Response to Henry Giroux's "The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism"

Last night, I read an article on truth-out.org that defended higher education better than I ever could. Instead of providing the URL at the end of the essay, I feel it necessary to provide it now.

http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287

The article first and foremost made me feel better about learning what I wanted to learn, and ultimately defended the entire point of that $100,000 piece of paper even against the reality that English majors don't easily get jobs.

But more than that, Mr Giroux looks at the whole picture, and sure, while one can see the enormous impact on one kid's personal growth, there is a much wider problem as the institutions which form the backbone of our age are consistently attacked by smaller people, and as those institutions start to give way to what is useful, rather than what is good for both society and the individual: The ability to make informed decisions across all aspects of one's life: From one's own worldview to on the job.

There are people who can go to college, be considered fairly well-educated, but not know how to think critically. I know two people who went to prestigious universities, have excellent jobs, and sit around watching Fox News all day. How is this possible? Because they didn't care about making good decisions, they cared about getting a job.

This in itself isn't bad, BUT getting a job should be second to exploring ideas, especially if our democracy is to be preserved. Let's look, for a moment, at our political landscape, not just in the present, but all the way back to the Scopes Monkey Trial. Mr Giroux lays the picture out very well, but in my mind this is not simply a contemporary problem, it is both all-encompassing and life-long.

From the Salem Witch Trials to the Confederacy to William Jennings Bryan to Joseph McCarthy to Ronald Reagan to George W Bush (and Harriet Miers), to Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann, and no other example provides such a clear picture of American intellectual bankruptcy as Supreme Court nomination hearings because the nominee is so terrified of offending a constituency that prides itself on its Philistinism that he or she cannot give a straight answer. In fact, GOP Senators, in response to Elena Kagan, have actually attacked Thurgood Marshall, though, as usual, without justification1.

But that isn't to say that we don't have intellectuals. Conservatives have come up with all kinds of ideas, such as Rand Paul, who wants to forgo a section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits private enterprise from discriminating against people. He's gone so far, in fact, as to say that he wouldn't have voted for the bill had he been there because of that provision. Mr Paul, with all due respect, businesses even still try to discriminate against people. Whether you think it's bad business practice or not, look at how job candidates are treated. It must not be very bad business if they think they can get away with it.

The kinds of "intellectuals" America has currently (or, has always had) are nothing more than demagogues and charlatans (only difference between the two is that the former seeks political power). Only in America could there be a Creationist Museum, to which thousands upon thousands visit because they believe in it, but a select, brave few who visit to see how bad it is2.

Perhaps the only actual intellectual still respected in the United States is Roger Ebert, who just conducted a study of his own, asking just one question: Would you rather play a great video game or read Huckleberry Finn? Before I go into it, Roger Ebert is so respected by nearly the entire population that when he said "Videogames are not art," everyone--especially the gaming community--went berserk, in mostly a good way. In fact, I'm upset that he recently retracted this statement because of the enormous debate he had sparked, whether one agrees with him or not.

On to this survey: 63% of those polled would pick a great video game over Huck Finn3. What does this have to do with our dysfunctional democracy? We aren't willing to do the work. Playing a game is easy, and we don't have to think much. Sure, I like to play video games, but I know that even the great ones have absolutely nothing to offer that would surpass a thousand years of literary history. Video games will not make us better people, and they will probably not teach us anything*. Not only do Americans not want to do the work, they vilify those who do. In the words of Insane Clown Posse, "Fuckin' magnets! How do they work? And I don't wanna talk to no scientist, cuz those fuckers are lyin' and gettin' me pissed." First of all, that is a real lyric to a real song called Miracles. Second of all, you might be wondering how a horrible indie hip-hop duo can be representative of 300 million people.

Here is a list of polls done on belief in evolution in the United States over the past two decades from Religioustolerance.org, from a variety of sources4. In 2007, 49% believe in evolution, either naturalistic or theistic, whereas 48% believe in creationism/ID. That is about half of the population of the most powerful nation on Earth.

And then there are statistics on biblical literacy. Now this is where it gets really interesting. I just did a Google search for "biblical literacy among evangelicals", and the first page is rife with worrying statistics. Dr Nienhuis, a New Testament scholar and professor, for example, states that "the vast majority of [his] students--around 95 percent of them--are Christians, and half of them typically report that they currently attend nondenominational evangelical churches. Yet the class as a whole consistently averages a score of just over 50 percent, a failing grade"5.

In my own experience, my cursory knowledge of the Bible is more than enough to upend the fundamentalists I encounter, and I am an atheist. It is less essential for me to understand the Bible because I have not accepted it as my worldview. If you believe in something, you better damned well know just what it is you're believing in, no matter what philosophy or religious system you subscribe to. Last year, some fundamentalists got it into their heads to use Psalm 109:8-9 to incite political violence.

Psalm 109:8-9 reads as follows in my New Revised Standard Version:

8 May his days be few,
May another seize his position
9 May his children be orphans,
And his wife a widow

The rest of it gets a little worse, but the point is clear. The interesting part is that these people failed entirely to read verses 1-7, which, I will reproduce for you here, because you will see just how screwed up these people are.

