Maureen Dowd resurrects an old meme in her most recent NYT column:
The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.
Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.
Not surprisingly, her poster children are Rick Perry (he of the most pedestrian, not to say underwhelming, Texas A & M transcript), Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann. Now, I’m not about to make any claims regarding the hidden genius of those three figures, but we shouldn’t forget that Al Gore’s undergraduate transcript was spotty at best (while his performance in div school and law school displayed a certain uninterest—not disinterest (conservatives can be as pedantic as the best of them)—in academic matters. And John Kerry didn’t set Yale afire academically either, with average grades a tad lower than those of another widely reviled Texan. Finally, all we know about Barack Obama’s grades is speculative—since he didn’t graduate with honors from Columbia, his GPA must have been below 3.3 (at best a B+, at a time when grade inflation had taken off, unlike the Bush/Kerry/Gore era of somewhat more honest grades).
But I’m less interested in this “so’s your brother” response than in exploring a certain divide to which Dowd’s column points. On one side is the liberal intelligentsia, which keeps telling “us” how smart its members are and how dumb the rest of us are—especially those who fall for Republican campaign rhetoric. On the other side are those who are not averse to appearing anti-intellectual to their self-described intellectual betters. (Rick Perry is obviously a good example of the latter, though his aversion to intellectuality has its limits.)
One of the areas of contention is the contemporary university, home both to anti-religious hyperrationalism and to the shape-shifting contemporary progeny of Nietzschean relativism (usually in an apparently unthreatening soft democratic or egalitarian form). If I regard professors and universities as largely hostile or indifferent to traditional wisdom or religious truth, if I regard them as a force that tends to undermine all that I hold dear, if I believe that they tend to alienate my children from their roots, and if intellectualism is defined by the New York Times and the faculty lounges, then, to say the least, I will not be or appear to be a great friend of the contemporary university or of intellectualism. (And, needless to say, they will not be, or appear to be, a great friend to me.)
Perhaps if we took the trouble to develop a more capacious understanding of truth (and hence of intellectualism), the gap might be narrowed. Someone as smart as Maureen Dowd thinks she is can take a first baby step. She can attempt, for example, to understand this statement, which she says makes no sense to her: “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” That the world is broken is something that her colleagues on the religious Left surely affirm. But any self-respecting evangelical would catch Perry’s drift right away. Dowd could become alive to the reality and centrality of sin in our lives (something that all too often is lost sight of in our universities, unless we’re talking about America’s misdeeds abroad, or perhaps about the profit-mongering of Big Oil and Big Pharma).
But I digress. We remain in the midst of a Kulturkampf (a fancy foreign word to convince people that I’m not anti-intellectual). While it might be satisfying and politically useful for both sides to continue to take shots at one another, anyone who wants to work for peace (which, by the way, St. Augustine says we all want) should encourage our learned brethren to cast about more widely for wisdom and truth. That means that they, first of all, have to affirm (or at least “have faith”) that it can be found. And second, they need to recognize the limitations of the modern scientific paradigm.
I’m not looking for immediate results. I don’t expect 2012 to be any less contentious. But if our universities remain essentially at war with our traditions and our moral common sense, if they seem irremediably hostile to religious faith, we will all, in the end, be losers.
September 19th, 2011 | 11:10 am
Against my better judgment, I “read” through Ms. Dowd’s column, if “reading” is the proper word for slogging through such strange combinations of letters and words that weren’t created through any process of “writing” that I’m familiar with. And I was most struck by this “paragraph”:
“Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.”
Never mind the first two sentences, which contain three assertions that can all be quibbled with for either accuracy, significance, or both. I was most struck by the notion that doing poorly (or at least not well) in school as a late teenager should disqualify you from being able to do some particular job several decades later, even if in the meantime you have demonstrated actual, you know, qualifications for said job that just might be more impressive than an old piece of paper. Is she really arguing that an A student in 1970 would be inherently and indisputably more qualified for a given position than a C student? Really? Is that what modern conventional liberalism is really all about? Or does this only apply to GOP politicians and the rest of us can safely ignore this rule as the unserious twaddle it clearly is?
September 19th, 2011 | 11:22 am
Is there anything that comes ‘second of all’? Is all the work to be done on ‘their’ end?
