then acts surprised when it fails and complains that government is the problem. Neither approach is a good recipe for success.
As for misunderstanding my last paragraph... From my experience, students can get through physics, biology, and chemistry without really understanding science. They come out with some factual knowledge, and they can state what the scientific method is, but they don't have a good feel for how to apply it or how scientists in the real world apply it, and that is a very important part of what I think science literacy should be. This lack of understanding is exactly why students can come out of these high school classes and not only think that the Earth is 6,000 years old, but also that there are enough flaws in the science that they've been taught that it is reasonable to think that what they've been taught is wrong.
According to Watchblog.com:
•States that voted for Kerry in 2004 had 21 percent more college graduates than states that voted for Bush.
•The states that ranked the lowest for high school and college graduates were all red states.
•Eight out of 10 of the states that ranked the highest for high school college graduates were blue states.
But according to another source:
Self-identified Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to have 4-year college degrees. Regarding graduate-level degrees (masters or doctorate), there is a rough parity between Democrats and Republicans. According to the Gallup Organization: "[B]oth Democrats and Republicans have equal numbers of Americans at the upper end of the educational spectrum — that is, with post graduate degrees.
And there's this from the Heritage foundation:
Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.
Stats can be easily manipulated to give the impression you desire. At any rate, the situation re right and left seems more complicated than most of us might have thought.
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