by Penny, Laura
This Young Earth thinking – I am Year Zero! – obliterates history. Meghan McCain and my bored students are essentially Whig historians who do not know what the term Whig history means. They think that they live in the best of all possible worlds and act as though all previous generations were just eejits, fumbling and bumbling their way towards the world we live in now, where everyone knows better. Consequently, they are free to ignore the past. This is sad, and scary, because it means they are like goldfish in a bowl, totally trapped in their own cultural moment, unable to consider it critically or compare it to anything.
6. Nerds are negative nellies: pessimists and player-haters.
The only kind of thinking that sells really well is positive thinking. Unfortunately, this is not thinking at all. For example, The Secret book and DVD both did gangbusters. Those who market The Secret and hawk its law of attraction maintain that “it is the culmination of many centuries of great thinkers, scientists, artists and philosophers.”6 But I’m quite confident that both Jesus and Leonardo da Vinci had a more challenging and complicated world view than “wishing extra-hard makes it so,” which is what the gurus of The Secret teach their terminally credulous followers.
In a similar vein, many of the most successful megachurches of recent years retail prosperity gospels, reassuring you that Jesus wants you to be rich, that you are all (to filch a phrase from the troublingly toothy Joel Osteen) “God’s masterpiece.” Never mind that Christ’s instructions to would-be followers are quite explicit, right there in the Bible in red type: yard sale, drain the accounts, give it all away, and get back to me when I know you really mean it. Some of the most popular strains of contemporary Christianity have more to say about getting than giving, casting the Lord as a celestial career coach and concierge and the priest or minister as a – gross portmanteau alert – pastorpreneur.
In a 2008 New York Times op ed, writer Barbara Ehrenreich linked the popularity of New Agey and Christianish positive thinking to the mortgage meltdown. She wrote:
The idea is [that] … thinking things, “visualizing” them – ardently and with concentration – actually makes them happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits, the reasoning goes, if only you truly believe that you can.7
All that complicated fiscal math was a towering cathedral of logic tottering on a squidgy foundation of feelings. John Maynard Keynes used the term animal spirits to describe the psychological or emotional underpinnings of the market, such as trust and confidence. The Internet and housing bubbles of the past twenty years were periods of overconfidence, of investors getting skunk-drunk on optimism. The crashes and slumps of 2000, 2008, and 2009 were the hangover and morning-after regrets as hot dot-coms and formerly foxy mortgages proved coyote ugly in the merciless morning sun.
Our valorization of belief, our conviction that faith and certitude are virtues, makes the hard work of thinking look pretty dour in comparison. Doubt, skepticism, research, revision, sustained criticism: all of these read as negative, which is a big cultural no-no. Staying positive in spite of the odds, in spite of the facts, is lauded as beneficial to our physical and spiritual health and our capacity to accumulate wealth.
Rational thought has become an excluded middle, squished and muffled by more popular mental modes such as wishing and counting. The practical, money-minded side dismisses thinking as useless navel-gazing, and the wishful one sees it as a major downer, bad thoughts that beckon bad news. Criticizing is just complaining – another object of bipartisan scorn. The right contends that lefty criticisms of markets or the latest war are blame-America-firsting, the mewling and puling of moon-bat losers who are jealous of the successes of suits and soldiers. At the other end of the ideological spectrum from these beefy pragmatists, the flaky and wishful also take a dim view of criticism. They decry negative energy and channelling too much of one’s vital force into corrosive pessimism, lest one poison oneself with hatred.
Even though these two camps appear to have little in common, they both contend that criticism is a wholly personal matter. This is another sign of the decline of reasonable argument; objections are routinely reduced to personal or private squabbles, expressions of petty passions such as jealousy or bitterness. Cons attribute liberal gripes to the individual whinger’s envy or thwarted longing to be the boss of everyone. New Agers exhort us to let go of the unhappy thoughts, as focusing on them will curdle our spirit. In both cases, it is actually all about you: narcissism in the guise of traditional morality or the latest spirituality.
The rugged-individualist and hippy-trippy versions of pro-positive rhetoric both sound awfully retrograde to me. Complaints about complaining, no matter their political slant, all tell us the same thing: Shut up and smile, smile, smile. Keep a gratitude journal, churls. You can thank your executive liege lords for the gift of unpaid overtime and your daily ladlefuls of high-fructose corn gruel.
This complaint – that nerds are negative – is not as goofy or paranoid as the preceding five. Professors can appear negative when they debunk some cherished notion or drop more bad news about our expanding debts, waistlines, and environmental wreckage. But this is one of the most valuable public services nerds provide. Negativity and pessimism are seriously – maybe even dangerously – underrated in North America.
Astute readers have doubtless noticed that these six complaints about nerds contradict each other. But intrepid anti-intellectuals continue to combine them, jumping from charge to charge in the space of a single op ed, speech, sentence, or protest sign. Can someone please let me know if we’re supposed to be lazy losers who can’t hack it in the real world, or corrupters of youth, enemies of capital, and despoilers of democracy? I’d like to adjust my alarm clock accordingly.
