Saturday, March 19, 2016

American Anti-intellectualism

The phenomenon that we are experiencing in our electoral process is one that was predicted at the formation of the country. In the words of John Adams, our second president, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” This is why the founders insisted on a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy, in order to protect the people from their own baser natures. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two that has allowed us to rise as a superpower and maintain a level of respect in the world for two hundred and forty years is rapidly becoming a moot point as amoral corporations, corrupt political representatives and an anti-intellectual electorate are all colluding to bring the entire experiment crashing to the ground. In the end, Adams was right to characterize the demise of democracy as a suicide, as it is our twin obsessions with religion and capitalism that have been eating away at the American intellect for centuries to the point where the masses, uninterested in thinking at all, are heading lemming-like for the cliff and taking the rest of us along with them to our mutual destruction.

Donald Trump is not the cause of this destruction, but the inevitable result of hundreds of years of a system of belief based on conning consumers into buying products they don’t need and coercing them into worshiping a deity that doesn’t exist. In that sense, it is much like global climate change, in that the results of this assault on reason have only reached a critical mass in the last fifty years or so. It’s only now that we are seeing the results of our own intellectual neglect in ways that are alarming. Unfortunately, this is not something new, and a look back in history shows the propensity for this behavior already firmly established in those religious outcasts who first set foot on the North American continent with the intent of making a home here. In the words of playwright Arthur Miller, “To the European world the whole province was a barbaric frontier inhabited by a sect of fanatics.” And it was that fanaticism, which can only be achieved through a concerted effort to avoid thinking combined with a devotion to an imaginary religious idea, that first began the denigration of independent thought in America. In his play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, the minister of Salem Village tells the protagonist, John Proctor, in no uncertain terms, “It is not for you to say what is good for you to hear! . . . There is either obedience or the church will burn like Hell is burning!” And in reinforcing this idea, the reverend from a neighboring village tells him something s similar when Proctor expresses doubts as to the Salem minister’s sanctity. “I must say it, Mr. Proctor; that is not for you to decide. The man’s ordained, therefore the light of God is in him.”

It has always been the case that adherence to the religious philosophy of any cult, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the thousands of smaller, personality-based cults that have been created in the wake of those three, requires a suspension of intellectual thought on the part of the individual in order to conform to the dictates of the accepted leader of the cult, whether it is a Christ, a Muhammad, or a Jim Jones. And since this country was initially peopled by religious zealots it makes sense that a certain amount of anti-intellectualism would continue to be inculcated among the population for generations. But the great early twentieth-century educator and critic John Erskine recognized this penchant for denigrating intellect in the English peoples long before they began immigrating to North America:

          If we look beneath the history of the English people, beneath the ideas expressed in our literature,
          we find in the temper of our remotest ancestors a certain bias which still prescribes our ethics and
          still prejudices us against the mind . . . Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone
          among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption
          that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral
          conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with
          each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced--
          full mind, starved heart--stout heart, weak head.

Given that level of skepticism for intelligence in our history it’s actually something of an anomaly, on the order of a genetic mutation, that the intellectuals who founded this country under the Constitution were highly intelligent men who expended considerable intellectual effort to derive at a way of governing this new nation that would allow it to endure. But we may be nearing the end of the ability of the buffers the founders built into the Constitution to absorb its misuse by corrupt elected officials whose only loyalty is to the interests who line their pockets and keep them in office. The French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed as much in 1840. “I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America . . . In America the majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence.” And that majority has been, almost since the Revolution, business interests with a capitalist philosophy every bit as coercive and anti-intellectual as that found in religion. In his introduction to a book of essays by the great literary critic Lionel Trilling--a student of Erskine’s--author and editor Leon Wieseltier said this about Trilling’s fight against these kinds of beliefs. “Trilling never encountered a good reason to postpone thinking, though he lived in an age when such reasons were regularly and popularly advanced, in the forms of totalistic philosophies and totalistic politics.”

When Wieseltier speaks about totalistic philosophy and politics, he is speaking of ideologies that are seen to be complete within themselves, that hold all of the answers to any questions that might arise, obviating the need for independent thought. In this sense, the two most powerful totalistic dogmas in America are Christianity and capitalism. The two have been at the heart of an unholy alliance, if you will, that is bent on devouring the intellectual might of this country in its pursuit of dollars in the case of capitalism, and converts in the case of Christianity. Capitalist conglomerates use scare tactics relying on the fallacy of complete government control and the loss of freedoms--especially the implied loss of religious freedom--to gain the support of evangelicals in order to continue their anti-regulatory agenda. At the same time, fundamentalist Christians use their political power as a voting block to ensure that politicians will support their anti-freedom agenda, one that would enforce their personal morality on a largely secular country that doesn’t believe in their spiritual fantasies. In both case these factions have relied on the inculcation of citizens for hundreds of years in the case of capitalism, and thousands in the case of religion, that what they both represent is an obvious moral right that is understood to be beyond question. Any reasoned argument against their agendas is interpreted as an attack by god-less, atheistic libertines on the one hand, or communist, socialist traitors on the other. The ascension of Trump has exposed who is really in charge, and it’s not the religious right. It is big business that rules this country, and always has. Though it has tried to maintain a low profile for the last fifty years, since the time of the robber-barons it has been a thinly-veiled attempt to keep an uninformed, anti-intellectual electorate distracted by everything from sports and entertainment, to modern news reporting that combines the worst of both into one.

