Thoughts about life with limits
Limits To Intelligence
A recent trio of articles explored the idea that Americans are averse to knowledge, allergic to reality and getting dumber by the minute. The articles featured the following headlines: Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?; The Dumbing Of America; and The US State of Denial.
One observation above all others, as expressed in Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?, resonated with my anti-Panglossian convictions regarding limits to growth:
"But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that 'too much learning can be a dangerous thing') and anti-rationalism ('the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion') have fused in a particularly insidious way."
I encounter this alarming "arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism" (The Dumbing Of America) all the time. It's most often expressed, in my experience, through frighteningly aggressive apathy, "Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge [...] but they also don’t think it matters." (Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?).
This supposedly new strain of viral ignorance apparently infects all of society, top to bottom, side to side.
The Obama phenomenon is a perfect manifestation of this delusional illness. Marc Lamont Hill has astutely pointed out that, "To believe that Obama is a Kucinich leftist rather than a Clinton centrist is to ignore his own expressed positions. To believe that the world will be markedly improved after an Obama presidency is to ignore the structure of corporate-controlled politics. To believe that Obama is prepared to address the fundamental structure of our political system is to ignore his own investment in it." But the Obamabots are incapable of hearing, let alone processing, this information. Empty slogans carry their day. "Race Doesn't Matter!" and "Yes We Can!" are apparently proofs positive of real, effective, relevant and productive change. Obama's followers don't ask hard questions and don't demand difficult answers. Style over substance triumphs again.
The recently passed and signed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (H.R. 6) highlights the profound disconnect between Americans and reality. H.R. 6 pursues the folly of biofuels and the no-fat-food approach to driving: better fuel efficiency. The implication is that Americans don't need to take responsibility for their choices and they don't have to change their behavior. Like the person who gets fat eating no fat cookies, drivers believe better gas mileage is a prudent, healthy and effective response to climate change and peak oil (assuming they "believe" global warming and are aware of peak oil which is not a safe assumption by any stretch). In The Sierra Club Solution David Cohen writes, "The 'single biggest step' to ridding ourselves of an unsustainable oil dependency and curtailing tail pipe CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming is not fuel efficient SUVs. The single biggest step in the transportation sector is driving less. This can be achieved through telecommuting, sharing rides, cutting out superfluous travel, using trains or buses, etc. One would think that this would be obvious." But, clearly, it is not obvious to those who don't believe in evidence or facts.
The housing debacle is another revealing example – one particularly well suited for a limits-to-growth analysis. Here the delusion cuts both ways. On the one hand you have the hubris of financial institutions and the financial industry which banked on the supernatural powers of fictional "financial instruments" and fictional "free markets". On the other hand you have Joe and Mary American who believed they could own a $250,000 dollar house making $30,000 a year. Both sides essentially believed they could get something for nothing.
I'm especially intrigued by the corporate side of this equation because I think their hubris was in large part driven by our cultural mythology of infinite growth. They had a true believer's mentality which told them that they could create, manipulate, trade and sell endless amounts of worthless garbage for profit and that their behavior could continue indefinitely without negative consequences.
Maybe this is nothing new. The Dumbing Of America quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." The more things change, the more they stay the same. But this country can ill afford to continue eating itself while believing it will not one day go hungry.■
