One of this week’s top headlines at Salon.com:
“America hits peak anti-intellectualism: Majority of Republicans now think college is bad”
First, let me say outright I am not a qualified expert in anything. With that out of the way anyone reading further may dismiss everything I have to say as the unqualified opinions and observations of an amateur. Then again, let’s have a quick show of hands: How many of you would dismiss my opinions and observations if I actually were a qualified expert in a given field? Say, perhaps, climatology? Physics? Law? For people like me who aren’t professionals of any stripe we live on our ability to recognize expertise, and rightly point to those experts when attempting to hold up an otherwise well-informed–if not professionally accredited–opinion. For those of us who cannot recognize expertise, who lack the capacity to take a seemingly disorganized jumble of proven facts and assemble from them an accurate assessment of how things might be, we are vulnerable to distortions and outright lies of unscrupulous manipulators. We become uninformed. Worse, we find ourselves on a downward spiral where we become so uninformed we can’t even begin to imagine our own ignorance.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to defend not just an opinion, but the very sources I’ve used to prop it up, sources I know well are accurate and dependable, studies with abstracts and transparent research methodologies with easily defined limits against the assertion that I’ve been bamboozled by “so-called” experts. This trend is not unique to conservatives, either. I’ve run into many well meaning liberals who–despite abundant and decisive evidence to the contrary–insist 9/11 was an “inside job.” Where does this come from? Allow me to venture a guess:
Fear, though not the kind of fear often associated as being afraid, but more like a gnawing paranoia that nothing can be known, and then anger at those who dare to know. Consider that state of mind, and in case you need a better understanding of it think back to a time when you got into an argument with someone and refuted something they said with a very well established fact. Flat Earthers come to mind. Yes, they exist, and any time you assert an observation that has been made that contradicts their hypotheses you are told something along the lines of: “Were you there? Did you see with your own eyes? No? Then you cannot know.” Of course, they ignore the fact that same argument makes their own even weaker, but these aren’t people who think quantitatively. They have no faith in what may be quantified, and so they think exclusively qualitatively. If you’re someone who assumes nothing can be known, you are left with nothing but qualitative analysis, and everything (especially data driven quantitative analysis like the science behind climate change) becomes subjective and malleable.
Hopefully you can see the problem immediately. I alluded to it above. If you are someone who cannot or refuses to comprehend how something may be known, you have no foundation to build an understanding of the truth of things. I think this may be why conspiracy theories are so popular. In our still largely scientific society the quantitative arguments of intellectual elites have become mainstream, as they should. It shouldn’t be a surprise, either, in the Darwinian processes of science where hypotheses clash with measurements those hypotheses best matching what is measured must be accepted as the truth. Otherwise science doesn’t work, and our entire society collapses. That should terrify my readers, because as much as our entire society is built on science, science itself is so poorly understood. This lack of understanding has bred a type of counter-culture of intellectual nihilism not unlike the immature rebellion of angry teenagers who reject anything main stream without consideration. This leads to Orwellian inversions of thought, that whatever is known must be unknown, whatever is true must be false, and whatever is popular must be unpopular.
The fall of Rome and the end of the Classical World is blamed on many things: An erosion of morality, lead in the water, slavery, barbarians, apathy. These are excuses. Rage against knowledge destroyed Rome, just like it is destroying us. The people who burned what remained of the Great Library were people very much like Republicans today. They were devoutly Christian, probably some of the first fundamentalists of a young religion, and they were above all angry. They were angry at the arrogance displayed by people who dared to know things, because in their mind only God may know anything.