Ubi sunt: Elegy for American intelligence

Oh where have all the smart Americans gone? In his new book Rick Shenkman rehashes the tired stereotype of American ignorance, excerpted on Alternet here:

http://www.alternet.org/democracy/90161/?page=entire&ses=a2a47c7198da63e0197a5064b3e10f84

Although I haven't and won't read the book, the article uses statistics from widely distributed surveys over the past few decades to "prove" that Americans are more "ignorant" than ever. Among the things we don't know: Who was our greatest president?

Reading the article I couldn't help but think how it amounts to bitching about how the Americans who answered the surveys cited don't know what people like Shenkman think we should know (ie: those people specialize in things the rest of us don't give a shit about, which is understandably piss off). The example of the "greatest president" to me is typical of the poli sci privleging of knowledge in their field as essential to enacting "good citizenship" and being "informed." It isn't that Americans didn't answer the question, it's that they said it was Reagan, JFK or Clinton. Oh God, how stupid, we didn't answer the way they wanted us to.

There are several assumptions behind this argument that I don't buy. The first, of course, is the privileging of knowledge. Just because many Americans apparently can't answer basic civics questions does not mean they're stupid. Maybe it means civics teachers (ie poli sci types) are shitty teachers? I dunno, I didn't take high school civics and I can answer all the questions he cites. I would imagine, though, that these same people know a lot of other shit (for example, he talks about how more people can name the Simpsons than the parts of the 1st Amendment). What's wrong with that? Isn't that why we have "representative democracy" instead of democracy? So some people can specialize in governance while the rest of us go about the business of being real people with lives. Feeding our families and stuff like that.

Secondly, Shenkman assumes that because individuals can't answer these specific questions it means we as a whole are stupid. This might make sense at first thought in our individualistic society, but we're also an expert society. The division of labor in post-industrial society also means a division of knowledge. What this means is that while individually we might be ignorant of some things, we're also well-informed on other things and the diversity of the country means, to me, that as a whole we're probably SMARTER than ever before (see wikipedia). There is a lot of shit to know and you can't know it all, so most people pick some things to know about and others to leave to others. Many people know more than me about sports, for example. And if you take away the "better knowledge" thing, the amount that someone who knows a lot about sports knows is probably roughly equal to the random shit that I know a lot of. I would imagine.

You may not have thought about this, but there's a pretty good chance that you, if you have a basic college education or beyond (which most people I know do, cuz I'm an elitist) then you (and I) know more (in general) than, for example, Plato, Shakespeare, Washington, etc. Simply because we have the benefit of being on this end of history where a lot of people learned a lot of stuff that was cutting edge at the time and is now elementary school. Like gravity, you know?

Tell me who knew anything about global warming 50 years ago. I'm waiting.

This is all relative and I wonder what Shenkman is comparing this to. I know a lot about movies, but I don't know the technical aspects or even the high theory of it. I've just seen a lot. So if I were to talk to a "real" expert on film, I probably seem ignorant. But if I talk to someone else they might mistake me for an expert.

So the third assumption is I think the most damning: if Americans are more ignorant than ever, this assumes that at one time we were less "ignorant" than we are now. So this is where the conservative thing comes in. Shenkmen is essentially mourning our lost intelligence, without proving that we ever actually WERE more knowledgable than we are now. When was this? Can anyone tell me? Is it because back in the day instead of learning through multimedia we used to all read newspapers? Really? Have you ever actually READ an old newspaper? Because that shit is stupid. Sorry. I'm just saying.

Finally, this argument seems to me to basically be an ego-affirming argument. You see a lot of this on Alternet and other "liberal" media outlets. Bitching about how stupid everyone is because they don't agree with the author on everything, which is a conservative mentality. It's just another way of making up for insecurity. The entire argument amounts to "I must be smart because I can call these people out for being stupid." Which is stupid.

mm