Proud Americans, Willful Ignorance

Published Aug 4th, 2009

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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”  –Thomas Jefferson

It is not commonly discussed, because the press is hesitant to alienate its followers through the use of socially-relevant, intelligent journalism, but America has reached a precipice where its collective ignorance is now a serious threat to the very foundation of its government.

In his 1964 work:  Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which also won him a Pultizer Prize, Richard Hofstadter sought to explain the conditions by which American culture shifted from the classical European tradition of nurturing intellect to the growing modern trend of treating intellectualism with contempt and ridicule.  What he identified as the components of this shift were science, business, religion, utilitarianism and egalitarianism, where they intersect with the deeply-embedded American heritage of European colonialism and evangelical Protestantism.

Early in America’s history, education was a tough sell for the communities of a primarily agrarian economy.  Children were needed as farm hands and thus were not free to spend a large part of the day sitting in a schoolhouse learning and nurturing their intellect.  In fact, it was not until 1918 that all states even required their residents to attend school.  Even with this requirement, only an elementary level education was mandated.  Prior to government educational reforms, schools in the United States–all the way up to the university level–were instituted primarily to train ministers and later to ensure that colonists and eventually U.S. citizens were sufficiently literate to read the Bible.

Historically, in the European system of education, schools were founded by monasteries for the purpose of training monks to transcribe the Bible and other works of classical literature or to ascend the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church.  In China and other countries, education was reserved for aristocratic families and those deemed worthy of ascending in secular bureaucracies.  Unique to America was the evangelical, Protestant notion of learning for the sole purpose of worshipping God.  Classical European education was centered on the idea that the goal of learning should be to develop the ability to “learn for oneself.”  Education was a lifelong pursuit and not something to suffer through until the governmental requirements were met.  Europeans resolved their conflicts between schools and their adversaries very early on.  Aristocrats, burghers, and other local city officials who felt threatened by the monastic schools were kept in check through papal bulls which limited their ability to refuse teaching licenses to qualified individuals.  Full autonomy from censorship and outside control of educational institutions was granted by the papal bull of 1233 (Toulouse) which gave the studium generale (university) and universitas (corporation of students and teachers) protection of their curriculum and freedom to teach everywhere without further examinations.  Henceforth, European education developed a tradition of education that remains resistant to outside political, religious and social pressures.  The European curriculum has held to the traditional concept, modeled on the classics:  Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  The underlying concept being that if these disciplines were learned first, the individual would have the basic tools to go forward and learn anything else.  In fact “trivium” and “quadrivium” directly translate into “three roads” and “four roads,” respectively, in Latin.

American education, unfortunately, does not enjoy similar protections from outside political, social and religious forces.  As Hofstadter came to understand, American schools are subject to the whims of local politicians, elected school board officials and the citizens who elect them.  Consequently, in religious areas, pressure is put on schools to bend and censor the curriculum to satisfy religious ideologies that may not even comport with proven scientific evidence.  In this respect, the American educational model resembles those of theocratic nations such as Iran and Afghanistan.  When homeschooling in the U.S. is factored in, this religious goal of education becomes even more pronounced.

Hofstadter also noted that it was not democracy per se that contributed to the decline of intellectualism in American society but cultural tensions between urban intellectuals and “village culture” as the agrarian way of life in America became overtaken by the industrial age and expanding cities.  Villagers resented the educational mandates placed on them from an urban government and the encroachment of cities and “immoral” city life in their rural communities. Villagers perceived urban intellectuals as having lives of luxury, whereas village life relied on the practicality, utilitarianism and physical labor to run farms.  Villagers, who were loathe to send their farmhand children to school, imparted their contempt towards the “luxury lifestyle of intellectuals” onto their children.  It is this hostility and sentiment that remains rooted in so many Americans and is so easily exploited by candidates like Sarah Palin who seek to divide Americans along socio-economic lines.  At the same time, Palin has no problem accusing Democrats of inciting a culture war between rich and poor, when the issue of unbalanced taxation is discussed.  Sadly, ignorance blinds these villagers from seeing that despite her status as a “hockey mom” and speaking with a village dialect and worshiping an abstract, one-size-fits-all God, Sarah Palin has little else in common with the villagers she cultivated such a vast following from.

