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.
Unfortunately, one can multiply this
scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are
quite literate, who believe the
United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed,
in 2005, George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a
graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment