America, the Ignorant

Power Line’s John Hinderaker comments on Susan Jacoby’s recent article, “The Dumbing of America.” John finds her arguments less than convincing. I think he’s on to something, and suggest you read his comments, but I think Jacoby’s article is most noteworthy for what it omits.

Jacoby attributes our collective stupidity to three things:

• First and foremost, video and the corresponding decline in newspaper reading (Jacoby is a journalist).
• Second, the erosion of general knowledge. Here she recounts FDR’s fireside chat asking Americans to get out their maps to understand the geography of battle. What has changed? Well, she says it’s a different country as well as a different presidency, and our knowledge of geography is deficient.
• Third, arrogance about our lack of knowledge, what Jacoby labels “anti-rationalism.”

I would concede that video is a poor substitute for reading, that many are woefully ignorant of geography, and that there are ways in which we celebrate our ignorance. But my biggest dispute with Jacoby is that she attributes the entire phenomenon of dumbness to her little list of causes cited above. Introducing her argument on anti-rationalism, she says:

“That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: . . .” (emphasis added).

Surely Jacoby’s list is not exhaustive and this is not the final factor. Most of us could, with scant reflection, provide several additional factors. And dumbness is neither particularly new nor peculiarly American as Jacoby contends.

True, ignorance of geography can seriously hamper one’s understanding of world events. Even in the absence of FDR, however, we should expect better analysis of the current war from our newspapers – something pertaining to our strategy, maybe even maps – and not simply a tabulation of dead. It doesn’t take a president to do this; any editor can make it happen. Try Googling “Iraq war strategy.” You will find numerous references to the political strategies of Republicans and Democrats, but not much on the military strategy that should inform the discussion. What kind of American dumbness impels the media to blather about the political strategies at home without examining the underlying military strategy? Perhaps one that values opinions over facts.

And while we’re lamenting the lack of general knowledge and the celebration of ignorance, we would do well to take a closer look at what passes for higher education in America and its systematic deconstruction of the foundations of Western culture. Jacoby does acknowledge “a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history.” The disjunction extends also to the arts, literature, religion, and philosophy. It is a disjunction perpetrated in no small part by so-called intellectuals who run our educational institutions, and it is misleading for Jacoby to chalk the problem up simply to “anti-intellectualism.” When we equate all cultures, all art, all philosophies, and can no longer exercise judgment about their relative merit, then we can claim ignorance of far greater significance than Jacoby describes. This is the ignorance to which higher education increasingly calls us.