...And therein lies the problem.

[kiaa]

This is just a minor example. The problem goes much deeper and wider. What I'm talking about here is a cult to ignorance, actually. It's as if ignorance is a virtue, as demonstrated by the ascent of the likes of Trump (but he's not the first one to start that phenomenon; just look at Congress -- snowball demonstrations, anyone?)

Unless Americans recognize that if the cult of ignorance continues it'll become more and more difficult to compete both politically and economically with societies that highly value education, intelligence and learning, it'll be the doom of American prosperity and hegemony. Nowhere in the developed world (I'm not talking Third World) is this more problematic than in the US, and the problem is that a growing number of elected officials turn out to be a product of that cult of ignorance. These people are in a position to make decisions affecting millions of people both at home and beyond borders. So I'd argue this is not just a domestic problem but an international one. A problem of national security even if you like. Because a population and its leadership lacking the knowledge and intellectual tools necessary to analyze domestic and world affairs in a way that's smart and complex enough, is extremely vulnerable.

The problem here is not the educational system per se; it's rather the very educational culture. As Thomas Jefferson once said, if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Comments

[halialkers]

I suppose a slaveowner would know how to define freedom and its limits.

I don't see this spelling the end of American hegemony, at least, until its competitors decide to boot out those US bases and rebuild their own military might and assert power on a global scale themselves. Until they do so, outsourcing all that to the USA and hating it without deciding to boot it changes nothing.

Global empires are not sustained by the intellect of the people pulling the triggers, only that the firearms work and the machines of death are simple enough to be maintained.

I mean you're entirely right that the USA is going to degenerate ever more fully into being an Anglophone Upper Volta with missiles. My country unfortunately sees the swaggering global empire and as that's all we want to see, the razzle-dazzle of war by robot will enable us to delude ourselves into seeing a strength whose foundation decays until one day one President Gorbachevs us into destruction trying to stop it, optimistically.

[dewline]

Self-understanding, knowledge about the wider worlds and prosperity are all threats to domestic tyranny-building. Their opposites have therefore been actively encouraged, I fear.

[asthfghl]

DailyQuoted.

[johnny9fingers]

One thing about the cult of ignorance is that it has a long history. In 1964 Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction for his book Anti-intelectuallism in American Life.

But the difference is now it is yoked to a certain kind of capitalism, and now it is being exported, almost evangelically, alongside that capitalism. Ad majorem pecunii gloriam and all that.

[garote]

America is a nation crowded with people who take after Rudyard Kipling's "If", in that they aspire to greatness but not to "look too good, nor talk too wise." I try to follow that ideal myself. Few things are worse, in a face-to-face encounter, than mocking or berating someone for their ignorance of the wider world. (Not to mention counterproductive.) That it's rampant online is more a statement about how people are assholes online, than it is about high intellectual standards.

There's a guy in Alameda who works on my car. It's a '97 Ford with 280k miles, so it's had more issues than I even knew cars could have. But this guy isolates the fault in short order every time. I've dealt with lots of mechanics, and it's worth hanging onto a good one. If I found out he didn't know Alaska was a part of the United States, I'd be all, "you're kidding, right?", and joke with him about it. Then the next time my car had a problem, I'd bring it straight to him, like always. His knowledge of geography has jack shit to do with his performance fixing cars, QED. That's how he makes his living and earns his respect.

Same with my dentist. I might find it a bit odd that she'd have that gap in her knowledge, considering how much schooling dentists tend to accumulate, but it wouldn't stop me from coming right back, like I've been doing for 15 years.

People are often ignorant about stuff that doesn't matter in their daily life, because they are busy making that daily life work. Shitty jobs, too many kids, bad logistics, compromised food options. ... If your perspective is narrowed to the lane you have to run down for survival, and you run into someone with a much wider view, who also doesn't seem to care about, or even be aware of, how hard it is for you ... wouldn't some resentment be likely?

That's the class warfare angle. If the "elites" declare contempt for the "masses", the contempt inevitably becomes mutual.

Three generations ago my family was literally dirt-poor farmers in Oklahoma. Now the whole family is college-educated white-collar types, and all our kids are shaping up to be the same. I guarantee you that neither our attitude, nor our general intelligence, has changed in the intervening 100 years. What has changed, is our standard of living. Did we start in the "cult of ignorance" and then break out? Or were we post-facto never in it, because we're no longer poor?

