Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  The memorial commission spent hours consulting with religious experts who concluded that Rawls’s theory was so much conspiratorial moonshine. It paid for and issued a white paper refuting his claims. Murdoch changed the name of his design from “Crescent of Embrace” to “Arc of Embrace.” He even adapted the design so that it looked less like a crescent and more like a semicircle. Rawls’s ideas kept circulating. Resentment and ill-feeling suffused the project and ran through the region like a low-grade fever. Rawls kept showing up at the meetings in Pennsylvania. Ed Root refused to shake his hand.

  Debate over the building of memorials is not uncommon. Indeed, Kenneth Foote, of the University of Colorado, argues that wide-ranging debate is a necessary part of the process, particularly in situations regarding memorials of traumatic events such as the September 11 attacks. “Debate,” Foote writes, “is an essential part of honoring victims and preserving memory…. Debate over what, why, when and where to build is best considered part of the grieving process.” However, Foote further argues, such debate is productive only if it leads to a consensus over the eventual memorial. Persistent hecklers, no matter how well amplified, do not contribute to that process at all.

  “Initially,” Root explains, wearily, “it didn’t have any legs. The only legs it had originally was in the blogosphere-type thing. Very few of the mainstream media picked up on it, originally…. Over time, there’s been different benchmarks in the process [of building the memorial] and, every time one of these benchmarks happened, Rawls would come out of the woodwork. He’d raise his head, and the blogs and everything would start to come all over again.

  “I mean, it’s a free country and he’s got a right to say what he wants to say, and I think there are people out there for whatever reason who are susceptible to conspiracies in this type of thing. And I honestly don’t know that I’m qualified to judge those people as to why they believe what they believe, but I think those people have a tendency to make noise in greater numbers.

  “It becomes more than a distraction. The park service, by definition, they have to respond to citizen complaints, and my belief is that the park service has bent over backwards to accommodate this person—more so than any one person deserves who came up with a theory that’s been debunked by every mainstream person that I can think of.

  “On a personal level, that anybody would think that I would be in favor of anything that honors the people that attacked our country and murdered a member of my family, well, it’s pretty much of a reach, I’d say.”

  Under the Third Great Premise, respect for the effort required to develop and promulgate nonsense somehow bleeds into a respect that validates the nonsense itself. Religion is the place where this problem becomes the most acute, where the noble tradition of the American crank is most clearly spoiled by respectability and by the validation bestowed by the modern media. Push religion into other spheres—like, say, politics and science—and the process intensifies. “Respect” for religion suddenly covers respect for any secular idea, no matter how crackpot, that can be draped in the Gospels.

  Thanks to the First Amendment and the godless Constitution to which it is happily attached, mainstream churches flourished in the United States. The country even made peace with Catholics and Jews, after a while. Meanwhile, a thousand-odd flowers bloomed: American Baptists and Southern Baptists, splitting over slavery, and First Baptists, the grandchildren of the slaves themselves. Anabaptists and Amish. Quakers and Shakers. Splinters of all of them, forming and re-forming. A main characteristic of many of these religions was that they withdrew from the culture at large. They did not seek validation for their ideas. They didn’t care whether they were respected. They preferred to be left alone. The desire to be left alone sent the Mormons to Utah and explains why the Amish still drive their buggies through the hills of southern Pennsylvania. Some sects, for example the Shakers, took it so seriously that they died out almost entirely. Even American fundamentalism, shaken by the consequences of having won the Scopes trial in 1922, withdrew from secular politics entirely before coming back with a vengeance in the 1970s. Neither the country nor the faith was better for their return.

  Susan Jacoby cites a writer named Carson Holloway who, in a 2006 article in the conservative National Review, called the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins a “poor public intellectual” essentially because Dawkins’s scathing critiques of all religions failed to take into account the feelings of their adherents. “It is hard to imagine,” Jacoby writes, “exactly how anyone might function as a public intellectual while taking care to avoid all issues that might trigger a spiritual, emotional, or intellectual crisis among his or her readers.”

  Having freed up religion to grow in its own sphere, the founders went back to being inveterate tinkerers and arguers. These were fundamentally curious men. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson ordered the pair to categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping all the terrain from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, the founders assumed that they had established a polity that guaranteed their posterity would be curious as well. In 1815, appealing to Congress to fund a national university, James Madison called for the development of “a nursery of enlightened preceptors.”

