T
ThaddeusStevens
Guest
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By Patricia Cohen The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021608E.shtml
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. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The
New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you
couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant").
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology
or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is
well aware that some may tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62,
either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as
a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.
Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or
ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows
and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and
conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the
phenomenon and offered advice.
T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said,
"The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history," adding that in
periods "when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward
cultural issues."
But 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.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to
24-year-olds don't think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news
are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some
college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting,
appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library's majestic Beaux
Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the
library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she
stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly
dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying
attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam
War," the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."
Ms. Jacoby doesn't expect to revolutionize the nation's educational system or cause
millions of Americans to switch off "American Idol" and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would
like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to
such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, "the empire of infotainment
doesn't stop at the American border," she said, yet students in many other countries
consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.
In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. "Although people are going
to school more and more years, there's no evidence that they know more," she said.
Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism's antipathy toward science, as she
grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be
taught along with evolution.
Ms. Jacoby doesn't leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left's
attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women's
studies to an "academic ghetto" instead of integrating them into the core curriculum,
ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat
that trivialize college-level learning.
Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to
call herself a "cultural conservationist."
For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard
it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the
annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. "I was stunned at how difficult it
was for me," she said.
The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just
how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is - even curmudgeons.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
Multiculturalism will not move us out of the fascist slough we are in:
Back to the Enlightenment!
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/BackToTheEnlightenment.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible,
and . . . justice as fairness should have a special place among the political
conceptions in its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to accept the
conclusion that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not possible, and even
regard it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the inevitable
loss of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background thoughts and
attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and attitudes
before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take part in it. . .
If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered democratic
society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will reflect that
knowledge. A cause of the fall of Wiemar's constitutional regime was that none of the
traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate
to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was
possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments from 1930 to
1932. When these were increasingly weakened by their lack of popular support,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such support and
whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
__________________________________________________________________
This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in
my efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights,
economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section
107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material in this post is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this post for purposes of your own that
go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
By Patricia Cohen The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021608E.shtml
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. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The
New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you
couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant").
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology
or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is
well aware that some may tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62,
either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as
a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.
Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or
ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows
and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and
conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the
phenomenon and offered advice.
T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said,
"The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history," adding that in
periods "when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward
cultural issues."
But 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.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to
24-year-olds don't think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news
are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some
college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting,
appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library's majestic Beaux
Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the
library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she
stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly
dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying
attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam
War," the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."
Ms. Jacoby doesn't expect to revolutionize the nation's educational system or cause
millions of Americans to switch off "American Idol" and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would
like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to
such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, "the empire of infotainment
doesn't stop at the American border," she said, yet students in many other countries
consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.
In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. "Although people are going
to school more and more years, there's no evidence that they know more," she said.
Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism's antipathy toward science, as she
grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be
taught along with evolution.
Ms. Jacoby doesn't leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left's
attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women's
studies to an "academic ghetto" instead of integrating them into the core curriculum,
ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat
that trivialize college-level learning.
Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to
call herself a "cultural conservationist."
For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard
it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the
annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. "I was stunned at how difficult it
was for me," she said.
The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just
how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is - even curmudgeons.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
Multiculturalism will not move us out of the fascist slough we are in:
Back to the Enlightenment!
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/BackToTheEnlightenment.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible,
and . . . justice as fairness should have a special place among the political
conceptions in its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to accept the
conclusion that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not possible, and even
regard it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the inevitable
loss of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background thoughts and
attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and attitudes
before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take part in it. . .
If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered democratic
society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will reflect that
knowledge. A cause of the fall of Wiemar's constitutional regime was that none of the
traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate
to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was
possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments from 1930 to
1932. When these were increasingly weakened by their lack of popular support,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such support and
whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
__________________________________________________________________
This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in
my efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights,
economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section
107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material in this post is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this post for purposes of your own that
go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.