Noam Chomsky has been warning for decades that the corporate controlled media has been lying to us, that it is just another tool in the capitalist arsenal to wrest money and power from the American public. And for decades it has done this in the form of liberal bias in the media. “If the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively. In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? . . . A well functioning [propaganda] system would in fact have a bias of that kind.” Today the media has become a joke, and there is no need to attempt to disguise their motives because television news has become so nakedly partisan. The result of this willful disobedience to the accepted norms is that Dish Network has become the first corporate media entity to eliminate NBC and its associated networks from its television delivery system. Claiming a failure on NBC’s part to adhere to some technicality, it is now able to remove MSNBC, the only overtly liberal news network on television, as one of its viewer’s choices. CNN has stayed well within the norm by adhering to one of the most insidious of all anti-intellectual traps: objectivity. Not one but two relatively recent books discuss this phenomenon. The first is called The Age of American Unreason by the wonderful Susan Jacoby, an inspirational figure whose freethinking is a model for what a true American should be. The second is Idiot America, by journalist Charles P. Pierce. Both take as their starting point the seminal work on the subject, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstader from 1966.

Pierce’s book was published in 2009, just after Obama took office, and is subtitled “How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.” His thesis revolves around the idea of the democratization of American thought--not a good thing--in which anyone with an opinion can post it on a blog or on YouTube or, increasingly, shout it out on a major television news outlet. What this has done is to polarize truth to the point where anyone with an opposing view is given a legitimacy that is not only unearned but patently false. “This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong.” One of the earlier examples of this was with Holocaust deniers who, for a while, were getting equal media time in “debates” over the reality of the Holocaust when their claims clearly had no basis in fact. But the media, complicit in the duplicity, allowed the deniers equal space, equal airtime in a misguided quest for fairness, and in doing so legitimized a point of view that was completely fictitious. Pierce then demonstrates how this phenomenon is not organic and has been promulgated for decades for a specific purpose. “The rise of Idiot America today reflects--for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.” By pandering to an increasingly uninformed and unthinking electorate, politicians are then able to wield the ignorance of their followers into a movement can be used to the advantage of their corporate masters to suppress a wide range of critical needs, from health care to climate change, for the very people whom they have coerced to vote against the things they desperately need.

Jacoby’s book, published in 2008, is by far the more academic of the two. She clearly addressed the idea that Pierce seized upon for his book, the “ideological polarization that has sanctioned not only the demonization of opponents but the trivialization of all opposing opinions . . . and has produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.” But her scope is much larger than this, taking in religious anti-intellectualism as one of the main avenues for the denigration of scientific thought that has allowed corporate polluters to perpetuate the idea that the mere opposing of scientific thought is the same thing as the equality of the thoughts themselves. This is yet another corporate-political tactic that inspired the book Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which begins with the pseudo science introduced by cigarette manufacturers to muddy the debate about the deadliness of smoking, and has since been picked up by climate change deniers. For Jacoby, this then leads quite naturally to the dearth of scientific knowledge that the average U.S. citizen is fluent in, eroded by creationist religious fallacies, and yet another indictment of our education system. But what I found the most fascinating was her identification of the root cause for all of this:

          The current American relationship to reading and writing is best described not as illiterate but as
          a-literate. Fewer than half of adult Americans [in a 2002 survey] read any work of fiction or poetry
          in the preceding year . . . Only 57 percent had read a nonfiction book. In this increasingly a-literate
          America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk. That Americans
          inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable
          only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization
          of everything.

The end result of this has been touted as the information age, and that is exactly the problem. As far back as the 1930s Robert Maynard Hutchins, the editor of Britannica’s Great Books, was sounding the alarm against an educational system based solely on information. “Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum . . . Facts do not arrange themselves. Facts do not solve problems.” As Jacoby puts it, “The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between.”