  It’s a long way from that speech to the morning of February 18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the Bush administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is an even longer way from Franklin’s kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation’s science classrooms. “Both sides ought to be properly taught,” the president said, “so people can understand what the debate is about.”

  The “debate,” of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. The very notion of a debate on evolution’s validity is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, have slipped, through lassitude and inattention, across the border into Idiot America. Intelligent design is religion disguised as science, and it defends itself as science by relying largely on the “respect” that we must give to all religious doctrine. Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it.

  If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway. By the rules governing those realms, any scientific theory is a mere opinion, and everyone’s entitled to those. Scientific fact is as mutable as a polling sample.

  The rest of the world looks on in wide-eyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein so wanted to be a part that he moved here, seems to have enveloped itself in a fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanness of blastocysts and the victims of Parkinson’s disease.

  Kit Hodges is a scientist who studies the geology of the Himalayas, when he is not dodging the local Maoist guerrillas. Suffice it to say that Hodges’s data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the Creation Museum, whereupon dinosaurs and naked people do gambol together.

  “Even in the developing world, where I spend a lot of time doing my work, if you tell them you’re from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it’s a big deal. If I go to India, and I tell them I’m from MIT, it’s a big deal. If I go to Thailand, it’s a big deal. In Iowa, they could give a rat’s ass. And that’s a weird thing, that we’re moving that way as a nation.

  “Scientists are always portrayed as being above the fray, and I guess to a certain extent that’s our fault, because scientists don’t do a good enough jo
b communicating with people who are non-scientists that it’s not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another. The reason, for example, that the creationists have been so effective is that they’ve put a premium on communications skills. It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it’s important to them, and they are hugely effective at it.”

  Bush was not talking about science—not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct—ostensibly without God, but with a Designer that looks enough like him to be his smarter brother—and an attempt to gussy creationism up in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified—or, more important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain cachet ought to be irrelevant. A higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there’s no great push to “teach the debate” about what happened in Dallas in the nation’s history classes. Bush wasn’t talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and how many votes there were in breaking Ganesh’s theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.

  THERE is still hope for any country that remains as easy to love as this one, in no small part because this is still the best country ever in which to be a public crank. The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid.

  Americans can awaken on a fine and sparkling spring morning happy in the knowledge that hundreds—nay, thousands—of their fellow citizens believe that space aliens landed in New Mexico, that Lyndon Johnson had John Kennedy killed from ambush, that the Knights Templar meet for coffee twice a month in the basement of the United Nations building, and that the Bavarian Illuminati control everything from the price of oil to the outcome of the fourth race at Louisiana Downs. Let us be clear. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.

  “A silly reason from a wise man,” Mr. Madison once wrote to his friend Richard Rush, “is never the true one.”

  We will have to sort ourselves out again here in America. We will have to put things back on the right shelves. We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It’s a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Beyond Atlantis

  In 1789, President Madison told Congress: “Gentlemen will recollect that some of the most important discoveries, both in arts and sciences, have come forward under very unpromising and suspicious appearances.” Once tested and found wanting, a new idea should be mined for whatever merits it might have, and the rest abandoned. All he hoped was that the people in that society could educate themselves sufficiently to distinguish between the good ideas and the transparently crazy ones, and engage with one another well enough to use the best parts of the latter to improve the former. They needed us to celebrate our cranks by keeping them in their proper place, from where they can help the rest of us live our lives. Madison is an imperfect guide, but he is as good a guide as any other.

  THE success of Atlantis flabbergasted Donnelly, but it also deeply reinforced the feeling he’d always had, and which had been exacerbated by his political setbacks and the financial collapse of his Nininger project, that he was a genius for whom the world was not yet ready, and against whom the dunces had entered into confederacy. “We have fallen upon an age when the bedbugs are treated like gentlemen and the gentlemen like bedbugs,” he wrote in his diary one day in 1882. “My book has helped me very much because my prestige before it was below zero…. A succession of political defeats and an empty pocket would destroy the prestige of Julius Caesar or Benjamin Disraeli.”

  The book’s success also encouraged Donnelly to move even further out in his scientific speculations. That same year, he followed up Atlantis with Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel. Finished in a mere two months, Ragnarok is even more densely argued than Atlantis. “Reader,” Donnelly begins, “let us reason together,” and he then leads said reader hopelessly into the weeds.

