No Brakes or Brains

I have felt for a long time that the root of the current problems in the United States is ignorance. I have no reason to suppose Americans are any more or less stupid than other peoples of the world. But I have lots of little Walter-facts that convince me most Americans are woefully uneducated. (I say "Walter-facts" because those opposing or disbelieving my views will challenge all of them. I've come to accept that most of what I know is treated as non-existent or irrelevant by others.)

One of my major reasons for considering Americans ignorant is what passes for college curricula these days. Courses and standards reached a peak in the 1960s, and have been "dumbed down" ever since. The fraction of Americans attending college and even graduating has increased - I think college attendees are now about 15% of the population - but the amount of education has more than correspondingly decreased. The course titles are often the same as in days of yore, but the course content is far less. I cannot escape the feeling they teach "Western Civ Xtra Lite" these days, because recent college graduates seem unaware of some of the greatest names in History. When they do know a name, they are frequently confused about time, place and manner. High school graduates might be excused for thinking that Abraham Lincoln was President in the World War II era, but what are we to make of U.S. college graduates who either haven't read the Constitution or don't know what it says? There is some compensation for that particular loss: many young people know more about Eastern cultures than older generations were taught. (My undergraduate department belatedly hired a fellow who knew something about Indian Philosophy, but never got around to China and the Far East.) The difficulty is that what is known about the East is a smattering of yoga and Buddhism, enough to make glib statements to a date at a bar.

This is not to say a determined person cannot become well educated at American Universities. There is still a core of attendees who actually seek knowledge, not just a job. Unfortunately, they are too few to dominate the University culture as they once did. In some cases, they are too few to prevent an eventual decline in departmental faculty and staff. Threatened departments at many Universities include Mathematics, Philosophy and others related to Art, Literature and Humanities. The United States is no longer the center of wisdom in many disciplines. The decline of American academia is hastened by the return of Asian students and teachers to their homelands, now that Asian economic standards and American xenophobia are rapidly rising.

I am reminded that my undergraduate college was dominated by engineers, most of whom took whichever classes in the liberal arts were deemed easy A's and B's. Since all those humanities courses were commonly described as "bullshit," students were unwilling to put any more effort into them than earned the desired grade (as in the Harvard gentleman's C). They treated those subjects as word games with queer, shifting rules, not reservoirs of sure knowledge. They sat through economics obediently, nodding their heads in  assent to every proposition "proved" by the in-house Capitalist priest. What my engineering classmates wanted were formulas useful in obtaining their greedy, selfish ambitions. This is why, when the same men arrived in management some years later, they had few concerns about the lives of the wage slaves they oversaw. Education was all about self-service, not public service; certainly not serving humanity.

While there are some reasonably intelligent Conservatives who might be called intellectuals, such people are few and far between. Conservatives love their William Buckley of Aristocratic pretensions, fawning on his words, but Buckley does not often rate highly as other than a master of rhetoric. In Plato's authentic aristocratic world, rhetoricians were not held in high esteem. I first saw Buckley in action in 1958 or 1959, when he debated a socialist, Shiffrin, before the committed ultra-conservative audience of my alma mater. Buckley was awarded the tongue, ears, tail and debating points on that occasion, but I remember a Moderator as biased as the audience in arbitrating questions and answers. The point of the event was, of course, to offer the sophomoric undergraduates a Bull Fight with a certain outcome. Most of the audience enjoyed the spectacle much as Romans thrilled at the dismemberment of martyrs thrown to the lions in the Coliseum. Buckley chose a strategy for victory: pick just slightly weaker opponents, then slice and dice them before audiences demanding blood. I have never seen Buckley win against a strong liberal contender. What's important about William Buckley is exactly that he did pioneer and persist in a winning strategy which eventually elected the Conservative Reagan government and introduced an era of Conservatism into the United States.

Would Conservatives have gotten so far, had the political battles been fought on level playing fields? I doubt it. I think they know that, which is why the aptly described Faux News is so outrageously mistaken and biased in its reportage. The Conservative case can only be won in front an audience willing to ignore errors of commission and omission; which finds its sympathy in ritual sacrifices accompanied by deeply toned incantations of mumbo-jumbo.

The religious commitment of Conservatives to Smithian Capitalism is impressive. Their certitude inspires fervor, so they have spread their flat world doctrine over most of the continents of a round planet. This repetition of the success of the Medieval Catholic Church did not come about on the strength of reason alone. Just as the Medieval Church depended on the arms of worldly Kings and Knights, so our modern Crusaders are accompanied by legions of soldiers and marines preceded by nearly invisible, deadly flying carpets. Would a sane man believe in an Invisible Hand, when it is obvious things are always pre-arranged to benefit denizens of the nether world, Plutocrats?

Because people are ignorant, they do not know the true arrangement of the world. Their experience should, but does not, instruct, because their heads are filled with lies and half-truths. They are too jaded with petty pleasures to care about the deceits practiced on them. They accept the easy sentence - even a lie - rather than take the difficult course of knowledge. This is possible because everything can be presented this way or that. Words are tricks waiting to be played on the unwary. Those tricks played by Conservatives and their fellow-travelers portray the American Way as the salvation of mankind. It's easy enough to believe.