[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Triumph of Ignorance

[Bill Totten]

Why morons succeed in US politics

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 28 2008)


How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be
dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity
that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms
as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering
numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008
be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a
Muslim and a terrorist? {1}

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life
mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities
and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in
science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of
knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible
exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt,
Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch
and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were
successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite
(as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the
defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald
Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate.
Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the
benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said "there you
go again" {2}. His own health programme would have appalled most
Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he
had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his
opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men
like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and
Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They
felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched
degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by
ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious
for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in
five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that
evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young
adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot
name the three branches of government; the maths skills of fifteen
year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD {3}.

But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become
so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age
of American Unreason (2008) provides the fullest explanation I have read
so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a
series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular
fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich
country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its
anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of
The Origin of Species (1859), for example, Americans had good reason to
reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals
with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the
US with the brutal philosophy - now known as Social Darwinism - of the
British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the
popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D
Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the
top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit
people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the
nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary {4}.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from
the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians
responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine
rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William
Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian
right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution
and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual
isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the
control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern
states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of
planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South", Jacoby
writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was
imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social
order" {5}.

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination
in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church
was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force
to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off
desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and
universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher
degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist
beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey
by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four
of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and
dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time {6}.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of
self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching,
Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good
education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required
to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have
served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one
built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th
century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment it is a recipe for
confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why
intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been
equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with
communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the
public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men
like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites"
destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the
election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the
neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed
to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans
and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the
ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an
end if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are
reversed or religious fundamentalism withers there will be political
opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. For a staggering display of ignorance and bigotry, see:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lPg0VCg4AEQ

2. You can see this exchange at
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=px7aRIhUkHY&feature=related

3. All these facts are contained in Susan Jacoby, 2008. The Age of
American Unreason: dumbing down and the future of democracy. Old Street
Publishing, London.

4. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Chapter 3.

5. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 57.

6. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 25.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/28/the-triumph-of-ignorance/


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