Below The Beltway

Susan Jacoby has a piece in today’s Washington Post about the all-too-familiar topic of the dumbing down of America. In which she identifies the three factors which have lead to what she calls not only a decline in knowledge, but a decline in the desire to even learn things among the average American.

First, she cites the decline in reading and the rise of the video culture:

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent 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 (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Although I grew up in the era that Jacoby derides, I’ve got to admit that she has a point. I continue to read books and magazines on a regular basis, but I know I’m in the minority in that respect. And I spend far more time on the Internet or watching television than I do reading. And I’m not even part of the group that spends hours on end playing video games. People, specifically young people, are reading less outside of school and that can’t be a good thing.

The second factor Jacoby cites is a decline in general knowledge:

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping “I’m the decider” may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio “fireside chat” so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, “they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public.

This is an issue that has been talked about for decades now. Back in 1988, there was a book published called Cultural Literacy which discussed the things that Americans needed to know and weren’t being taught. The situation isn’t any better today; if anything, it’s gotten worse.

But it’s the final factor that Jacoby discusses that I think is the most important:

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.

We can see this anti-rationalism manifest itself in a variety of places, and across political lines. On the left, so-called progressive educators deny the importance of teaching children about the history of America’s founding and the principles behind it. On the right, an entire cult of so-called “creationist science” has attempting to appropriate the legitimacy, if not the methods, of man’s most rational logic-driven field of knowledge. And all over the country, people spend more time worrying about Britney Spears, or Paris Hilton, or Anna Nicole Smith than about the War in Iraq.

As a result, on both sides of the aisle, people respond better to demagogues than they do to ideas.

A democracy with citizens who are not only ignorant, but willfully so isn’t going to be free for long.