Republicans, who quite transparently place corporate interests over all other aspects of American life, care little for the educational well-being of citizens.  American companies have made great advances in transforming their operations, through automation, into workplaces that can largely succeed by employing trained monkeys, who are simply replaced time and again by those with little or no education.  For the practical and utilitarian sensibilities of “villager” Americans, there seems little reason to educate their children beyond what is required to obtain employment as a trained monkey, at any place of business throughout America.  So long as their family members are employed and receiving a paycheck, villagers see no deficiency in their way of life and thus see more of themselves reflected in anti-intellectual representatives like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, or representatives who vocalize the same evangelical, Protestant ideologies they share.  Intellectuals in America are seen by villagers as critical of America, critical of the village mentality and a threat to their religious belief systems.

What is not understood by the willfully ignorant demographic, residing in pockets throughout the United States, is that being the president, or being a congressman, senator or governor requires a great deal of education.  It simply is not adequate to run a public office having only evangelical, Protestant convictions and quaint cultural similarities with other villagers.  Government office is complicated.  It requires great talent–talent which is rooted in the trivium and quadrivium of classical education.  It is not acceptable to dismiss large-scale social problems with a sarcastic remark and to reduce complex military strategy down to bumper sticker soundbites such as “mission accomplished” or “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”  A universally well-educated populace would not permit such juvenile rhetoric from its elected officials.

What America’s slide in intellect has done is create a population of imbecilic parrots who spend little time reading, thinking or seeking to educate themselves so that they can become better custodians of their own democracy in the way that Thomas Jefferson articulated.  The willfully ignorant spend a lot of time talking about how religious the forefathers were and how the forefathers envisioned a “nation under God, ” yet they spend very little time acknowledging how intellectual and educated the forefathers actually were–so much so that they had the wherewithal to Constitutionally separate STATE from RELIGION.  The intellectualism of the forefathers can be seen in the very architecture and design of the nation’s capital city, in their numerous writings, in their private estates and in the details of how our government is structured.  None of this would have been possible without surpassing intellect, derived from an intensely cross-disciplined education.  Yes, rural practicality is a decent virtue.  Of course pride can be found in hard, physical labor.  Certainly things have to work and government function has to balance utility with enlightened philosophical thought.  However,  hockey mom’s do not create nations.  Biblical recitations do not create great, inspirational, historic speeches.  Ignorance does not provide the foundation for a great country like the United States.  So then, why do these villagers, these Sarah Palin followers, think that our nation can remain great with elected officials who seek to validate proud Americans, who are willfully ignorant?  Does the preservation of our liberties and our way of life require no education?

If “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” are indeed cherished American ideals, they have been eroded in recent years by the special interests of corporations and the wealthiest individuals–an Aristocracy of Wealth.  An ever-growing, ignorant society allows this aristocracy to prosper.  Hearing the ignorant, parrot followers of Sarah Palin, one gets the impression that the villagers do not even comprehend the state of our lives as worker monkeys, the erosion of our liberties and our diminishing ability to pursue happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, in all of his intellectualism predicted this:

“Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.” –Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. MW 1:54

An aristocracy of virtue and talent can never exist in a culture of willful ignorance. Thus, the foundation of our government and our American way of life now stands under threat–not by terrorists, not by liberal ideals, not by government spending, but by Sarah Palin ignorance and the ignorance of her parrot flock.

Today the United States tolerates widespread ignorance throughout its citizenry. This is profound ignorance that our religious forefathers would never have imagined could exist in a nation of free citizens, who are charged with the sober responsibility of being the “depository of our political and religious freedom.”