This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House.
It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public
ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled
an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied
to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly
assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that
you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before
1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks,
for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of
ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of
anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University
historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,"
was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the
McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter
saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon
that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s
democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of
anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who
died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a
modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7
infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the
future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a
combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the
triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every
form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction
between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky
grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of
anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism
is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now
an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it
continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education
levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for
pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40
percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or
nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds
who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than
doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses
the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end
of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his
book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is
Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures
us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their
"vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the
screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental
atrophy. They’re signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what
toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they
sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies
as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that
focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a
study released last August, University of Washington
researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an
average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching
videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what
I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than
hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook
profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time –
as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems
to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember
even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less
has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq
war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier
ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in
Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not
necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy
to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces
of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the
New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is
cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television,
the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he
started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the
process of acquiring information through written language, all
politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their
messages as quickly as possible — and quickness today is much quicker
than it used to be. Harvard University’s
Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on
the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own
voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according
to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8
seconds.

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.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant
anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise
standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to
specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the
people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly
anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter
noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about
whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this
indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse
in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the
first item on the change agenda.

Via the Washington Post