A Brief Point About Stupidity
This NYT article, regarding Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason, has been hanging around the "most popular" list for a few days now, and at present, it has attracted 978 comments. Soon, I hope to address why it (and grumbles like it) strike such a chord, but as for the actual content of the article, it demands a brief rejoinder.The essential thrust of her argument, at least as it is depicted here, comes down to that evergreen canard: Americans are ('R'?) stupider than they have ever been. Often now, and exclusively in the past, that argument is made via anecdotal evidence, such as Jacoby's little parable about the two men on 9/11 who didn't know what Pearl Harbor was. This is, to say the least, inconclusive. Contemporary scolds, however, are able to draw on survey data to demonstrate just how widespread and shocking is the ignorance of Americans, and Jacoby invokes statistics on college students' shaky grasp of geography. This sort of evidence would seem to be more useful for someone looking to indict a whole culture; after all, to show that Americans are stupider now than they have ever been, they must show a) that they are stupid, and b) that they used to be less stupid. Presumably Jacoby shows a) well enough, but that leaves b). And b) is a problem.
The inconvenient thing for Jacoby's argument is that survey data have pretty much always shown that Americans are shockingly ignorant. I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but I could send you toward Philip Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" from 1964. Drawing on data from 1956-1960, he made an embarassingly convincing case that 90% of Americans had little knowledge or understanding about our political system. I don't know if Jacoby is using any similar statistics from modern times, but that sounds pretty ignorant to me, and that in the golden age of the post-war boom.
As for before the postwar era, no survey data exists, because widespread surveying of the population only began in the 40s. So could we have perhaps been smarter before then? Could that data just have gone uncaptured?
The problem with that idea is that universal compulsory education has only been in existence in America since 1918, and it seems unlikely that Americans were smarter when they did not have to attend school. The only possibility left, then, is that Americans were smarter in the 25 year (or so) period between the starts of compulsory education and surveying, and sure, it's possible. But something would've had to happen during that period to make them 90% stupid about politics by 1956. It's hard to think of what that could be; certianly Jacoby's hobgoblins, anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, were not exactly unknown in the first half of the twentieth century.
In sum: Jacoby can say that Americans are stupid. She can wonder why they continue to be stupid, and indeed, many people do. She can even say that we should be smarter. Bravo! But she can't say we're stupider, and she most certainly can't blame either pop culture or teaching about pop culture in colleges for making us stupider. It seems like what she really wants to be saying is that the educational system in America needs to be fixed--but that would be a much shorter, or at least much different, book, and would probably not appeal to quite the same audience.
The interesting suggestion about the above analysis, though, is that there might be a fairly logical reason for why Americans think so little of themelves and so much of the Americans of old: we know how stupid we are, but we don't know how stupid we used to be. And that, sad to say, is the direct fault of the national survey. It seems elitist and condescending to think of most Americans as fundamentally ignorant, but survey after survey comes out to say that we are. We want to think of our fellow citizens as decent, kind, respectful human beings, but surveys pop up to inevitably remind us that they are not. And if we are not now, it seems likely that we never were. The only evidence of our predecessors' sanctifying grace is either anecdotal, clearly unrealistic, or taken from the sullied minds of the elderly. Just like everyone everywhere, the American people are not wonderful human beings. (American culture or American ideals maybe not so, but that's a different discussion.) We have surveys to thank for that knowledge, and though what they reveal may be disheartening, it is imperitive that we resist the siren song of nostalgia, that we do not view the past through a Vaseline-smeared lens in order to make ourselves feel better about the present. We're stupid, we're mean, and we're selfish. If we want to change that, there's no backwards path, no state of grace to return to. There's only forward.
ADDENDUM: Regarding the "maps" thing brought up in comments, this guy makes a good point:
Apropos of Jacoby, the reason FDR wanted people to buy maps in World War II
is because polling showed a significant number of Americans did not know where
Germany was located on the globe, and of course, at that time, there were far
more people than today who believed the earth was not a sphere, but essentially
flat. My question to Jacoby would be "How many people really went out and bought
maps--and of those, how many were the ones who didn't know where Germany
was?"
