ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IS KILLING AMERICA THROUGH ITS EMBRACE AND EXALTATION OF IGNORANCE
The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.
The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.
America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance.
In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are“lies straight from the pit of hell,” where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.
In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America's violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.
Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated byfear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?
And even though it may seem counter-intuitive, anti-intellectualism has little to do withintelligence. We know little about the raw intellectual abilities of Dylann Roof, but we do know that he is an ignorant racist who willfully allowed irrational hatred of an entire demographic to dictate his actions. Whatever his IQ, to some extent he is a product of a culture driven by fear and emotion, not rational thinking, and his actions reflect the paranoid mentality of one who fails to grasp basic notions of what it means to be human.
What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.
But it doesn’t. International quality of life rankings place America far from the top, at sixteenth. America’s rates of murder and other violent crime dwarf most of the rest of the developed world, as does its incarceration rate, while its rates of education and scientific literacy are embarrassingly low. American schools, claiming to uphold “traditional values,” avoid fact-based sex education, and thus we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world. And those rates are notably highest where so-called “biblical values” are prominent. Go outside the Bible belt, and the rates generally trend downward.
As this suggests, the impact of fundamentalist religion in driving American anti-intellectualism has been, and continues to be, immense. Old-fashioned notions of sex education may seem like a relatively minor issue to many, but taking old-time religion too seriously can be extremely dangerous in the modern era. High-ranking individuals, even in the military, see a confrontation between good and evil as biblically predicted and therefore inevitable. They relish the thought of being a righteous part of the final days.
Fundamentalist religion is also a major force in denying human-caused climate change, a phenomenon that the scientific community has accepted for years. Interestingly, anti-intellectual fundamentalists are joined in their climate change denial with unusual bedfellows:corporate interests that stand to gain from the rejection of sound science on climate.
Corporate influence on climate and environmental policy, meanwhile, is simply more evidence of anti-intellectualism in action, for corporate domination of American society is another result of a public that is not thinking critically. Americans have allowed their democracy to slip away, their culture overtaken by enormous corporations that effectively control both the governmental apparatus and the media, thus shaping life around materialism and consumption.
Indeed, these corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance. They are the ones who stand to gain from the excessive fear and nationalism that result in militaristic foreign policy and absurdly high levels of military spending. They are the ones who stand to gain from consumers who spend money they don’t have on goods and services they don’t need. They are the ones who want a public that is largely uninformed and distracted, thus allowing government policy to be crafted by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. They are the ones who stand to gain from unregulated securities markets. And they are the ones who stand to gain from a prison-industrial complex that generates the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world.
Americans can and should denounce the racist and gun-crazed culture that shamefully resulted in nine corpses in Charleston this week, but they also need to dig deeper. At the core of all of this dysfunction is an abandonment of reason.
More on this subject in David Niose's latest book, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america
Michael Arnovitz's photo.
Michael Arnovitz
I saw something on twitter today, and it made me want to interrupt my Facebook hiatus for a quick moment in order to talk about perspective, and what really matters in this world. Proper perspective, for example, is going to play a vital role in our defense against the non-stop gaslighting that awaits us during the upcoming Trump administration. But deciding what really matters is critical too. Here are some thoughts I have about all of that:
Like many of you, I’ve often been caught up in the outpouring of grief over the loss of so many celebrities this year. Although Snopes assures us that 2016 wasn't actually the worst year for celebrity deaths (http://bit.ly/2hxeCZh), it certainly seems like it. And of course it’s touching to see so many people bond together in the shared loss we feel when one of our cultural icons leaves us.
But then there’s the guy on the left of the photo below. He died this year too. Yet if you’re like me (or I assume most people) you probably have no idea who he is. And that is deeply unjust, because his name is Dr. Donald Henderson and he was responsible for eradicating smallpox. And it’s difficult to overstate just how big of a deal that is. During the 20th century alone the "red plague" was responsible for the deaths of as many as 500 million people. That’s a half BILLION people.
Because of Dr. Henderson’s efforts however, it’s been nearly 40 years since the last known naturally occurring case of smallpox. Which means that even in that short time period, Dr. Henderson probably saved over 200 million lives.
Numbers that big turn into mere statistics. So for some perspective look at the image below on the right. That's a Bangladeshi child stricken with smallpox. That used to be the reality for untold millions of people around the world. Smallpox was a ghastly disease. It killed a third of the people who contracted it. And those who survived it were often scarred, crippled and/or blinded for life.
But that is all gone now. Dr. Henderson took that horror from our world.
By any objective measure, at least in my view, that makes Dr. Donald Henderson one of the greatest men who ever lived. But men and women like Dr. Henderson don’t get parades, they don’t get TV specials, and they don't get celebrities tweeting about how amazing they were. Most often, as in the case of Dr. Henderson, they pass with barely a mention.
To be clear, I have no objection to honoring the work and lives of popular celebrities and artists. But as we move forward into our new year and our new reality, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst idea to start thinking a little more about what we value, and why.
We live in a nation that has spent decades over-valuing fame and under-valuing expertise. That did not happen by accident, and it’s a large part of why a reality-TV host is now the president while a man like Dr. Henderson died in near obscurity.
No matter how much pundits like to insist otherwise, we do not live in a “post-fact” world, and we never will. As a society, any collective decision by a large faction of us to ignore facts/truth doesn’t change the reality of those facts/truth. On the contrary, the only things that change are the consequences.
There are real facts in this world. There is real truth in this world. Men like Dr. Henderson used real facts, science and expertise to change the world for the better. Men like Trump manipulate and distract us away from real facts in order to pursue their own agendas.
Sadly, many of our fellow citizens can no longer tell the difference. Worse, many of them don’t want to. That means its up to the rest of us to speak for the truth. And we will.
Back soon…
Living Blue in a Red State with Donald Trump Is Not My President.
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Paul McCartney Is Asked To Perform ‘Hey Jude’ At The White House, But No One Expected This Ending!
Paul McCartney Pulls Out All The Stops, And Even President Obama Is Amazed!
Paul McCartney is truly one of the most most iconic musicians of all time, which is obviously to be expected given that he’s a founding member of The Beatles. Even after his departure from The Beatles, Paul McCartney went on to have what is considered arguably the most successful solo careers in recent history. So with all of that being said, you could imagine that Paul McCartney has been asked to perform at some of the most prestigious events in history. Well, it’s true and we have the proof.
What you’re about to watch is Paul McCartney and his band take to the stage to perform at The White House their song Hey Jude. As you could imagine, the performance is nothing short of amazing, but the best part about the thing is when the song draws closer to the ending! See for yourself!
http://societyofrock.com/paul-mccartney-is-asked-to-perform-hey-jude-at-the-white-house-but-no-one-expected-this-ending/
Occupy Democrats
The hypocrisy is truly blinding.
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