April 8, 2013 |
In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the
History News Network, published a book entitled
Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter.
In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were:
(1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how
their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing
to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate
amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and
(4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions,
irrational fears and public relations babble.
Shenkman
spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls
and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard
to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?
One
thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of
affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local
affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of
authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for
any population.
To
put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or
no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to
impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something
non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they
will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.
The
primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay
attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention. For instance,
in Shenkman’s book unfavorable comparisons are sometimes made between
Americans and Europeans. Americans often are said to be much more
ignorant about world geography than are Europeans.
This
might be, but it is, ironically, due to an accident of geography.
Americans occupy a large subcontinent isolated by two oceans. Europeans
are crowded into small contiguous countries that, until recently,
repeatedly invaded each other as well as possessed overseas colonies.
Under
these circumstances, a knowledge of geography, as well as paying
attention to what is happening on the other side of the border, has more
immediate relevance to the lives of those in Toulouse or Amsterdam than
is the case for someone in Pittsburgh or Topeka. If conditions were
reversed, Europeans would know less geography and Americans more.
Ideology and Bureaucracy
The
localism referenced above is not the only reason for widespread
ignorance. The strong adherence to ideology and work within a
bureaucratic setting can also greatly narrow one’s worldview and cripple
one’s critical abilities.
In
effect, a closely adhered to ideology becomes a mental locality with
limits and borders just as real as those of geography. In fact, if we
consider nationalism a pervasive modern ideology, there is a direct
connection between the boundaries induced in the mind and those on the
ground.
Furthermore,
it does not matter if the ideology is politically left or right, or for
that matter, whether it is secular or religious. One’s critical
abilities will be suppressed in favor of standardized, formulaic answers
provided by the ideology. Just so work done within a bureaucratic
setting.
Bureaucracies
position the worker within closely supervised departments where success
equates with doing a specific job according to specific rules. Within
this limited world, one learns not to think outside the box, and so,
except as applied to one’s task, critical thinking is discouraged and
one’s worldview comes to conform to that of the bureaucracy. That is why
bureaucrats are so often referred to as cogs in a machine.
That
American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less
distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the
minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that
polls show over
half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was.
We
might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there
are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated.
Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated
from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show
Lou Dobbs Tonight. Speaking
on March 23 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela
McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the
following exchange:
McGlowan:
“What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that
wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if
they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms
under this Obama administration.”
Dobbs:
“We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al
Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want
to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”
Despite
education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in
any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the
President has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast
majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the President’s actions
point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and
that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.”
Finally,
while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda,
they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central
organization that dictates their actions.
Did
the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any
difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not.
Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this
surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them
not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well
rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across
them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts
for more than the messy, often complicated truth.
Likewise,
so paranoid are gun enthusiasts (whose level of education varies
widely) that any really effective government supervision of the U.S. gun
trade would be seen as a giant step toward dictatorship. Therefore,
the National Rifle Association, working its influence on Congress, has
for years successfully
restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using computers to create a central database of gun transactions.
And, last but certainly not least, there is the
unending war against teaching evolution in
U.S. schools. This Christian fundamentalist effort often enjoys
temporary success in large sections of the country and is ultimately
held at bay only by court decisions reflecting (to date) a solid sense
of reality on this subject. By the way, evolution is a scientific theory
that has as much evidence to back it up as does gravity.
Teaching Critical Thinking?
As
troubling as this apparently perennial problem of ignorance is, it is
equally frustrating to listen to repeated schemes to teach critical
thinking through the public schools. Of course, the habit of asking
critical questions can be taught. However, if you do not have a
knowledge base from which to consider a situation, it is hard think
critically about it.
So
ignorance often precludes effective critical thinking even if the
technique is acquired. In any case, public school systems have always
had two primary purposes and critical thinking is not one of them. The
schools are designed to prepare students for the marketplace and to make
them loyal citizens.
The
marketplace is most often a top-down, authoritarian world and loyalty
comes from myth-making and emotional bonds. In both cases, really
effective critical thinking might well be incompatible with the desired
end.
Recently,
a suggestion has been made to forget about the schools as a place to
learn critical thinking. According to Dennis Bartels’s article “
Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom” appearing in
Scientific Americanonline, schools can’t teach critical thinking because they are too busy teaching to standardized tests.
Of
course, there was a time when schools were not so strongly mandated to
teach this way and there is no evidence that at that time they taught
critical thinking. In any case, Bartels believes that people learn
critical thinking in informal settings such as museums and by watching
the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
He
concludes that “people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society
depends on them being able to make critical decisions.” If that were
only true it would make this an easier problem to solve.
It
may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize
themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to
tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and
to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly
focused critical thought.
But
beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies,
be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking
about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the
case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls
into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the
better.
Under
such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events
outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to
rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.
The
truth is that people who are consistently active as critical thinkers
are not going to be popular, either with the government or their
neighbors. They are called gadflies. You know, people like Socrates, who
is probably the best-known critical thinker in Western history. And, at
least the well educated among us know what happened to him.
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