An interesting article in today's Washington Post claims that America is dumb and proud of it. Susan Jacoby says, in her article entitled "The dumbing of America", that:
The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. 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.
As we try to woo voters this year ideas like this can have more than mere provocative value. George Lakoff has hinted at a similar fact about our Nation's people with his emphasis on the impact of framing issues properly. Look below the fold and see how this plays out.
The America of today would probably frighten Emerson by comparison with his observations. Anyone who has spent time living in Europe may have been impressed with the frequency of intellectual discussions even about politics. Americans have a way of reducing their conversations to diatribe when it comes to politics. They spend time listening to and reading the likes of Rush Limbau and Ann Coulter. Jacoby says it this way:
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This discussion raises the proverbial "chicken and egg" question; which came first, TV or this propensity to swallow sound bites? I suggest that it doesn't matter. What is at the root of this phenomenon is the desire to avoid a frightening complex world that is increasing the number of interdependent issues that affect us at an alarming rate. We begin to confront issues like Global Warming and the effects of the iraq war on the economy only after they have become so obvious and threatening that it is impossible to ignore them. We are easily frightened and respond by giving up rights and freedoms that were won by the shedding of our ancestors' blood. Our health suffers a similar lack of attention to prevention and therefore we struggle with the costs rising from neglect along with the other illnesses we have befall us. All this is cause enough to worry about the state of the Nation but there is something more. Jacoby writes:
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.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
This last issue is more troubling than any of the rest. It is what allowed George Bush to sell himself as a man with convictions rather than someone living in a self constructed dilusion that too many Americans shared with vigor. The story of the Emporer's new clothes has been a theme for my many, many letters to the editor during this administration. Reality seems to have become what can be sold. The frightening reality that does not sell is the ignorance of so much of the population and the lack of any notion that it is a problem. I am afraid I have to side with Jacoby on this one. She starts out by saying:
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
I think I'll end with that thought.
Update: Note the ad for Susan Jacoby's book to the right.