1 Do not be silent, O God of my
praise
2 For wicked and deceitful mouths
are opened against me,
speaking against me with lying
tongues
[Here's the kicker]
3 They beset me with words of
hate,
and attack me without cause.
4 In return for my love they
accuse me,
even while I make prayer for
them.
5 So they reward me evil for good
and hatred for my love.
6 They say, "Appoint a wicked
man against him;
let an accuser stand on his
right
7 When he is tried, let him be
found guilty;
let his prayers be counted as
sin[..."]

Do you see it? In an ironic turn, Psalm 109 may well be the prayers of their very target, if we're going to play that game. No, I'm not a fan of The Bible, but don't mess with an English major.

All of this leads back to the importance of education, if not for itself, then for the integrity of our democracy. Americans can't even understand their own worldviews, much less figure out how to fix a tanking economy.

There is one thing I have thus far neglected to address: Why? Why are Americans so hopelessly ignorant not only about themselves but about everyone else? For that, I turn to PZ Myers, author of the blog Pharyngula. Myers, in his presentation in Oslo on Creationism in America, proceeded to place the blame, specifically for the pervasiveness of Creationism/ID on the volume and amount of charlatanry, and scientists' poor PR coupled against the rise of theocratic organizations6. Religious belief had existed far before Charles Darwin wrote about his famous voyage, but by now I'd expect everyone (such as the rest of the developing world), to forgo creationism. In fact, the announcer at Myers' lecture was even surprised that creationism could be a serious threat.

I would argue that it may be that we think we can afford to. We've always been City on the Hill, or to take one of my friend's favorite analogies, Fiddler's Green, from Land of the Dead. Consider how we consider ourselves, and consider the life cycle of city states that we have survived. We think we're invincible, that we can afford to wage two large-scale military campaigns simultaneously and survive (Sun Tzu disagrees, and Hitler demonstrated this fact to us in his hubris), that our fortune will always be there. We saw this attitude right before the economic meltdown. Sure, people now realize what's really going on, but their solutions will only serve to make things worse. In Giroux's essay, the people who have realized this the most cannot figure out which programs to cut: They want to balance the budget, but cut taxes. Giroux cites JM Bernstein who said, in an article in the NYTimes,

"When it comes to the Tea Party's concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don't raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy."

Even worse, which Giroux himself also mentioned, and I have also read about a few weeks ago, is that some Americans have entertained the notion that libraries are a waste of money. I kid you not7. I think Roger Ebert may have just had a heart attack.

How do we fix this problem? Pffft! I'm not even sure we can. The American population has been effectively insulated against any and all encroaches upon their worldview by "intellectuals" or "experts." I spoke to one man in a doctor's office(!) who tried to disparage higher education as "Leftist" after I heard him comparing Obama to Hitler. This sentiment was repeated by another man I encountered at a revolutionary war exhibition in my dad's church for it's 300th anniversary. Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to come to the defense of what I hold so dear.

And then there's something unexplainable by anything but avarice. There are smart people--scientists--who will throw their credentials into a bonfire and join the Institute for Creation Research or the Discovery Institute (not associated with the Discovery Channel). Jeffry P Tomkins is listed, for example, on the ICR website, and has headed a project that "involve the development of integrated genomic frameworks and the discovery and characterization of genes and genomic regions associated with environmental adaptation"8. Umm...what? "Associated environmental adaptation" is evolution. Hello? Unfortunately, I cannot find anywhere, a full history of his career, nor any justification for his joining the ICR.

This brings up an important point, however, that, like I said before, we think we can afford it, that truth, in a larger social context, can take a backseat to whatever makes us feel good. "I believe it because I want to believe it." But immediately we see what's wrong with this notion, because much like whether injustice pays better than justice in The Republic, things like science and critical thought that we neglect or disregard because they are difficult or don't produce short-term gain or happiness, will eventually destroy us. If we are unjust, eventually people will turn on us and we will be punished. If we are stupid and uncaring, we will fall behind on the international stage and our economy will falter. Without science, we will fall to disease, our computers will cease to work, and our military will weaken. The disgusting thing--the greatest injustice--is that laypeople will lambaste science and scientists, yet depend on them to improve and even save their lives. While you're off in church being taught that God created the Earth in 6 days 6,000-10,000 years ago and that dinosaur bones are the work of Satan, there are people who are trying to save your kid who has been bitten by a rabid dog. And then when they do, you don't thank them. You thank your God, who did it by magic.

1) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062805129.html

2) http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/excellent_analysis_of_the_crea.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scienceblogs%2Fpharyngula+%28Pharyngula%29

3) http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/video_games_13823_huck_finn_80.html

4) http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm

5) http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=1110&var3=main

6) http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/31859717

7) http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Fox-News-Reporter-vs-Libraries-1537

8) http://www.musc.edu/mbes/faculty/tomkins.html


*One exception: Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers taught me about Voodoo. It turned out (because I looked it up) that everything GK said about Voodoo is actually true.