Author Susan Jacoby had a good piece in The Washington Post yesterday about “The Dumbing of America.” The article focuses not just on the increased ignorance of American citizens in the digital age - largeley precipitated by the replacement of reading with various forms of multimedia - but the fact that so much of the citizenry is opposed to the idea that the aquisition of knowledge is important at all:
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 is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”
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.
This is one of the reasons I personally believe a test should be administered to those who wish to vote in a general election. It could be quite simple (think the written portion of your driver’s license test) but might help to weed out those individuals who are voting because MTV told them to, or because they think a candidate is “cool”, or because they’ll get a sticker that said “I voted today” that will get them a free taco at participating area restaraunts.
The sum total of anti-intellectualism is the success of Obama’s campaign. Nobody cares that he is bringing nothing of value to the table or that he could drive the country right off the economic cliff. Instead, they’re crying and fainting at his speeches.
We need to wise up. We’re running out of time.
