Hildegarde

Okay, now to the books I’m reading, which are a little confusing here, because there are three of them.  I’ve noted before that I tend to get sent things, and one of the things I always get sent are the latest volumes on how bone-headedly stupid the average American really is.  This has given me a few very good volumes and some decent ideas.  I really do have to thank whoever sent me my first book by E.D. Hirsch, for instance.

This month, what this has resulted in are these:  Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind:  The New Epidemic of False Knowledge; Benjamin Barber’s Consumed:  How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citzens Whole; and Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America:  How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

Before I really get going here, let me point out that, as far as I can tell at the moment, all three of these books seem to be making largely the same argument from largely the same premises, in spite of the fact that Thornton is definitely a conservative and Barber is definitely a liberal.  My guess is that Pierce is also a liberal, although his approach, at least up to the point I’ve managed to read, is wide-ranging enough to make you wonder.

Okay, not quite.  Pierce is fully capable of spotting liberal lunacy as well as conservative lunacy, but he seems to spot all the conservative lunacy and makes glancing remarks towards some of the liberal lunacy as if he’s happy to drink the Kool-Aid.

That said,  I’m more than a little sympathetic to books like these, because anybody who’s paying attention must notice that there’s an oversupply of stupid out there, and especially stupid of the conspiracy theory variety.  Conservatives and Liberals both respond to losing Presidential election by declaring that the other side is plotting to suspend the Constitution.  The loony left believes that Bush engineered 9/11 in order to declare martial law.  The loony right thinks the U.S. Census is designed to put all conservative Christians into concentration camps so that they can be either “reeducated” or offed.

There are people who argue that none of this bodes well for the American polity, and I think they’re right, but the fact is that stupidity and conspiracy theories are not confined to the political.  There are plenty of people out there who insist that high tension wires cause brain tumors, vaccines cause autism, and silicone breast implants cause breast cancer, in spite of a wealth of proof that all those things are false. 

Then there are the kind of things I think of as quasi-political–political  only because our politics has reached the stage where any question of our national identity is now a matter of court cases and town meetings.  There is, for instance, the Creation Museum in Kentucky, build by Ken Ham, an Australian  Creationist who founded the organization Answers in Genesis.

The Creation Museum is one of those things I’m going to have to get into the car and go look at one of these days, because by now I’ve heard so much about it I’ve got to see it.  Reports are that there are not only exhibits showing people and dinosaurs living together, but dinosaurs saddled up for people to ride and use as pack animals.

I mean…um…

Pierce’s book has the largest number of these oddly sort of political sort of  not weirdnesses–the people who believe they’ve found Atlantis or that they know when the world is going to end or that they’ve figured out that eating nothing bu chokeberries and arrowroot will give you eternal life. 

But it is, in my opinion, the weakest of the three. 

Part of that is because Pierce write good humor–in fact, absolutely hysterical humor–and he sometimes goes for the joke instead of the point.  Part of it may be an artefact of my particular prejudices.  He mentions, favorably, Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason, which I personally found completely awful, lightweight, badly argued and in need of a good dose of serious research, nevermind a rereading of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which she  misread so badly that you can’t figure out what it’s actually about from her descriptions of it.

But most of all,  the book is weak because it skirts around the central premise–which is that this book is a symptom of the infantilization of the American public, and it’s the infantilism, not some inherent dearth of IQ points, that really is the problem.

In the end, all three of these books are about the endless adolesence of Americans, and first world people generally.  And all three of these books–yes, including Bruce Thornton’s–blame it in the end on “consumer capitalism.” 

And the three of them have made me rethink everything I’ve said on this blog about education, and culture, and all the rest of it.

So let me leave you with Charles P. Pierce for the moment, and I’ll get on to the other two in the next few days.

But it all comes down to a paradox that goes like this–you pay for genius with stupidity.