  Ragnarok postulates that the earth’s land masses were formed by what Donnelly called the Drift, and that the Drift was caused, not by the movement of glacial ice sheets, as conventional science would have it, but by an ancient collision with a passing comet. Mankind existed in a kind of golden age before the Drift and then, when the comet arrived, fell back into a darkness out of which it continues to struggle. (The comet turns out to have been the same one that did in Atlantis.) In support of his theory, Donnelly again called on ancient legends. He noted that prehistoric societies from the Aztecs to the Druids all included in their mythology the story of a cataclysmic event that involved the darkening of the sky.

  Donnelly concluded that a collision with a comet was the source of all of these stories, and that the sky turned black due to the dust and gravel thrown into the atmosphere by the impact. (“Ragnarok” was the Scandinavian myth of “the twilight of the gods.” Donnelly wrote that hundreds of scholars had mistranslated the word from the Icelandic, and that it actually meant “rain of dust.”) He notes that both Milton and Shakespeare used comets as harbingers of doom, drawing on an ancient, visceral terror of them. “They are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous,” Donnelly writes, “something let loose, like a tiger in the heavens, athwart a peaceful and harmonious world.” That this was a curious string of adjectives for anyone like Ignatius Donnelly to sling at an innocent comet apparently eluded the author.

  Ragnarok is such almost perfect pseudoscience that Donnelly can be said to have helped invent the form. It so gleams with the author’s erudition that you don’t notice at first that none of it makes any sense. In addition, Donnelly was a master cherry picker. He seized on data that support one conclusion only to discard the same data when it seems to undermine another. For example, some people theorized that the continents were formed by the actions of the waves. Other people attributed their formation to the forces of the continental ice shelves. Donnelly dismisses the first theory using evidence developed in favor of the latter. He then dismisses the ice-shelf hypothesis by saying the whole notion is impossible. This leaves him with his comet theory, which he admits is complex, but then, Donnelly argues, so are all the others, so why shouldn’t his be as true as they are, especially with the Druids on his side. “I believe I am right,” Donnelly wrote in his diary, “and, if not right, plausible.”

  Ragnarok bombed. Notwithstanding the success they’d had with Atlantis, Harpers refused to publish it. Scribners passed, too. The reviews were scathing. The reception convinced Donnelly that his genius was as threatening to the scientific community as his political ideas had been in the Congress.

  The sheer preposterousness of Ragnarok seems to have overwhelmed even Donnelly. At the end, it seemed to dawn on him that he’d written not a work of science but an allegorical narrative of the fall of man. “And from such a world,” he writes in the book’s final sentence, “God will fend off the comets with his great right arm and angels will exult over heaven.” It’s as though Donnelly went to bed one night as Darwin and awoke the next morning as Milton.

  There are echoes of Ragnarok in the modern “scientific” case for intelligent design, and there’s not a great distance between the codes that Donnelly found in Shakespeare’s plays and the impulse that today sends people prowling the Louvre looking for the clues that a popular novel has told them are encoded in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. When Dan Brown got to the end of his treasure hunt, Ignatius Donnelly wa
s there, waiting for him. It’s wrong to believe that our abiding appetite for counterhistory simply makes us a nation of suckers who will fall for anything. Sometimes, that appetite makes us a harder people to fool. It’s meant to operate parallel with the actual country and to influence it, but subtly, the way a planet, say, might influence the orbit of a comet. It’s meant to subvert, but not to rule.

  IN 2003, the state of Texas determined that it would build itself something called the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC). This was a transportation megasystem involving highways, railbeds, and freight corridors that would stretch over four thousand miles and price out at nearly $200 billion. According to a report by Christopher Hayes in The Nation, the TTC would pave over almost a half a million acres of the state. The first leg would be a massive toll road, built and operated by a Spanish company.

  From the start, there was a great deal of resistance to the plan. Local landowners hated it because of the amount of Texas that would disappear beneath it. The process was insufficiently transparent, which was hardly a surprise, given that Texas has operated largely as an oligarchy since they sank the first oil well there. There aren’t many toll roads in Texas, and the ones that exist are not popular, especially not among the long-distance commuters of the state’s several sprawling metroplexes. What ensued was a classic political knife fight, with local opposition arrayed against powerful special interests and at one point, as Hayes reported, Republican governor Rick Perry arrayed against his own state party’s platform, which opposed the TTC. The battle engaged many of the issues of the day regarding the globalized economy, but it was not particularly remarkable.

  And then the road took an even wilder turn, disappearing into the mists where Ignatius Donnelly once looked for cosmic gravel.