The Side Effects of Ignorance May Include...
I believe it’s possible to see Donald Trump’s presence in the White House as proof of the decades-long decline in American education, a decline that has left many of our fellow citizens stunningly ignorant of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs - of pretty much everything.
He’s the product, the end result - and it’s going to cost us.
The fact that I feel like I should be reaching for the kevlar right now underscores the problem we face. In America, freedom of opinion has been recast as the freedom to believe whatever we want, and anyone challenging that notion, or suggesting that opinions should have some basis in fact, does so at his own peril.
As far as I know, it’s a problem peculiar to us. While the average German or Czech will consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying something might actually know more about it, or at least have an opinion worth considering, the average American knows better. Though happy to recognize expertise in plumbing, or auto repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas all folks are suddenly equal and saying otherwise risks making you that lowest of all things in the American lexicon – an elitist.
It's been thus for a while. As Richard Hofstadter made clear sixty years ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, we’ve been equating education with elitism for three hundred years.
Not money.
Not power.
Education.
In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s inauguration, I wrote the following in an essay in Harper’s magazine.
The real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy, is the 38% of the population who didn’t move, didn’t vote. Think of it: a country the size of Germany – 83 million people – within our own borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo perpetuate itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and its immaturity, its unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that in every election there is a better and a worse choice. Millions of others, however, are adults who don’t know what the Bill of Rights is, who have never heard of Lenin, who think Africa is a nation, who have never read a book. I’ve talked to enough of them to know that many are decent people, and that decency is not enough. Witches are put to the stake by decent people. Ignorance trumps decency any day of the week.
Praise me for a patriot or warm up the pillory, it comes down to the unpleasant fact that a significant number of our fellow citizens are now as greedy and gullible as a boxful of puppies; they’ll believe anything; they’ll attack the empty glove; they’ll follow that plastic bone right off the cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact. If they’re ever activated – if the wrong individual gets to them before the educational system does – we may live to experience a tyranny of the majority Tocqueville never imagined.
Sixteen years later that “wrong individual” has gained the presidency (again) by convincing a sizeable portion of the electorate that a cognitively-impaired hustler from Queens with six bankruptcies under his belt is just the leader the country needs to fix whatever ails it.
We’ve followed the bone right off the cliff.
Not surprisingly, outside of a few defensive enclaves, educated Americans (whether school taught or home-grown) have developed strategies for survival. Like chameleons moving against a dangerous background, we know how to blend in by avoiding serious subjects, tapping up the vernacular, dialing down the vocabulary. It comes naturally – it’s like a national instinct. We don’t question how weird it is. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, we gotta dumb ourselves down... or try.
But let me take a step back and clarify – I don’t want to be misunderstood.
First, I’m not suggesting that education is the answer to all our problems, only that in a democratic society education functions like an essential nutrient in the body; deprived of it long enough, the body grows weak, vulnerable, sick.
Second, in talking about American attitudes toward education, I’m not just talking about ‘formal’ education. Our suspicion of the educated isn’t limited to those with higher degrees – anyone using a four-syllable word can qualify.
Third, I’m not saying you need a degree to be educated or that having one necessarily makes you so. I have nothing but respect for the self-educated, though even they need some foundation – a conducive atmosphere in the home, a solid high-school experience – on which to build.
Lastly, I’m not equating education with decency. It’s perfectly possible to emerge from Columbia or Yale the same corrupt person you were when you went in, or worse – just look at J.D. Vance. All I’m saying is that a good education provides us with the analytical and conceptual tools necessary to weigh information, to deal with complexity, to make reasoned judgements. How we use those tools is up to us.
Ignorance similarly doesn’t make us good or bad - just dangerous. Because we’re more likely to believe any slick-talking con-man who comes around.
The years since I wrote my Harper’s piece have not been kind. We’ve taken a one-two punch. Setting us up, our schools, long impoverished by the self-defeating aphorism “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach,” whipsawed by the inanities of the left and the right, sank into ineffectuality.
Then came the haymaker: Social media, which would have required a public trained in critical thinking to keep it from becoming the greatest idiocy-multiplier the race of man has seen, morphed into a field of echo chambers where the reasoned voice struggled to be heard over the foolishness and the rage.
So here we are:
A conspiracy crank with a worm in his brain (but not a day of medical training), is head of the Department of Health.
A former Fox News host too dumb to use a secure server when discussing military attack plans is Secretary of Defense.
Marjorie Taylor Greene – and a hundred like her - are running Congress.
Donald Trump, who is stumped by the ‘old-fashioned’ word, groceries, is taking a five-iron to the global economy.
We did this to ourselves, but our failed education system made it possible.
It’s the price of ignorance.
Like the value of the humanities, which will be understood afresh by their absence, the value of a rigorous education will come clear by the alternatives. It will probably still take quite a while.
Oh, Mark, all so true, so sad, so detrimental to us, the people in the US , and the world. We must do whatever we can to stop the Felon and his henchmen. Sharing your words.