This is kind of a follow-up to my previous essay, because the theme is basically the same, but it has more to do with why we behave in ways that do not warrant respect.
The opening line of volume II of Democracy in America states, "I think that in the civilized world there is no country less interested in philosophy than the United States1" But the reasons he gives for this are at best inadequate, and at worst flatly wrong. He claims that Americans aren't interested in philosophy because they are more concerned with private matters, but this fails to explain the kind of disrespect vomited out by our political commentators every single day. If it were merely the kind of apathy de Tocqueville described, Americans would at least be tolerant of others' views, and they clearly are not.
Americans engage not in debate, but rather in personal attack. Glenn Beck personally attacked a sociology professor, and he personally attacked George Soros for stating their opinions. Many people, some I've even heard myself, have personally attacked everyone from Nancy Pelosi to President Obama, and, when pressed, cannot give sufficient justification for their attitudes.
I have personally accused Sarah Palin and most of the GOP/Tea Party establishment of being stupid, so I'm not blameless either, but I can cite numerous specific examples to justify why I believe most of the prominent figures in the opposing party to be intellectually impaired (Michele Bachmann's 'rebuttal' to the SotU is a good start).
When we aren't talking about beliefs or facts; when someone's beliefs are nebulous at best, and their knowledge of the facts is grossly lacking, we may not have a choice but to point this out to them. I realize here that I am defending what I have set out to stop.
But back to the issue at hand: Why is there 'anti-intellectualism' in America, and why is it so pervasive? Even in matters of religion, people who have studied it most--atheists--are accused consistently of being bitter and angry, even when they are not, and even if their justifications for abandoning religion are quite good. Ironically, most of this comes from people who have not once opened a Bible or a Koran in their entire lives.
Continuing with this religious theme, there exists a paradox: People want to believe whatever makes them feel good, regardless whether or not that what they believe is actually true, but they get offended if their beliefs are proved untrue. Beliefs that have nothing to do with being true or false and have no relation to actual reality, it would follow, have no place in directing the real world.
But is that where we are as a country? For if the condition exists in our political system that we care not whether our attitudes are true or false, how could we function? How could we possibly make decisions that impact not only our society generally, but also our lives individually if we didn't rely on standards of truth and falsehood? Or, perhaps we didn't so much as completely eliminate these standards, but expanded the criteria much too far as to cease to be useful.
Let us once again take the Tea Party and the deficit. If the Tea Party truly wanted to reduce the deficit, they would not have argued with the Congressional Budget Office about its estimation that repealing health care reform would add $230 billion to the deficit. Or, in another example, if the Christian conservative demographic truly wanted to reduce the number of abortions in the country, they would have to concede that abstinence-only sexual education was ineffective and join the rest of the world in advocating for contraception. But I'm talking about a utopia (the Greek meaning; "nowhere") in which political and everyday decisions are made based on fact.
The point is that these circumstances render philosophy absolutely impossible by virtue of the simple fact that we as a society no longer care about what is factually true. If we lose the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, we cannot make rational decisions that get us where we want to go. The Catholic Church is probably dumbfounded as to why people in Africa are still dying of AIDS.
Philosophy is "the love of wisdom," and wisdom is the ability to admit what one does not know, and to make sound judgments. These judgments, are again, based upon standards of truth and falsehood that we in America no longer respect.
The stakes of our political success or failure are high, and there is cause for us to get excited. But if we delegate authority to angry demagogues, we will have forfeited any chance of success. A professor of Russian history appeared on CNN's AC360 (substituted by Soledad O'Brien) who made this one quick and important point before he was cut off: In America, we have confused celebrity with political leadership2. This is an enormous detriment in itself to our political landscape, because we actually give people who know absolutely nothing about politics or history a venue in which to speak and be heard, and cloud out what really matters. Ed Rollins in the clip I cited complained that the panel should be concerned with Paul Ryan, who gave the Republican rebuttal to the SotU, but instead they were talking about Sarah Palin's idiocy.
But worse than Sarah Palin, of course, is Glenn Beck, who, as Joe Scarborough said, was a "nobody" before being put on Fox News3. Scarborough beautifully illustrates the problem of Glenn Beck in the video clip by stating that people who watch him will start to believe what he says and he will have a "corrosive impact on our politics." Of course, this is unequivocally true, evidenced by the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories--once found only in the dark recesses of the Internet--in our mainstream political landscape. Furthermore, I would venture to say that before Beck mentioned her on his program, no one had any idea who Frances Fox Piven was. This could only mean that Beck is directly responsible for the threats she has received since his program aired.
What is the "mainstream" anyway? How do we define what is "normal" in our political discourse? Is it a numbers game? How does something like the Tea Party go from a fringe element to a mainstream phenomenon? Of course, the Tea Party was manufactured in such a way as to be made to look like a grassroots movement, when in fact it was first organized by Sal Russo and Dick Armey and their PACs.
A parallel example where the point may be made more clear is in religion. No "mainstream" religious leader or person wants to admit that the fundamentalist element has any power. Theologically, fundamentalism is certainly indefensible, but fundamentalists have gone on to:
1) Campaign massively and effectively against gay rights
2) Build a Creation Museum
3) Take out two of the tallest buildings in the United States
4) Affect public policy to an astounding degree in areas where religion does not belong (sexual education, high school English classes, science curriculums, stem cell research, etc)
5) Dominate policy in the Middle East, even as the people ruled under them understand how dangerous they are.
6) Wage a very effective campaign of guerrilla warfare against the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan
My point here is not to give credit or legitimize fundamentalism, but to merely ask at what point does a movement or demographic once relegated to "the fringe" become mainstream, regardless of whether we agree with them or not? What would it take, for example, for the KKK to become mainstream?
1) de Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America Penguin Classics ed. p. 493
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-FJ2jnj7No
3) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/12/joe-scarborough-glenn-beck-feud_n_807892.html
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