September 19th, 2011 | 11:42 am
Ms. Dowd’s tired recitation of the “conservatives/Christians/Republicans are dumb” canard is yet another example of the intellectual exhaustion of the liberal/progressive movement in U.S. The notion that what amounts to a schoolyard taunt –”oh yeah — well your guys are stupid” is an argument worthy of even a single repetition is lamentable, the fact that it now seems to be the established editorial stance of what was once considered the nation’s newspaper of record shows how very intellectually exhausted and bankrupt the whole project is.
And while we’re at it, when did intelligence become such a great predictor of political success or prowess in presidential leadership? Jimmy Carter is thought to be the ‘smartest’ President in my lifetime…. Ronald Reagan an “amiable dunce”…
September 19th, 2011 | 11:59 am
What you’re describing, Brian, is the petty tyranny of the “permanent record,” which was the cudgel used to extract fear and conformity from the students of my day. Nearly all the liberals I know are either hostage to it, or in thrall to it. Having proved too sophisticated to fear God any longer, they moved on to tremble before the copybook of a highschool administrator.
September 19th, 2011 | 12:06 pm
Let’s not forget our sitting President referring to the 57 states of the union, or Al Gore visiting Monticello and looking at busts of Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette, and asking “who are these people?”
September 19th, 2011 | 12:29 pm
There’s a fascinating article in yesterday’s New York Times magazine called “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=magazine&st=cse
It’s about educators — one from a prep school, one from a KIPP inner-city school — and others who have noticed that IQ and grades are not the most important qualifications for success in life. One measure of what is important is what they call “grit.” That’s not a quality running rampant among the Al Gores, John Kerrys, and Barack Obamas of the world, but you might find it in Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and some others hated by Maureen Dowd. The people discussed in the article are all liberals, I’m certain. What is Maureen Dowd — and others like her — going to do if this kind of thinking becomes acceptable?
I don’t think I’ve ever before read a NYT magazine piece all the way through without fidgeting and yawning. This one is riveting.
September 19th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
Ray,
You didn’t really miss Joe K’s “second of all” did you? He says it right there: “they need to recognize the limitations of the modern scientific paradigm.”
As to your question of whether or not Ms. Dowd and her ilk should have to do “all the work”? That’s not what is being asked at all. I’d settle for just a little on her part — like sitting down with and actually getting to know some of the people she spends so much of her time disparaging. The next time she’s in an airport at a stopover in “flyover country”, she should rent a car, drive an hour in any direction, get a room for a week and do what the locals do — all that whack a doodle stuff like shopping at Wal-mart, Friday night football, and Sunday morning worship…
Maybe she would still sound the same, but at least she’d have some factual basis for her fevered objectification and snarky ramblings…
September 19th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
So those who disagree with the godless social engineers of our ruling class “revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.”
That is hogwash (somebody needed to say so), although even hogwash can be very intimidating when it is authoritatively promulgated by the ruling class.
The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels made it seem as though the most trivial act of human kindness shown to a Jew was a treasonous act. That was hogwash, too. There were those Germans who did not possess the critical thinking skills to see that it was hogwash, and those who did but were intimidated into silence.
It seems to me that there must be more pundits who see that Dowd and others like her are spewing forth hogwash than are willing to say so.
After all, what is so unscientific about admitting that some phenomena are more likely to be the result of the work of an intelligent agent than not? Nothing. If some unmanned (or should I say unaliened?) spacecraft crashed into the earth, scientists wouldn’t be saying it was really a very different kind of meteorite. They would know it was intelligently designed.
Modern science has enabled us to look much more closely at inner space as well as outer space. We now know that the most primitive, single celled, reproducing life form consists of nanotechnology light years beyond anything modern science is able to build from scratch. Relentlessly objective science sees that it is far more likely that the first such life form came about through the work of an intelligent agent, just as it would know that the alien spacecraft wasn’t a mindless, accidental, natural phenomenon.
Due to atheistic perversion of science, the godless establishment continues to insist that it is plausible that there was some prebiotic scenario that would have allowed for the gradual, incremental, mindless development of such nanotechnology. This approach will be as fruitful as searching for a mindless, natural explanation for the alien spacecraft. It is like insisting software of astounding functional complexity came about mindlessly, accidentally and incrementally — and basing this on the notion that a computer that would allow for this accidental development could come about mindlessly and accidentally as well. Basing belief in one absurdity upon another absurdity is not science — it is the last, desperate attempt of militant atheism to maintain its control over the establishment.