This kind of cognitive dissonance is not a problem if you deny that cogitation has value, if you insist that feelings and beliefs are more authentic, more democratic, more trustworthy than ideas. The realm of feelings and beliefs is much more accommodating than reason or history, allowing nerd-bashers to posit a world where intellectuals are simultaneously ineffectual and threatening, buffoons and tempters, failures at life and the covert masters of the world.
Public discourse is a messy mélange of bean-counting, belligerence, and bathos, of number crunching and emoting. We veer from childish wishes (house prices will go up forever!) and hysterical declarations to narrow calculations and reductive analyses. Just watch your local news team as they whipsaw between raw numbers (box-office totals, the GDP, unemployment rates, grim health stat o’ the day) and ploys to jerk tears, fear, and aaws from their audience (house fire, terrorists, child abduction, kid eats ice cream). Numbers and stats bob in a sentimental slop, a swampy slurry of bits of hard data and buckets of mushy manipulation.
Education might look like one of the most centrist issues possible, given that virtually everyone, from wealthy employers to impecunious hippies, agrees that kids should be well-educated. Even the most boorish politician knows better than to run on a platform of fewer, crappier schools and lazier, thicker children. But this nice warm unanimity dissipates quickly when we start talking about why we need good schools, what we mean by good schools, and how we might improve schools.
Arguments about schools and universities, and the way we conduct those arguments, show us that the North American public is quite riven about the life of the mind. We may be dismissive of intellectual life, but we are also exceedingly defensive about it. We are quite anxious about our collective intelligence, constantly fretting about the better students of worse lands supplanting our slack little button-mashing screen junkies.
Again, though, this concern has more to do with money than brains. We’re not worried that our kids will be less well-read than Chinese students. Instead we fear that they will lose out economically and technologically, that the flow of shit work will turn against us and we will be stuck making the poisonous toys and tainted toothpaste,
horror of horrors. This is why there are campaigns to get more kids to study the STEM disciplines: science, tech, engineering, and math.
Of course these subjects are important; even Mr. and Ms. Real World will condone them. But it’s foolish and counterproductive to insist that these are the only subjects that really matter and that we should starve the spendthrift arts to save the sciences. First, this ignores the economy of most post-secondary institutions. Science students require a panoply of expensive equipment, which is subsidized by el cheapo arts majors. Pricey instructional tech is slowly creeping into the liberal arts, but the majority of humanities classes require nothing more than a room and a prof and a pile of books.
If that prof is an adjunct – and many in the liberal arts are – the labour costs for the class are less than a single student’s tuition fee. The other twenty-nine, forty-nine, or ninety-nine cheques are free to fund the more important functions and tools of the modern university: new computers for the geeks, feeding the protective blubbery layers of administrators and fundraisers, and splashing out for marketing baubles like snazzier dorms and shinier brochures and websites.
Second, pushing kids who have no interest in a topic to study it as a means to an end guarantees that there will be a goodly number of incompetent, resentful dullards drawing blood and drafting blueprints in the near future. And that’s if they last that long, gritting their teeth and sticking it out till graduation. Nearly half of the people who start a college degree in the U.S.A. never finish it. Steering someone towards a particular major is too little, too late. Cultivating quality nerds is a process that has to start much earlier.
When employers bitch and moan about college grads – can’t read, can’t write, stare blankly when you mention the before-times – their complaints suggest that liberal-artsy skills such as general knowledge and linguistic ability do have some use after all. But a rigorous humanities education also teaches you that there are values other than use, that there is more to human existence than being an employee busy brown-nosing or, better yet, becoming the boss.
Our insistence that everything, especially education, need be useful is wrong-headed. The presumption that everything exists merely for our use is spectacularly ignorant and wantonly destructive, and it’s partly responsible for our ongoing and intertwined economic and environmental difficulties. Moreover, the idea that we are hard-nosed pragmatists, that North Americans venerate usefulness above all things, is utterly at odds with all that crazy shit we’ve just bought and hope to replace and upgrade someday soon, when this whole recession/depression thing finally blows over.
Every university offers a couple of courses that sound kooky and easy to mock in an op ed. But have you been in a Wal-Mart or on Amazon.com lately? How much of that junk is, strictly speaking, useful? It’s pretty hilarious that a culture so devoted to toys and divertissements and status symbols and paraprofessions and pseudo-sciences pitches hissy fits about usefulness when students are wasting their time and money on literature, history, and philosophy. No, it’s far better for them to drop out and pursue a higher calling, like popularizing another cheap piece of plastic guaranteed to delight and serve for mere minutes before it clogs landfills from here to eternity. If they must learn, they should study something really real, something with lots of rote memorizing and right or wrong answers, or the latest trendy, tradesy e-degree. Hell, then they can come up with something truly useful, like a new iFart application.
Throughout this book, I will look at the way our more-money-than-brains mindset affects schools, universities, politics, and pop culture. First, though, a caveat: one of the risks of writing a book like this is the “get off my lawn” tone that creeps into conversations about ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Teachers have bitched about the kids today since Socrates and Saint Augustine bemoaned their feckless charges. Every generation seems to turn declinist when it starts to sag and flag. I would like to avoid this kind of argumentum ad fogeyum.