Labels: everything that is old, notes, pop, shitty world theory
posted by Mike B. @ 5:34 PM
12 Comments:
Jacoby was on Bill Moyers last night (watch it here). I was only half-watching, but some of what she said was interesting - particularly a couple of points about how words like "folks" and "troops" entered the language of our politicians, and what effect they have.
That said, when she went on about how stupid people are, I tuned out...
Saw her on Moyers too (which is weird because the last time I watched it was...who knows) and was struck by how insistent she was on a point about how people used to LOOK AT MAPS to see where our soldiers (not troops) were during WWII. Some weird link between geographical knowledge and understanding of a political situation -- I mean I couldn't point out plenty of US states on the map on first go (I know because I tried this yesterday!) but that doesn't mean I don't know anything about, say, electoral politics or What's Wrong with Kansas.
More disturbing to me, actually, was the discussion of the economy collapsing that preceded it. I don't think this has much (directly) to do with Americans getting "stupider," but it's a tangible problem that's going to get a LOT worse about the time I might be thinking about ummmmm starting a family and what not.
Also "we get the government we deserve," which she used at least once, is a super-clever way to talk about "us" when you really mean to say "them" (that is, they who are not paying attention to the Bill Moyers program and OF COURSE know how to locate places on maps! See, I'm smart enough, so what's wrong with the rest of this goddamn country, anyway??)
(That's "of course I know how to locate places on maps.")
The video seems to me more nuanced than the article.
Map placement on its own isn't an infallible barometer of intelligence, but it does indicate a basic lack of knowledge. She also mentions senators not knowing the difference between Chiites and Sunnis. Most importantly, the general point is that you can't have an informed, rational debate and make good decisions without a minimum amount of information.
To get to Mike's post (which I mostly agree with), in the video there isn't that much comparing between Golden and Fallen periods.
I think it's implicit in everything she's saying, though, isn't it? "Flight from reason," "crisis," "age of unreason"--those all imply that something has changed, that we used to be reasonable, no? Like, take the "folks" thing. She clearly wants to call out GWB in particular--she goes back as far as FDR in citing great speeches, and I think you can still find that kind of language even in Reagan's speeches (see the "Challenger" speech)--but seems relucant to name names. And there's a good reason for that, since we all know why GWB doesn't have friggin' iambic pentameter in his speeches--the man simply can't get those phrases out of his mouth. I'm all for exposing the motivations behind politicians' use of language, but this just seems a fetishization of verbal over visual information. With the maps thing, FDR asked people to pull out their atlases because he was on the radio. If he was on TV, they probably would've just put up a map. It wasn't because the culture was less degraded, it was because his audience couldn't see him! FDR was a brilliant politician; if people went out and bought maps before his broadcasts, that's probably less a sign of Americans' hunger for knowledge and more a sign of his skill at getting them to do things (or, you know, a sign of parents wanting to know where their children were).
In the abstract, democracies are supposed to have a well-informed citizenry. But there's a vigorous debate in the literature as to why that's true and as to whether low levels of knowledge necessarily imply a badly-informed citizenry. So for instance, you have Downs (an economist) pointing out that we already have a division of labor in our society with information-gathering--we don't expect everyone to actually go to Afghanistan and learn personally about the border crisis there--so where does that stop? For an individual, does it really make any sense to be well-informed about everything? Other people argue that since public opinion, as a mass, moves rationally, people are still making the right choices even if they're not meeting our defintion of "fully informed," while others say that it's an illusion, that since the poor are more likely to have low levels of knowledge, their interests are not being represented fully. There's a constitutional basis for needing a well-informed citizenry, but it requires ignoring all the non-democratic (and very useful!) aspects of our government.
We can all agree, I think, that we don't have to wait until every single citizen can explain the process of Medicare funding before we can say our democracy is working. But then what point do we stop at? If we were to improve political knowledge, what kind of changes would we expect to see in the political system?
