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Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
Patricia Cohen, New York Times
A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.
Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”
Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization.
… now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
(14 February 2008)
Keep America strong – read a book! -BA
The Dumbing Of America
Susan Jacoby, Washington Post
… 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.
… 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.
… 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.
… 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.
(17 February 2008)
Related: Bill Moyers interviews Susan Jacoby.
The US State of Denial
William Bowles, Creative-I
Observations from the Front Line
… Above the subway, in Mid-town Manhattan, around Times Square, it’s a riot of neon some of which has crept down off the buildings onto the sidewalk beneath our feet, so as you walk, words stream endlessly, a photonic treadmill, advertising this and that. In the words of the Crazy Eddie TV commercial of the 1970s, it’s “absolutely insane!”.
Absorbing all this after an absence of fifteen years has been difficult for me, made all the more so by those who are no longer with us or who have succumbed to the various diseases of age and the ravages of living in a rapacious and unforgiving environment.
The changes are perhaps best reflected in the TV commercials, dominated as they are by an avalanche of ads for ‘medications’, health insurance (which most cannot afford) and all manner of ‘lifestyle’ ads which guarantee you happiness and escape from the daily grind of survival in the dog-eat-dog society that is, we are told, ‘the best of all possible worlds’.
The ‘news’ programmes explain much about US capitalism’s ability to block out the reality of the situation, with virtually no coverage of the world beyond the US, even the obscenity which is the US occupation of Iraq gets no mention at all, nor even the sub-prime mortgage crash, they simply don’t exist. You have to read the ‘quality’ newspapers like the New York Times to even see it mentioned, never mind explained …
This is denial on a grand scale. …
Yet and still, the US I left fifteen years ago is basically the same one I returned to, what has changed is the frantic nature of the drive to consume, keep on buying, keep the ‘wheels of industry’ turning. Rack up the credit debt like there’s no tomorrow (maybe because there isn’t).
Frankly, I find it extremely difficult to communicate the nature of contemporary US society, it’s so over the top as to defy description even for someone raised in a so-called developed country like the UK or for someone who lived in the Big Apple for seventeen years. And as the contradictions of a capitalism in crisis increase, so too does the frantic nature of its desire to justify itself by any means necessary, including the use of the enormous force of the machinery of state.
… For the fact is, I like Americans, they are a generous, friendly and uninhibited people, especially working class Americans, people I find I have more in common with than the Brits (which is perhaps one of the reasons I lived here for seventeen years).
But at the same time they are totally ignorant of the real state of the world and their own country and kept that way by a corporate media and an mis-education system that corrupts young minds.
(13 February 2008)
The Former United States of America (F-USA)
Michael Ventura, Austrin Chronicle (Texas)
Date: 2107
Subject: The decline and fall of the former United States of America (F-USA)
We must begin by stating without equivocation that the former United States deserves to be honored as a crucial experiment in human history and surely the most creative society the world has yet seen. Save for religion, spirituality, and the theatre – in which it could be argued that the former U.S. was at best derivative and at worst backward – one cannot name a human endeavor in which that society failed to create fundamentally new forms. Music, literature, sports, cinema, education, dance, war, psychology, architecture, visual and plastic art, governance, transportation, engineering, agriculture, commerce, communications, medicine, and every science – for better and for worse, all these and more were forever revolutionized by that society’s innovations. From the cotton gin to the Internet, its inventions were envied and copied the world over by cultures as different from the former U.S. as China and the Muslim nations.
… In short, and to put it crudely: In its founding conditions, the former United States had a lot of luck – but hidden in that luck was the beginning of that society’s fall. Early on, as a culture, the people of the former U.S. came to believe their luck was a kind of divine providence and that, being divine, the luck of their society would never run out. Also, a generally shared belief system held that the Creator would not so bless a nation that was not good – so it followed (in this belief system) that they deserved their luck. This, in turn, reinforced their assumption that their luck wouldn’t run out. These beliefs, held almost reflexively and unconsciously by many, contributed to an arrogance that was one (but only one) engine of their undoing.
Oddly, every colonizer, settler, immigrant, and slave in the former U.S. came from cultures whose luck had run out not once but many times. Indeed, the vast majority would not have come if their culture of origin had not somehow failed them, and failed them mightily – for it was always a risky enterprise to begin anew in the former U.S. But this country was such a new phenomenon that it was believed – on all sides, by all factions, and in many ways – that the human condition itself could change. Indeed, in some ways it did. Eventually, all sorts of behavior that had never been openly tolerated anywhere blossomed in the former United States and spread to other cultures, until the entire world had to deal, in one way or another, not only with technologies but with public behaviors and assumptions unheard of before the founding and blossoming of the former U.S.
… It is one of the great ironies of history that the former United States finally failed at that which it had been best at: pragmatism and materialism. Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, other cultures accused the “American character,” as it was called, of being pragmatic to a fault. Here was a society that could invent, fix, use, and build anything, but (so went the accusation) it had no depth.
…They even had a phrase for it: “good old American know-how.” They knew how to do.
How did they lose that ability? How did such a country become, in the end, helpless and beyond saving?
Part Two (October 12, 2007)
Part Three: Conclusion (October 26, 2007)
… Which brings us to the tricky issue of identity. The propellant ideals of the former United States were, as we have seen, innovation and individual gain. Community was given every variety of lip service across the political spectrum, but never did community compete as an ideal with innovation and individual gain. The highest rate of homeownership in the world was matched (and undermined) by the most insecure sense of community. One owned one’s own home but owned it in isolation – which, for many, proved to be a terrifying experience. (What is more terrifying than isolation?) Without a true community, if you fall, nobody tries to catch you, and it’s in no one’s interest to help you up. Without a true community, you’re not a part of anything; you are only your own quest for individual gain.
… The major nations of Europe and Asia looked on in bafflement as the former United States became the only advanced nation in which religion revived as a major political force – to the point where a politician who did not profess a belief in God doomed his or her chance for higher office. But religion was merely the only fundamentalism called “fundamentalism.” In fact, this people’s fundamentalisms were many and varied, though similar in their passionate, exclusionary insularity. Leftist, intellectual fundamentalists ghettoed themselves in universities and university towns, where, inventing constantly more complex jargons, they lost the ability to communicate with anyone unlike themselves, thus abdicating their societal function as intellectuals. Business became a fundamentalist activity in which the god of short-term profit trumped any other consideration. Work was done with fundamentalist fervor, such that, on all levels, this people worked harder, longer, and enjoyed far less leisure than any other developed nation. A kind of artsy fundamentalism gripped even so-called “high culture,” much art became incomprehensible to those outside artsy circles, and rare was the writer, for example, whose social circle included anyone but writers and their hangers-on. Even sports and entertainment became fundamentalist subsets in which teams and participatory TV programs had massive, passionate followings.
… Almost until their collapse, this nation (in general) continued to revel in unheard of individual gain – causing the Texas philosopher Ramsey Wiggins to speak the aphorism that would serve as the epitaph of the former United States, a sentence now known ’round the world:
They got what they wanted, and it cost them everything they needed.
(28 September 2007)
Suggested by J Barton.
Part one (Sept 28,2007)
Part two (Oct 12,2007)
Part three (Oct 26,2007)
Author Michael Ventura had a series on peak oil published by Energy Bulletin.
