We appear to be at a cusp point, where the Western World chooses between two paths.
One is the trail of stupidity, leading to a cliff. Almost 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West, Ozwald Spengler transfixed the public with his certain-sounding explanations for why Europo-American society would soon dissolve into pain and despair, decadence and dust.
Pain came... dealt by people who believed as Spengler did. A cult of cynicism despised the Enlightenment. Monsters of both left and right saw as degenerate self-indulgences such shiny modern things as democracy, science, markets and the empowerment of individual minds. Horrors like Hitler and Stalin strove to prove it so.
But they failed and enlightenment optimists prevailed, through courage, innovation and will. George Marshall showed the way into a better era, filled with challenges but also progress. Today, most babies that are born actually live good lives. We have been to the Moon. Race and gender and class are less deterministic of your fate, and you are sharing thoughts with me across a worldwide brain that we forged with our own ingenuity and hands.
Cynicism isn't dead. It never went away, nor is it only a thing of the right. (Though that is its present core.) Dire eco-warnings, like Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE (see my review) and James Cameron's AVATAR may have been meantserve partly as dire warnings, to help us see the dangers, but also deliver doses of poison, by railing that we westerners are all hopeless fools bereft of decent institutions or problem-solving skills. Or even hope.
In fact, the clear-eyed view is neither gloomy nor starry-confident. It was the great historian, Arnold Toynbee, who I believe got it right. After studying dozens of past cycles, he declared that civilizations thrive when they invest faith and hope in their creative minorities. When they see the future as a destination and willingly adapt new ways to reach it.
Toynbee -- after surveying many tales of rise and fall -- concluded that cultures start to decline when those creative minorities become distrusted, or are starved of capital, or left out in the cold. Or when they are shunned by those in power.
I mention this, because the clear and distinct pattern the we see in the latest phase of the American Civil War... similar to what occcured in earlier phases... has been an underlying theme of populist hatred for society's brightest and most skilled.
This motif pervades everything we see from the "movement" nowadays. In distrust of the Civil Service and the US Officer Corps. In the relentless War on Science. In boos that surge, at sneering mention of the word "Harvard." The use of anti-intellectualism to divert attention from a far more worrisome elite -- a rising aristocracy of monopolies and almost-feudal wealth.
Let's be clear. I am not saying that intellectuals are always right. I know plenty who are foolish. Nor is wealth inherently evil... I aspire to acquire more, through delivery of excellent goods and services, and I know some damn-fine billionaires. Nor is there anything wrong with salt-of-the-earth fellows like those Redneck Comedy Tour guys, whose self-effacing charm could win over even alien invaders. (Even if they don't read sci-fi.)
Still, if anybody ever had a clue about what makes civilizations rise and fall, Arnold Toynbee knew what he was talking about.
Moreover, the propaganda campaign against our creative people is so intense, so pure, and so relentlessly across-the-board, that it simply cannot be an accident. The correlation is just too perfect.
Somebody wants us to fail.
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Runaway Serfer
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Salon.com
Comments
anti intellectualism is a theme youve been exploring, and I see the current, but dont necessarily see it as greater than in the past ... its always been a potent force in civilization.
we are like fish in the water, what does the water look like? the water is in fact invisible....
Is it the "world" so much as the U.S? While I detect growing frustration among some citizens, there doesn't appear to be an growing or active European Know-Nothing party, I see no European media-superstars decrying "elites," and the anti-Muslim bigotry that appears to be growing (in places like Denmark or the Netherlands) actually seems to be a spike of reaction to liberalization of immigration laws, stoked perhaps by a few right-wing politicians, but already declining according to some estimates. Of course the economic troubles Europe faces could develop more "resentment politics" abroad - and recent calls for a "European tea party" no doubt suggest US conservatives will do all in their power to promote such.
But is India crushing innovation through anti-intellectual posturing? Has Japan banned stem cell research and thus shut themselves off to bioscience innovation? Are any Asian or European nations (We'll get to Africa in a second) defunding education due to outrageous military spending? South Africa is no paradise, but there is a great deal of development occurring there, and no doubt innovation along with it. Other African nations lag behind (there's a lot of US and Euro money in S. Africa), and are likely to be so for a while due to lacking education, but there is certainly a large labor pool to be exploited (thus the spike in N. African immigration to Europe).
I'm aware that "where America goes, the world often follows" - but that is clearly a meme of the past. The world follows us to war now only hesitantly, and then only because we make the most weapons, and thus they depend on us for their defensive needs, so find themselves hamstrung into lukewarm support for our military ventures.
Really? The world? I'm not so sure about that myself. This growing anti-intellectualism, a hallmark sign of fascism, has concerned me since I grew up with fanatics who burned records and books, who decried "book learning" as inferior to "common sense," and who insisted the answer to every question is in their holy book. I've got an instinct for it, but maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but it seems right now that we're the dark continent; Americans are the ones mired in national depression and mounting toward national psychosis, we're the ones lashing out at the world without violence and now turning it on our citizens; it's our government that insists on total authority over all citizens and superiority over all nations.