First, it is unfair to all the great students I’ve had, smart kids of all ages who still care about reading and thinking. Second, I can’t really make a proper declinist argument – one that traces a drop-off from a high point. At the risk of sounding Meghan McCainish, I was born after the periods that other cultural critics cite as periods of intellectual verve and pro-nerd sentiment, such as Hofstader’s early 1960s.
I’m not really interested in pursuing the gap between our particular cultural moment and some wiser age, anyway. It’s not like we can hop in the way-back machine and pretend away developments such as the cable spectrum or the Web, nor would I want to do so. The Internet can be an invaluable resource. There are plenty of intelligent blogs and even more plum dumb books. No medium has the monopoly on bad ideas. Explanations that heap all the blame on text messaging or video games and rap are no better than fulminations against the intellectual elite.
I’m not worried about our failing to live up to the past, though it is a bummer to see so many blithely forget it. This is a really teachery thing to say, but North America’s problem is that it is not living up to its potential. What interests me is the gap between our speeches about schools and the actual school system. What interests me is the gap between North America’s technical sophistication and our ignorance and intolerance of other branches of knowledge.
Pandering to the common folks and their simple ways is the brightly coloured cultural candy-coating on the bitter pill of policies that are anything but populist. Sarah Palin, who has enjoyed a six-figure income for some time, plays working-class heroine by serving moose chili with a side of word salad. She swings the real-world cudgel with indefatigable vim. I’m sure she believes every garbled word, but her white-trash minstrel show in fact equates being working class with being an ignoramus.
Palin’s popularity is a perfect example of the way class has been divorced from wealth and is now wedded to cultural signifiers like religion, rhetoric, and hobbies. People born to trust-fundom and the beneficiaries of the past few bubbles – members of the loftiest economic classes – are not the elite. Rather, the elitists are the ones who sound like they’ve spent too much time in class. A delightful example of this occurred when Lady de Rothschild, a mogul and Clinton fundraiser, decamped to the McCain campaign because she feared that Barack Obama was an elitist. In an interview with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer, she said it was so sad to see the Democratic Party “play the class card,” and then ended by alleging that Blitzer was the elitist, not her.8
I reckon that Wolf makes a pretty penny for being on CNN whenever Larry King and Anderson Cooper aren’t. Still, his talking-head salary likely approximates the fresh flower budget for the de Rothschild family estates. But Blitzer is part of the media and de Rothschild, the humble daughter of an aviation company owner in Jersey, just happened to make a pile and marry into a family synonymous with wealth. She is an ordinary self-made millionaire aristocrat who wants to live in an America where anybody – nay, everybody! – can be an ordinary self-made millionaire aristocrat too.
The anti-elitist invective against nerds is laughable when you consider its sources. It is quite a feat of magician’s misdirection, a depressingly effective conjuring of pointy-headed straw men and scarecrows. One of the brutal truths of anti-intellectualism, or at least the version that currently prevails, is that it does not harm intellectuals that much. Oh sure, the name-calling, the snarky op eds, and the budget cuts sting. Job losses and ill-paid part-time gigs – all the rage lately in ostensibly elite fields such as journalism and academia – are difficult to bear. The acquaintances and relatives disappointed that you are not a “real” doctor can also be a swift kick in the ego.
These insults and indignities are flesh wounds compared to the damage that anti-intellectualism inflicts on some of the groups that embrace it ardently, that defend their ignorance as a virtue, be they the too-cool-for-school kids who inadvertently consign themselves to lives of poverty and drudgery or the electorates that must endure policies enacted by plutocratic pols playi
ng just plain folks in order to pick their pockets.
Jeremiads against the nerd elite play on our egalitarian sympathies, but they seem misplaced and daffy given the obeisance we render to other, much more powerful elites. Anti-intellectualism and ignorance have crummy socio-economic consequences, and they do some serious ethical damage too. Institutions such as the free press, democracy, and free markets collapse into farragoes of corruption and incompetence without the scrutiny of an informed populace. Notions such as universal suffrage and inalienable human rights are inextricably linked to the idea of universal human reason, the sense that we are all thinking people who can disagree and debate matters without resorting to fisticuffs or deadly force. When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old-fashioned phrase from Kant.
Chapter Two
AT THE ARSE END OF THE LATE, GREAT ENLIGHTENMENT
The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature!
– IMMANUEL KANT1
In the summer of 2009, Fox News bloviator Glenn Beck embarked on his “Common Sense Comedy Tour,” a title that contains precisely one accurate descriptor. Beck, a dry-drunk Mormon shock jock, dressed in Founding Fathers regalia accessorized with a pair of sneakers. Beck said that he wore the eighteenth-century costume to illustrate that the founders were regular folk, just like the lumpenyanks in the audience. Oh sure, they might have been geniuses, Beck concedes, but they couldn’t come up with deodorant or pockets, haw haw haw. The Enlightenment luminaries who wrote America’s founding documents were not that different from them. They loooved their country and stood up for it. Were the good people in the crowd willing to do the same – to rise up and resist the threat of out-of-control government?
