Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America
In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are
“lies straight from the pit of hell,” (link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel
brought a snowball (link is external) into the chamber as evidence that
climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens
can’t name the vice president (link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.
Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist
biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by
fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions.
Sound familiar?
What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the
hyper-patriotism (link is external) that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world?
Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.
But it doesn’t.
International
quality of life rankings (link is external) place America barely in the top ten. America’s
rates of murder (link is external) and other violent
crime dwarf most of the rest of the developed world, as does its
incarceration rate (link is external), while its rates of
education and scientific literacy are
embarrassingly low (link is external). American schools, claiming to uphold “traditional values,” avoid fact-based
sex education, and thus we have the highest
rates of teen pregnancy (link is external) in the industrialized world. And those rates are notably highest where so-called “biblical values” are prominent. Go outside the Bible belt, and the
rates generally trend downward (link is external).
As this suggests, the impact of fundamentalist
religion in driving American anti-intellectualism has been, and continues to be, immense. Old-fashioned notions of sex education may seem like a relatively minor issue to many, but taking old-time religion too seriously can be extremely dangerous in the modern era. High-ranking individuals,
even in the military (link is external), see a confrontation between good and
evil as biblically predicted and therefore inevitable. They relish the thought of being a righteous part of the final days.
Fundamentalist religion is also a major force in
denying human-caused climate change (link is external), a phenomenon that the scientific community has accepted for years. Interestingly, anti-intellectual fundamentalists are joined in their climate change denial with unusual bedfellows:
corporate interests (link is external) that stand to gain from the rejection of sound science on climate.
Corporate influence on climate and environmental policy, meanwhile, is simply more evidence of anti-intellectualism in action, for corporate domination of American society is another result of a public that is not thinking critically. Americans have allowed their democracy to slip away, their culture overtaken by enormous corporations that effectively control both the governmental apparatus and the media, thus shaping life around
materialism and consumption.
Indeed, these corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into
conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance. They are the ones who stand to gain from the absurd levels of fear and nationalism that result in militaristic foreign policy and
absurdly high levels of military spending (link is external). They are the ones who stand to gain from consumers who spend money they don’t have on goods and services they don’t need. They are the ones who want a public that is largely uninformed and distracted, thus allowing
government policy to be crafted by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. They are the ones who stand to gain from a prison-industrial complex that generates the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world. They are the ones who stand to gain from unregulated securities markets.
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...01506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america