I don't think the points that Jacoby is making are necessarily wrong. But I think couching them in this implicit "things ain't like they used to be" argument steamrolls over a lot of important issues. Trying to pretend like anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism aren't fundamental components of American culture--from the beginning--is ludicrous. They aren't going away. So do we need to get around those, or incorporate those? How do we do that? Why, exactly, would we want to do that?
A problem for a democracy is that the media, needing viewers/readers, tend to embrace the view that Americans are actually knowledgeable and engaged. And various experts that the media quotes also have agendas that they push, so you'll read the Ryan Lizza article in the current New Yorker in which Newt Gingrich and others spin John McCain's presumptive victory in the Republican primaries as meaning various things for the future of the party.
What you won't read in that article, or hear many places other than Matthew Yglesias' excellent blog for The Atlantic, is that, in the Virginia exit polls, the voters who said they were against the war tended to vote for McCain. So McCain's victory might just show that Republican primary voters have no idea what they're talking about. What happens when (if) they find out that McCain is actually has no substantive policy positions other than his ardent hawkishness?
It's not in anybody's interest to talk about this, though, (certainly not the Democrats'), because pointing out Americans' ignorance makes you an elitist.
But Marc, even sidestepping the issue of whether McCain has other substantive policy positions besides being pro-war, to see those votes as "not knowing what they're talking about" assumes they're single-issue voters. Maybe they are anti-war but McCain resonated for them in some other way that made up for his pro-war stance, with the most obvious concern being electability. If you're an anti-war Republican, do you vote for Ron Paul, who will never be president, or do you vote for McCain, who at least isn't an embarassingly anti-modern evangelical like Huckabee? Do you say "Well, at least McCain could actually get elected president and pursue other Republican goals that I do agree with." Politics is about choices and compromises. One of the problems with the public opinion literature, arguably, is that it groups the valid set of compromises you can make into only two categories: liberal and conservative. So for instance if you want to cut military spending but are also anti-union, that's a sign of political ignorance. That's fairly questionable.
At the same time, it's not like the information you're talking about was hidden--anyone with access to the internet could read Yglesias' blog, and certainly McCain's stance on the war is easy to find out. All the information is out there. At the end of the day, people are about as informed as they want to be, and there's only so much that can be done about that once they get outside the educational system.
Right, but what could be done inside the educational system is to re-structure the entire thing so that it's about questions kids actually are ready to care about. Get rid of all the time spent teaching them rules of grammar (in a vacuum), mathematical procedures (in a vacuum), scientific names for things (in a vacuum) -- which add up, in my experience as both student and teacher, to the majority of their time spent.
Start from zero: teach the kids to ask interesting questions about how their world works and how it came to be, and teach them how to find, think about, discuss, and challenge the answers. Give the students extensive chances to interact with, and control, parts of their world (and ours). People don't care about politics -- and no, they're NOT remotely informed enough, they DON'T display any ability to direct a sane agenda -- because they learned about politics by memorizing names in textbooks and by listening to dumb personality sketches on the TV. I wouldn't care about that either.
How do we create informed children when we don't have informed parents or teachers to teach them? For all the brilliant and well-tested ideas of John Goodlad, Ted Sizer, Neil Postman, or Maria Montessori, there are times when I can be gloomy about that. But on subject after subject, from race relations to computers, kids do learn far more than their parents. First we kill all the principals? Maybe, maybe ... I don't know. I just wish I knew of a politician who dared to acknowledge all of this.
teach the kids to ask interesting questions about how their world works and how it came to be, and teach them how to find, think about, discuss, and challenge the answers
Ha, good luck testing THAT twice a month!
I am wondering how the apparent technology gap is going to affect all of this -- as you say, I think kids are learning more, as in taking in more information, than ever, and they're also developing languages that just don't sync up with their parents'. To what extent this might express itself politically probably won't be clear for another ten years or so, as the first-wave internet kids (like me) are out of the 18-25 demo. OK, back to sitting quietly in my armchair.
I'd argue that the amount of stupidity in the general population remains about the same. What's changed is the percentage of people who go to college. i.e., The college-attending population has become stupider, mostly because it's become larger.
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