A Nation Of Idiots?
Consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth…
-Susan Jacoby, “The Dumbing of America”
On the heels of last Friday’s post, I happened to read an article last night from the Washington Post entitled “The Dumbing of America.” On Sunday, Susan Jacoby, author of The Age Of American Unreason, wrote:
Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations…
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
An independent scholar who focuses on American intellectual history, Jacoby said first and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video, accompanied by a decline in book, newspaper, and magazine reading. She cites a report from the National Endowment for the Arts last year which showed:
• In 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure. By 2002, this had shrunk to 67%.
• More than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book (fiction or nonfiction) over the course of a year.
• The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (outside of school assignments) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. She noted that this same time period encompassed the rise of personal computers, Internet surfing, and video games.
Some could argue that the tremendous amount of information made available through new technologies compensates for the decline in reading print material. However, the former Washington Post reporter claimed that the manner in which this information is presented erodes our attention spans. Video consumers, she said, are becoming progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language. And, according to Jacoby:
…the inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events.
The author linked the shrinking public attention span fostered by video to what she claimed is the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge. She cited a 2006 National Geographic-Roper survey which showed:
• Nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 don’t think that it’s necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made.
• More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language.
• Only 14% consider it “very important” to know another language.
Source: HousingPANIC
Ms. Jacoby said that the third and final factor behind the “new American dumbness” is not a lack of knowledge, but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. Jacoby explained:
The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
Ms. Jacoby sadly concluded that, “There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism… It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality.”
Sphere: Related Content
February 19th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
• In 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure. By 2002, this had shrunk to 67%.
–Wow, I feel honor to belong to 33% category. I read a lot, but not novels or poems.
February 19th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Jefferey Fox? could get in trouble for being a sexist.
The truth is men have shorter attention span
Anyway, I thought she was cute to say she heard about Turkey. Hungary triggered her memory of Turkey. Honestly, I didn’t know Hungary is pronounced same as hungry.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I have to hand it to the young lady for continuing on, with a good sense of humor I might add, despite the audience and little munchkin man snickering at her. It doesn’t appear that she is what Ms. Jacoby would call an anti-rationalist. I’d be curious to see what kind of environment she came from and the priority that was assigned to education…
March 7th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
See the movie “Idiocracy” to see our immediate future. The movie takes place 500 years from now, but seems more like barely around the corner except for surnames being the makes of cars like a “Mr. Lexus”.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Thanks for the comment Anonymous. Funny that you mention the movie “Idiocracy,” considering I just saw it a couple of days prior to you mentioning it. For those of you who never heard of the film, “Idiocracy” is a dark comedy by Mike Judge (”Office Space”) starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph (”SNL”). From Wikipedia:
“The two main characters sign up for a military hibernation experiment that goes awry, and they awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has devolved into a dystopia where marketing, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenics have resulted in a uniformly stupid human society. Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, the film has achieved something of a cult following with its anti-corporate message and savage satire of the way in which the mass media caters to the basest of human instincts.”