Because of this kind of thinking, or non-thinking to be more accurate, Trump has become the champion of those who glory in their own ignorance and wear it as a badge of honor. This can be seen in the way that he defends himself from criticism: he claims ignorance. Is that really what people want in a leader, someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about? But it’s not quite that simple. Right wing shills like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News, are not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing by manipulating an increasingly a-literate viewership, something corporations have been doing for hundreds of years; Americans have always had a penchant for snake oil salesmen and miracle cures. The promotional material for the book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality, states “Chris Mooney uses cutting-edge research to explain the psychology behind why today’s Republicans reject reality—it’s just part of who they are.” No it’s not. Those who have been duped by conservative anti-science rhetoric have been manipulated at the hands of those who know exactly what they’re doing. And in that sense, Trump has become the perfect Republican representative in that capitalist corporations have finally figured out a way to cut out the middle man. There’s no one with any intelligence who actually believes that Trump doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing--all corporate giants do--but his continued claims of ignorance seem to resonate with an electorate that is increasingly ignorant themselves.

In John Erskine’s account of the long history of Anglo-American ignorance entitled “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” he addresses the conflict of intellect with ignorance and the seeming inability of Americans to opt for intelligence.

          Our race has often been embarrassed when it has turned a sudden corner and come upon
          intelligence . . . But we discovered long ago how to evade the sudden embarrassments of
          intelligence. “Toll for the brave,” sings the poet, but he might have sung, “Toll for the stupid.”
          Our memory passes easily over the lack of [intelligence] a virtue we never did think much of,
          and dwells on the English virtues of courage and discipline. So we forget the shocking blunder
          of the charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly sing the heroism of the victims.

The way this has manifest itself a hundred years later in the form of Donald Trump, is his increasing willingness to cloak his true intentions with claims of ignorance. When asked about the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke, Trump claimed ignorance, that he didn’t know who Duke was, even though Trump had first publicly denounced Duke in 1991, and as recently as 2000 said Duke was, “a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.” But the fact that Trump is a liar is not news. The interview that was most interesting was when he actually tried to defend the behavior of his increasingly violent supporters. Caught in a trap of his own deceit by being unable to justify their actions, he suddenly deflected the question by lapsing into ignorance yet again, claiming he hadn’t seen the tape and therefore couldn’t comment on it--this after his previous defense that was clearly based on his knowledge of the incident.

But the argument for the end of American intellectualism can’t just come from looking at the right. The corruption and ignorance of the capitalist-religious consumerist citizens in this country has had a long history. What has changed in recent times, especially with the "democratization of thought" and the “videoization of everything” is that now those on the left have also succumbed to the lure of anti-intellectualism. In the past, American liberals always seemed to have a handle on the truth, or at the very least they recognized that by helping others who are less fortunate they also help themselves by strengthening the entire country, something the greed-based conservative right will never avow. But after generations of insufficient education in the area of critical thinking--and most visibly seen in the ascension of deconstructionism in higher education--even those with liberal leaning ideals are becoming part of the problem. The is evident in the recent “Bernie or Bust” movement among the youthful supporters of Bernie Sanders, in which they vow to abstain from voting in the general election if Sanders does not obtain the Democratic nomination for president. A more childish and petulant motivation is difficult to imagine. No doubt it was acquired when these young people were toddlers, screaming at their parents that they wanted candy or a toy, and reinforced when their weak-willed parents gave in to their every demand. But it was refined in public school when they devised the ingenious ploy of retaliating against teachers they perceived as unfair--or simply didn’t like--by refusing to do their work. So, after failing the course, the teacher goes on to another class the following year, and the student is saddled with the choice of taking the class again or not graduating. That’ll show those stupid teachers.

In the most important novel of his career, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--and arguably the greatest novel in American literature--author Mark Twain lampooned this way of thinking back in 1885. The character of Pap, Huck’s father, is a typical Southern racist, a poor white drunkard who blames the government for all of his problems. Huck, Twain’s narrator, explains, “Whenever his liquor begun to work he most always went for the govment. This time he says:

          Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free [black man]
          there from Ohio. And what do you think? They said he could vote when he was at home. Well,
          that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about
          to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State
          in this country where they’d let that [black man] vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.
          Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me-- I’ll never vote
          agin as long as I live.

The irony is clear, and it certainly didn’t need to be explained to readers twenty years after the Civil War. But apparently it does today, with young people metaphorically threatening to hold their breath until someone gives them what they want. The reality is, refusing to vote is nothing short of a complete abdication of civic responsibility, an act that is doubly offensive when that refusal results in putting the corporate oligarchy in power to continue their economic assault on the other ninety-five percent of the citizens of the country. But even that pales in comparison to the stupidity demonstrated by those who think that moving to Canada is somehow an answer. Twain had something to say about that, as well, when Pap makes this pronouncement. “A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all.” Yeah, that’ll solve the problem just fine. But there’s a reason for this kind of thinking as well. One of the other effects of a media that sensationalizes the trivial and creates specious opposition to truths that have none, is a form of learned helplessness that it inculcates in the electorate. Neil Postman, in his now forty-year-old book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, makes this point about TV news that is even more relevant in the age of the Internet and smartphones. “Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

          You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What
          steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? What are your plans for pre-
          serving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? I shall take the liberty of answering
          for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who
          claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two
          or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad
          range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the . . . last refuge of the politically
          impotent.