The astoundingly complex nanotechnology of life doesn’t prove belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is correct. Yet true, relentlessly objective science admits that currently the most plausible explanation for life coming about is that an intelligent agent of some kind was involved in the process. Insisting that is not the case is irrational atheism, not science.
I can’t help but think that many Americans would find politicians very refreshing who bluntly questioned the irrational assumptions of the atheistic establishment, and questioned their godless social engineering, and questioned their calling indoctrination “education” and so on and so on. Although that would take politicians and pundits who refuse to be intimidated.
September 19th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
harry –
Why, harry, don’t you remember we had a long chat or two about that? :)
You have struck upon one of my pet peeves.
Name some of these ‘militant atheists’ active today maintaining “control over the establishment”. I was unaware that it had come to open warfare with guns and such. I mean, when people talk about “militant Islam” they don’t mean ‘people who write books and essays advocating Islam’, and when people speak of ‘militant Christianists’, they’re talking about the Hutarees, right?
So, that must mean ‘militant atheists’ are using and advocating violence, right? Let’s hear about some.
September 19th, 2011 | 1:12 pm
david c. –
Ah, yes, the fault is entirely on the ‘liberal’ side. There’s no chance of any blind spots on the conservative side, right?
Um, the essay in question has Ms. Dowd disparaging – direct quote here – “know-nothing candidates” (emphasis added).
What would you suggest a conservative do to understand liberals? (Is such a thing even worth attempting?)
September 19th, 2011 | 1:31 pm
Ray,
It’s all well and good to quote Scripture (whose authority you would deny) and offer counter challenges, but none of that addresses the matter at hand: is the ongoing and undeniable contempt that most members of the liberal chattering class have for conservatives in general and Christian conservatives in particular be they politicians or plain folks. Do you really wish to deny it?
The rest is just obfuscation as I suspect you are aware.
September 19th, 2011 | 2:26 pm
Hi, Ray,
OK. Replace “militant atheism” with “aggressive atheism” in my remarks.
Atheism has infected and perverted jurisprudence, science, the media — even biblical scholarship. Now that modern scientific findings are demonstrating that atheistic faith is a rather irrational, unreasonable faith (and it IS a faith — it is impossible to prove that God isn’t there) it should become easier for pundits and politicians to question the social and legal policy derived from it.
It is no small matter that they do so. Atheistic regimes have repeatedly proven to be lethal to one segment of humanity or another on a massive scale that makes the crimes attributed to theistic belief seem insignificant in comparison. Where these regimes weren’t actually lethal to a vast segment of the human family they still brutally violated human dignity. This is due to the fact that there is no basis for inalienable human rights in atheism, nor is “human” dignity considered by atheism any more special than that of any other species. The history of such regimes make this very clear.
It is also no small matter that even though American jurisprudence was originally based upon “the laws of nature and nature’s God” and an acknowledgment of the inalienable rights of humanity, our current, completely secularized, atheistic government claims for itself the authority to bestow and withdraw rights of humanity that were once considered to be *inalienable* human rights, the protection of which were the very reason humanity brought the state into being.
September 19th, 2011 | 2:31 pm
david c. –
September 19th, 2011 | 3:32 pm
So those who disagree with the godless social engineers of our ruling class “revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.”
The irony is that the people who rely most on these arguments are the ones who define both “intellectualism” and “science” in terms that demand uncritical acceptance of the words spoken on high by prophets of the new religion.
Intellectual no longer means a person who thinks, but rather excludes any real thinkers, because the gap between their pet theories vs. the real world have grown too huge to contemplate.
And science, rather than meaning “the scientific method”, refers to a set of beliefs that can explain – in entirely ideological terms, and against all real-world evidence – how a man can “really” be a woman even though his body is entirely and unambiguously male, and how failure to recognize and accommodate this can wreck a person’s life, but then gender suddenly becomes unimportant when we’re talking about forcing a boy to accept a stepmother as a substitute for a same-sex parent/role model.
It’s all just more newspeak. Because the left needs to rely heavily on word-games – its goals are unrealistic, its expectations contradictory, and its policies have all failed.
September 20th, 2011 | 8:50 am
Ray,
most conservatives understand liberals far better than vice versa, since we live in a liberal world. that may seem like a tired platitude, but I live in a university, and have had earnest philosophy professors ask me (as a political scientist- not knowing I was conservative) why anyone might ever vote Republican.