But it's true: There's a big streak of anti-authoritarianism in American culture, with a streak of anti-intellectualism inside that. People who "talk too wise" are (often rightfully) accused of being out of touch. From my point of view, it's a mixed bag. In addition to its obvious bad qualities, each streak is also a catalyst for change, at a pace that is pretty remarkable. Also, on the ground - rather than in the wack universe of national and international politics - Americans often don't respect pedigree but what they consistently respect is job performance. I know I do.

Come to think of it, this is probably why the modern tech industry got such a huge head start here. For fifty years running now, students with four- and six-year degrees have often watched in horror as they compete for jobs with self-taught nerds who have zero on-paper qualifications but blundered into a tech job tangentially at the age of 16 and have been going trial-by-fire ever since. I have seen the inequity of this myself uncountable times, interviewing and hiring candidates. Programmers hired right out of college - even with a master's degree - are often almost useless until they've been working for at least a year full time. Especially if they got that degree in another country.

Hmm. How does a software industry that, even today, still increasingly dominates the world, square with a "culture of ignorance"? Perhaps that's more class warfare brewing. Well, at least the masses have smartphones now. If they wanted to learn US geography and not make inane blunders in their gross online ranting, they can. Unless ... they're trolling? In that case, well played Bryan Smith; well played.

[johnny9fingers]

I would agree with you some part of the way ; it is, after all, horses for courses. I would send my car to the same chap I’m sure.

However I want my fucking legislators to be as wise as possible, and as smart as possible, and as honest as possible. I don’t want Mr fucking average as my leader, I want someone who can think and lead and who is educated enoigh to know the fucking location of the country he is going to invade, so to speak.

[garote]

Let’s add to that list: able to resist corruption, cares about our fate, and won’t cede power to foreign governments. That’s what voters see in Trump, after all...

[johnny9fingers]

Let's examine that list:

Trump able to resist what sorts of corruption? Financial... Tax returns, Honey traps, alleged Russian bail-out loans (see next item but one), bilking his suppliers until they went out of business?

Won't cede power to foreign governments? Unless they have enough leverage, obvs.

Cares about your fate.... Seems to care more about his twitter account, but if you say so.

Now the markets love his tax cuts. But even so I'm going to play the long game here, just as I did with the Myanmar/Rohingya thing. I'll wait for trickle down to work. I mean sooner or later it has to, doesn't it? (Yet wealth disparity in the US is greater now than any post-war period and we've had decades of trickle down... and not that much has trickled down so far, and it always comes with added strings when it does.)

Good can still come from all of this. We just have to be luckier than we have been up to now. After all, someone almost always wins the lottery.

[garote]

Hey, I didn’t say they were right to see those things, just that they did. The Republican Party practically handed him the role, what with fielding so many long-career politicians for him to jab at, and those things the voters saw were exactly what Hillary appeared weak on. (To them.)

[nairiporter]

The cult for ignorance is not new in the US. Isaac Asimov said,

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

[oportet]

We're less likely to be told we're wrong, and we're also less likely to admit we're wrong.

One lead to the other, I'm not sure which - but it doesn't matter. Fixing one should fix the other. Get rid of the egg and you won't have a chicken, get rid of the chicken and you won't have an egg.

[johnny9fingers]

Ah, but we all know the egg came before the chicken. The ancestors of chickens laid eggs when they were still lizards.

Start with education and just maybe evolution will follow.

[garote]

Pretty sure the rooster came first...

[johnny9fingers]

Even when it's a lizard I suppose it's all about cock-a-doodle-doo.

[jazzyjj]

I think I'd have to agree here. Knowledge is power. Not to digress too much, but before the advent of screen readers and other assistive tech I and many others could not even use computers. But just look at how far we've come in terms of our technology. To bring this more in line with the comm, the only exposure to politics I ever got growing up--aside from my parents occasionally discussing it with us at mealtime--was on National Public Radio which my parents had on virtually nonstop and still do. But I for one don't stay glued to NPR all the time, as good as it is. It seems as though they've (my parents) been discussing more and more things of a political nature as of late. This isn't because they disagree on stuff, in fact quite the contrary. Unfortunately many political and news websites still remain largely inaccessible to this day for those of us who use assistive technology, which is in large part why I for one am perhaps not as well-versed on politics as others might be. That in turn is why I joined the comm, so thanks to all involved parties for setting it up.