There has always been anti-intellectualism; it is when it becomes an acceptable part of the national dialog that we have trouble. The anti-intellectualism of "conservatives" is widely known, but the vicious and paranoid response of the 'anti-vaccine crowd' demonstrates "liberals" are not immune to this. In our polarized nation, we appear to have a triple division: on either side of a vast swath are dedicated fanatics who decry anything which weakens their ability to gain power; one of their primary tools is Fear, and Reason defeats Fear (every time), so they must damage or destroy Reason in order to prevail. The vast middle consists of under-educated folks whose critical faculties have been bludgeoned to near-death by insipid television programming and whose will, however minimal, has been weakened by mounting personal debt and a growing sense that "nothing can be done." They are prone to believe that "experts" got them into trouble because, well, they're so clueless and powerless they can't have done it themselves (they never admit this argument, but that is the core of it: I'm nobody - how could this be my fault?).
Finally, I'm not sure we've ever been a nation which largely respects intelligence and education. The founders were of course well-educated, but the nation was even then primarily uneducated farmers; industrialization gave us uneducated blue-collar workers; modernization gave us uneducated white-collar labor. It was only after WWII and the GI Bill that we had an explosion of education and a focus on knowledge as a tool of economic growth. Our various attempts to stimulate intellectual development fail because our focus is always on jobs, leading us to favor 'practical education' or 'vocational learning' over classical models which tend more to promote creative and critical thinking.
A lot of people are whistling past the graveyard on this issue, thinking it's confined to the right-wing, or perhaps diluting the issue by declaiming its significance. I don't know how anyone could harbor the illusion that Americans are getting smarter, or that only 30-50% of this country is anti-intellectual. I mean, I think Bill Maher and Jon Stewart are funny, but intellectuals? No. I don't even think they're that smart.
It's one thing for there to be different points of political view in healthy opposition to one another, almost like the brain's neural net doing self-training at night-time to prepare to cope better with the future; it's quite another for each half of the brain to be arguing with the central nervous system that the body would be better off if the other half were simply put to sleep and not allowed to operate.
These guys need to rewatch the original Star Trek episode The Enemy Within, where Kirk is split into two Kirks, one with his good features and one with his bad ones, and finds that neither part can live without the other. Conflict is an important aspect of creativity, but Obama was right in his recent meeting with the Republicans where he said that if you're not careful you can get yourself into such a state that you aren't politically able to act on a good idea you hear from the other side.
Both the right and the left have always been, to pick up a phrase from Abrawang's post, stuck in an ignorant tribalism. Is bloviating from the right any prettier than bloviating from the left. Listen to rants on Fox and elsewhere, listen to Sarah Palin and the Tea Baggers, then read comments by nose-in-the-air "liberals", who must have missed the three-decade-old track Ronald Reagan began us on. Who is more irrational and out of touch with where the country really is?
P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain knew--we have been and are!
But yes, much less than back then, even if you can prove that ten years ago was better than right now (wouldn't surprise me) - both are far better than the 50's, the 1900's or the 1860's.
As to why he didn't check, even if your statistic refuted anything he's saying - because he's not a paid journalist and it wasn't even central to his overall point. Expecting anyone to check each and every general statement they make in a blog post is not very realistic. And if your datum did contain anything to refute his comments, it would be very welcome right here in the comments section, but more so as a polite "actually, you may not be aware of this, but..." rather than in the form of some implied accusation that he was derelict in some duty he has.
Your citation of billionaires and salt-of-the-earth types is notable because both poles are perfectly fine as long as there is humility, empathy, understanding and quest for internal self-refinement all around. The billionaire is palatable as long as they understand the role of chaos in their good fortune and the salt-of-the-earth fellow is fine as long as they aren't comfortable with a stagnant mind and soul.
@ Cal- At least Stewart doesn't think he's exceptional.
It is a mandatory read in terms of imperial management, although I think she is too optimistic about some things, mainly, the Chinese in modern times.
But, you are also correct in terms of identifying what DeTocqueville worried about in Democracy in America, namely, that absent a hereditary aristocracy, a debased, pull people down, egalitarianism would come to dominance.
If you read On Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray, also a fascinating read, it is curious to note that genius by his measure, which I think is the right one, is under-represented in the United States.
The reason is probably that in a majoritarian democracy, if you try to do something cool, too many people that know you try to destroy it out of the
"Who does he think he is?" motive, failing to see that progress would halt.
It is unbearable for most human beings to have their mental inferiority demonstrated to them by someone they know, so, in a culture that like the United States, emphasizes social conformity for the reasons adduced by Mr. D, genius on a per capita basis is disliked and therefore not produced as much.
Nonetheless, I think you undersell Spengler.
He was not a cynic, but a genius, in the sense that he identified the application of the SLT to social systems and how they finish, which is, like the Chinese say, the Warring States, and I want to win that contest personally.
In other words, both fascism and communism are better understood as containing elements of Enlightenment doctrines within them, and as products of those doctrines, rather than as simple rejections of Enlightenment values.
Also, the invocation of George Marshall is a bit of a non sequitur. I assume the reference is to his administration of the Marshall Plan? He was very good at what he did (and an excellent logistical organizer) but hardly an intellectual beacon. To assume that he 'showed the way to a better era' to Europe is to be guilty of fairly extreme American myopia. (Is the suggestion that, without the Marshall Plan, England would have abandoned democracy? Or that France would have renounced science?) Or does the post suggest that Marshall was somehow showing the way to the US? That seems an even more bizarre accolade.