The great irony of the information age is that it has provided us with vast quantities of information about which we can do nothing. Postman calls this the “great loop of impotence” because to escape the glut of news about our world that we are helpless to affect we retreat into a world of entertainment and sports, riveted to news about celebrities and athletes that by all rights should have no effect on us. “Where once people sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.”

In many ways the Presidential election cycles have become little more than an elevated form of celebrity news, and so it should probably be no surprise that a celebrity should aspire to the highest office in the land. After all, if an actor can do it why not a reality TV star? It naturally follows then that, with voters conditioned that their likes and dislikes matter when voting for their favorite stars online or fan favorite on the newest competition reality show, that politics should be no different. Unfortunately, it is. The presidential selection process has never been about choosing the person that the voter likes the best. Instead, it is about choosing from two people who have been chosen by their political parties to represent competing ideologies, and the choice for the common citizen has always been a simple one. On one side are the people who promise them everything and deliver nothing, and on the other side are people who promise to try, and usually deliver something. An apt analogy can be seen in the film Ray, when Ray Charles is attempting to see how much he can get from a deal with Atlantic records, whose owner Ahmet Ertegun has come to his room to sign him. Charles tells him another label owner (the Republican) has promised him seven cents a record. Ertegun (the Democrat), tells him, “Man, I could promise you fifteen cents a record but you won't get it, anymore than he'll pay you seven. What I will do is promise you five cents a record and pay you five cents a record.”

The dumbing down of the American electorate has been a long, multi-century process that is only now coming to fruition. And with it, perhaps, the beginning of the end for our country as a world power. Because the fact remains that being a world power isn’t about being powerful, a truth that Israel has demonstrated for nearly seventy years. That Donald Trump is on the precipice of claiming the Republican nomination should not be a surprise to anyone. It was inevitable given the complete domination of our political system by corporate interests whose only objective is taking money from the rest of us. The technological revolution is only one tool in the arsenal of big business, but it’s a powerful one. It has sapped the intellectual energy of the nation, leading to an indolent, uneducated, easily distracted and effortlessly lead electorate that can be convinced of anything. Thus the empty promises of Republican leaders--who have only contempt in their hearts for anyone not like them including the very voters who cast ballots that put them into office--are no different from the newest weight-loss spokes-model or televangelist who laughs all the way to the bank at the infinite gullibility of people who have stopped thinking altogether. The time is rapidly approaching--if it has not already arrived--when the people of America will be far more interested in their Twitter feeds and Facebook posts than they are in the state of their own country. Again, de Tocqueville was prescient in the way that he understood the insubstantial nature of the American devotion to country, especially considering the empty threats by those claiming they'll leave the country if Trump is elected.

          The inhabitants of the United States talk a great deal about their love for their country; I confess
          that I have no confidence in that calculated patriotism which is founded on interest and which a
          change of interests may destroy . . . What keeps a great number of citizens under the same
          government is much less a reasoned desire to remain united than the instinctive and, in a sense,
          involuntary accord which springs from like feelings and similar opinions.

Those "like feelings and similar opinions," to this day, are fueled by commerce, whether it be clothing, cars, or cosmetics, and Americans seem utterly incapable of distinguishing between the messages of Madison Avenue and those which are important to the long term stability of their lives. The hope, of course, is that Hillary Clinton will earn the Democratic nomination and deny Trump all but a handful of electoral votes on his way to quickly becoming a footnote in American political history. After all, common sense dictates that if Trump is nominated every liberal and progressive minded American will come out of the woodwork to stop him from becoming president. If that doesn’t happen, it will be the fault of ignorant Americans who either don’t care enough about their own lives to vote against him, or have bought into the media game of making everything out to be more dramatic than it really is, citing polls and surveys that are little more than guesswork to make it appear Trump has an actual prayer of winning, and voting for him just because it appears he has a chance. Worse than that, however, liberals might stay away from the polls because of their “dislike” for Hillary--something else the media has concocted--not seeming to comprehend the disastrous effect that giving Trump the presidency would have in their lives. That’s when John Adams’ prediction would come true, when campaign exhaustion, gross monetary waste, and electoral murder will ultimately result in the suicide of a country. And all of this the result of Americans who are too busy with their noses buried in their cell phones to actually think for themselves. Bill Maher once called David Duke’s support of Trump the racist Republican chickens coming home to roost, but if Trump is successful it will be a case of American anti-intellectual chickens coming voluntarily to the chopping block. With any luck it won’t happen. At least not yet.