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Here is a typical smug, condescending "analysis" from a leftist.
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This post was first published at Consortium News.
In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. (Well, no. One of the antonyms is indeed ignorance. Anti-knowledge is actively opposing knowledge, which is not a default state. Ignorance, however, often is benign.)
This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America. (I wonder if the author will establish this assertion. And might we wonder, what other factors might the author name? For example, would greed, corruption, oppression, crime, or incompetence contribute to the decay of political and civic culture? What about hatred, malice, envy, or violations of privacy? What about the militant secularization of society? Hostility to traditional families? Lack of respect and good manners?)
Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey. (From my perspective on the Right, this perfectly describes leftists. I haven't read on far enough to know, but I'm sure the author, coming from the Left, thinks he has the Right pegged.)
Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”
Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.
There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. (How about 911 truthers? The Left is certainly not innocent of their wide variety of extremists.)
Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.
At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. (The author tosses out a common anti-knowledge specter. What is it with the Left and Fox News? Why do they think Fox News is a refutation?
And by the way, Fox News has never made such an assertion. Some of its opinion makers have. Some of its guests have speculated. Some of its opinion makers have discussed it. But people express diverse opinions, and some of these are found on Fox News. Intellectual diversity, hated by the Left, is celebrated on the Right.)
Likewise, he can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old. (What about these leftists:
1) Rep. Hank Johnson, D. Georgia, who was concerned that Guam would tip over due to too many people on the island.
2. John Conyers on the Health Care Bill, which he voted for: "I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?'"
3. Howard Dean: "We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds."
4. Nancy Pelosi on the economy: "every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs."
5. Joe Biden on the economy: "The number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S."
6. Joe Biden on History: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened."
7. Ted Rall: "Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared."
8. Henry Waxman on Environmentalism: "We're seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point - they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn't ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there's a lot of tundra that's being held down by that ice cap."
9. Melissa Lafsky, Huffington Post blogger: "[Mary Jo] would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history ... Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it."
10. Jerry Brown, former governor of California, and current candidate for the same position: "The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs."
11. Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington, DC: "I am clearly more popular than Reagan. I am in my third term. Where's Reagan? Gone after two! Defeated by George Bush and Michael Dukakis no less."
12. Al Gore on zoology: "A zebra does not change its spots."
13. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the newly passed health care law: "We actually have not required in this law that you carry health insurance."
14. John Kerry on health care: "I'm going to be honest with you -- I don't know a lot about Cuba's healthcare system. Is it a government-run system?"
15. Congresswoman Maxine Waters on socialism: "Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal will be about socializing...uh, um...Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies."
And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. (As is typical for leftists, people who hold a different view are ignorant fools. That's why there's no diversity in leftist circles. Dissent is not tolerated.
As to the Commerce Clause, well, there is plenty of diverse thought on what it means. To summarily dismiss any other opinion on the matter is anti-knowledge. To permit only one perspective is anti-knowledge. To impugn peoples' intelligence is anti-knowledge.)
This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. (Calling people names is anti-knowledge. Not providing a rejoinder or a refutation is anti-knowledge.)
Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weaponsduring the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam. (I dealt with all of these supposed imbecilities here.)
It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. (More name calling. And we are still waiting for an actual intellectual refutation.)
And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes. (Still more name calling. Apparently that is all the author is capable of. Again, anti-knowledge.)
Why the Ignorance?
Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism. Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people after making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field? (The author is full of invective, but has yet to offer a substantive, documented point.)
“Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board.”
Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor rates roughly comparable to a doctor). (Not content to simply name call, the author now denigrates Dr. Carson in his area of expertise. You see, anyone can be a brain surgeon. All you need is the skill of an auto mechanic and stand the sight of blood. Thus the author completely negates Dr. Carson, even in his area of genius.
Can you imagine such language used about Obama? The Left would go ballistic.)
We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals come from? (Another sophomoric point. No one denies that species change and adapt. But that's not evolution in the sense that most people use the word, where through mutation and other processes one specie changes into another, more complex, even superior specie.)
Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?
The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans. (Only one day later the author wrote another post bemoaning the ignorance of the elites. Well, I guess we need to ask why the author singles out his ideological enemies when the situation is systemic?)
An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism
Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenuede spite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation. (It sure is easy to type stuff like this that dismisses an entire cultural phenomenon and an entire ideology, lumping it all together in the "ignorance" category. So far, the author has not offered a single rebuttal or analysis. Will he ever?)
Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck. (He does it again. You see, every single dissent, every single divergent opinion, every single voice of opposition to the leftist narrative is summarily dismissed with an insult or pejorative characterization. No analysis, no examples, no quotes, no thoughtful consideration. Again, this is anti-knowledge.)
Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.
Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. (The truth is, leftist perspectives are so endemic, so permeated, so pervasive in American society, that we are confronted with them every day. Average America is awash with leftist agitprop everywhere. There's no escaping it.
Thus, the author is completely wrong. In fact, it's just the opposite. A leftist finds himself in an environment of friendly political doctrine and social fabric built to support his world view. When occasionally confronted with a conservative perspective, he howls, shouts down, mocks, protests, and expunges the offending doctrine by any means possible.
Therefore it is the leftist who lives in a safe cocoon of leftist orthodoxy.)
This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.
The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened. (This is puerile. I mean, really. Read the paragraph again. Religious people are anti-intellectual. Every one of them. They listen to Fox News. Every one of them. They only believe televangelists. Every one of them. Faith is stupid, and only people like him have the truth.
There is nothing here for the serious seeker of information. The author has descended into depths of anti-knowledge from which he will not likely recover.)
For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.
We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market, the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio. (I now deem any reference to Fox News as a variation of Godwin's Law. This is his third appeal to Fox News as if simply saying "Fox News" proves a point and ends the conversation.
"Difficult questions?" How about loaded questions? Questions with an agenda. Irrelevant questions? Here are some examples:
Question to Trump: Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?
Question to Rubio: Well, do you hate your job?
Question to Bush: Ben Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know- nothingism. Is that why you're having a difficult time in this race?
Question to Fiorina: I think his quote was that, "if you pay zero dollars in taxes, you should get zero votes. If you pay a million dollars, you should get a million votes." Is this the type of person you want defending you?
Question to Cruz: Democrats and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown and calm financial markets that fear of -- another Washington-created crisis is on the way.Does your opposition to it show that you're not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?
Question to Christie: It raises the question: When it is acceptable to break a social compact?
Question to Rubio: In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy. What do you say?
Question to Rubio: But you've had a windfall that a lot of Americans haven't. You made over a million dollars on a book deal, and some of these problems came after that.
Question to Dr. Carson: Why would you serve on a company whose policies seem to run counter to your views on homosexuality?
Question to Dr. Carson: Does that not speak to your vetting process or judgment in any way.
The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience, however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebusnearly had an aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.
State-Sponsored Stupidity
(Hmm. Like the public schools system?) It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done.It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done. Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s political agenda.
Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War).
This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should bedenunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.
It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist, should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as fundamentalists. Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are also notorious for making inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald Trump is sui generis).
In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. But he will have left his mark, as they did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem unmoored to a stubborn and profane thing called facts.
(I stopped commenting. I've grown weary of the endless unsupported assertions, character attacks, name calling, and vapid discourse offered by the author. It just goes on and on, with no substance, no insight, no intellectual inquiry.
It is ironic indeed that the author does nothing but spew anti-intellectual invective, yet calls everyone else anti-knowledge.)
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