As a late life convert (20 years as a Liberal Democrat, then the last 16 or so as a Conservative), I know how little thought some give to the real arguments and the underlying assumptions.
it is possible to live today without having real, serious contact with conservative ideas. it is not possible to live in this society isolated from liberal ideas and attitudes. yet, the liberal intelligentsia feels embattled…
and, with Harry, I worry about the future of “human rights” when they are defined by fad and democratic majorities or loud minorities, rather than on the fundamental dignity of the human being created in the image of God.
September 20th, 2011 | 9:04 am
“And science, rather than meaning “the scientific method”, refers to a set of beliefs that can explain – in entirely ideological terms, and against all real-world evidence – how a man can “really” be a woman even though his body is entirely and unambiguously male …”
This might be an illustrative example that, on a good day, might result in an enlightening conversation about genetics, culture, and identity.
It’s not unknown for a human being to be born XXY. Man or woman? Is it a little too worrisome for conservatives to discuss if the person has both forms of genitalia, only in a smaller form from mainstream human beings? Or do we concede that a person is really an animal, and can be classified by outer characteristics, like a scientist would analyze a starfish or a pine tree? White or black. This or that. Male or female. Very simple, for simple people.
Personally, I don’t think “all” conservatives and Christians are stupid. I do know that the media, especially tv (but even the print media), tends to select figures for what they can sell, not for what they know. Presidential candidates are no exception.
Lots of amusement from this chair on the meme expressed above that “Your people are as stupid as ours.” Made my day. Thanks for that.
September 20th, 2011 | 11:18 am
Nancy –
Oddly, your characterizations were not parallel. Is it possible to live today “isolated from” conservative “ideas and attitudes”? Is it possible to live today “without having real, serious contact with”[emphasis added] liberal “ideas”?
One of the problems that’s been lamented by commenters on all sides is the way people today can tailor their reading and viewing – and even their social networking – to only get information that agrees with their preconceptions. I assure you, that’s not a trait restricted to any one political leaning.
September 20th, 2011 | 11:49 am
Todd, why did you dispute Blake’s reference to the folly of introducing ambiguity into an unambiguous situation by pointing out that there are ambiguous situations? Is it relevant?
September 20th, 2011 | 1:17 pm
I would guess that most of Dowd’s favorite “intellectuals” deny the very existence of the intellect…. If this crowd claim that we don’t have an intellect, then why is it a problem when “right-wingers” act as if they are “anti-intellectual”? Shouldn’t you be praising them?
I assume what she means is “smart vs. stupid.” If this is her criterion for political office, then we should elect homo sapiens (instead of persons) on the basis of MRI scans, IQ tests, etc. instead of on the basis of whether their judgments are correct or incorrect (which, of course, requires an intellect to decipher). I don’t know what Ms. Dowd’s ideal society is, but I know that it is better to have for president a high school graduate who knows he is a morally responsible agent vs. a “genius” with a PHD from Harvard who has convinced himself that he has no more “moral responsibility” for his actions than does any other animal, or tree, or even rock, for that matter.
If that gives me a label of “anti-intellectual,” then I’ll be happy to carry it.
September 20th, 2011 | 2:09 pm
most conservatives understand liberals far better than vice versa, since we live in a liberal world
What’s really funny is Jonathan Haidt, a liberal who has made a career out of studying “what makes people vote Republican” and “what the Tea Party really wants” – for the purpose of explaining it to lefties (so that they’ll stop failing so miserably in their political campaigns).
The reason I use the word “funny” is that – for all that he genuinely and sincerely tries to embrace the idea that maybe conservatives are people, just like normal people – he still gets it wrong.
In his book “The Happiness Hypothesis”, for instance, he defines the gay rights debate entirely in terms of the repugnance argument – then rejects that argument. No comprehension at all of the idea that maybe conservatives might be genuinely concerned with things like the integrity or well-being of the family as a social institution, or how changing the definition of marriage might impact the real-world, or any other pragmatic concern – oh, no; he has discovered that there are in fact conservatives who are worried about the boundary violation between “appropriate” vs. “inappropriate” sexuality, so therefore that must be how they all think.
September 20th, 2011 | 3:21 pm
Personally, I don’t think “all” conservatives and Christians are stupid.
That’s very kind of you.
September 23rd, 2011 | 3:17 pm
[...] Now, what’s this about Conservative “Anti-Intellectualism? [...]
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