soapboxing
Snarky but entertaining: Greetings From Idiot America.
It’s entertaining because it’s snarky. And also a bit hypocritical, in appealing to “the Gut” as much as the intellect. Still, as cultural critique it hits close to home:
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents–for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power–the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about.
Author Charles P. Pierce is nostalgic for times when America has not been Idiot, when expertise was not distrusted, when men like Jefferson and Franklin and even manly-man Teddy Roosevelt were political leaders and also “science dweebs.” He compares them to today’s leaders, and their wanton disregard of all that is rational and reasoned. He correctly, I think, attributes the success of this deliberate regression to the people who continually, willingly buy into it. That is, us.
Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success–against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore–was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut.
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It’s the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It’s what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they’re popular anyway. It’s what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.
To which I say: thank god for Jon Stewart.
But a few bright lights aside, the logical end of our collaborative effort at herd idiocy is not hard to predict. The comptroller general of the US did it just this week: Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned.
The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.
This is all staring us in the face, it’s all blindingly obvious. It’s not exactly news. So why does it still seem like no one is doing anything?
Pierce says it is the celebration of the Gut over the brain, of which “antimodernism” is a part. But I think Idiot America is part of a larger storyline, and modernism and post-modernism are one way to name these chapters. I think all of us—Idiot, Elite, and everyone in between to greater or lesser extents—are in the spastic teeth-gnashing throes of a post-modern cultural seizure.
I’ll explain: Rationality was freed from its religious, political, and physical shackles by the Enlightenment, and it has done big things for us over the last few hundred years, giving us science and progress, refrigerators and the internet and so on. But it has not delivered us any utopia, and these days it’s properly considered naïve to think that it alone will. But this was not so for quite a while, particularly in the avant garde of progress, the United States. “Oh, technology will solve our problems!” we have been told. The Jeffersons and Franklins and Roosevelts championed it. Secretly or not, we hoped it was true.
I think disillusionment on this point has seriously frazzled our nerves. With some exceptions, people fundamentally need things to believe in: ground to stand on, “faith-based” or otherwise. Up till now, in addition to the sturdy—if ephemeral—platforms of religion, we could affix our heels to more visceral, immediate signifiers of our essential good and worthiness: pioneers of free states and free trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, the dazzling advances in medicine, lifestyle, and social rights of the early 20th century, and even the cold-war-driven space race of the past 50 years. So often, science and rationality were our vehicle, powering us aloft, giving us the tools to excel and feel good about ourselves. Who needs a God when we can take care of ourselves with our very clever tools?
But now each of these things has in turn lost its buoyancy, and today science seems unable to solve what are not technological problems but political and economic obstacles. Hunger, AIDS, genocide, fossil fuel dependence. Partisanship and belligerence, corruption. The children of rationality—science, technology and the academic’s Modernist program—have done what they can with these issues yet the zeitgeist of progress is failing. Our ascent stalls and our stomachs rise to our throats. In a weightless moment, we see that we’re not so better off in certain ways than we were 100 or 200 years ago. Acrophobia kicks in. We panic, we seize up.
We throw out rationality along with its children. The academic retreats to post-modernism, where no view can be privileged except that of post-modernism, while the average person retreats to God, where no view can be privileged except that of his God. Each violently defends his position, gnashing teeth and lashing out. That some people today see a factual document in a statue of a dinosaur wearing a saddle is not so mind-wrenchingly incredible when you think of the terror they must feel in free fall. If there is no deus and there is no machina, there is no ground. The truth is there is only profound and utter, terrifying freedom.
In free fall, it’s not so incredible that people behave as irrationally as they do. How to approach these snapping frightened beasts with compassion is a tough problem, but that is the only appropriate response. I have little such tolerance for our leaders. They behave like petulant, ignorant children and there is no excuse. That shit’s got to be stopped.
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:53 am
MIT represent! Haha. The Infinite is indeed quite awesome, though it’s not as difficult to get lost in it as the author makes it seem.
Off-topic comment aside, the whole “Gut” vs. expertise thing strongly reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Except Pierce is obviously writing from the extreme point of view of Science rather than attempting to reconcile the two, which is what Pirsig did or try to do, but I still have yet to fully understand his answer, assuming he did ever give one.
I do like your take on the issue, though, and as you suggested, a good starting point for approaching the snapping frightened beasts would be to remove the so-called leaders who are exploiting their condition for their own good. That is, sadly, easier said than done.