The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation
is the philosophy of government in the next.
—Abraham Lincoln
The Challenge of Our Egalitarian Roots
American culture has always had a bit of a love-hate relationship when it comes to valuing a formal education. On the one hand, we take great pride in our long history of scientific and technological achievements which our many universities and other centers for research have accomplished. On the other hand, there has been an equally long antagonism toward those associated with such places and identified as intellectuals. From the “common sense” of the early frontiersman and the populism of the Jacksonian presidency to today’s Tea Party and anti-vaxxers, antipathy toward the expert and the value of expertise has deep roots in the American psyche, and even in popular culture—from the 19th Century’s “eggheads” to the 20th’s “nerds” to the 21st’s “geeks” and “wonks”—we have a lengthy record of pejoratives for those even perceived as possessing a well-trained intelligence.
The source of this hostility, I suspect, lies in our egalitarian roots. The notion that “all men are created equal” is a product of the Enlightenment’s belief that all human beings are born with the same capacity for rational thought and that, therefore, no one person is innately superior to another. Out of this grew the foundations for our democracy because if everyone is equally capable of rational thought, then everyone is equally capable of making decisions about how society should be governed. In other words, if everyone has the properties of the monarch, then anyone could be one, and thus, we are all political equivalents according to this line of reasoning.
It truly was a revolutionary idea at the time, and following the necessary physical revolution to make it happen, our founders set about constructing a system for guiding all this decision making everyone is equally capable of doing in order to prevent things from either turning into a shouting match or degenerating into mob rule. They recognized that just because everyone possesses the same capacity for rational thought does not mean that each person will employ this capacity equally well—just as the fact that all humans are born with the capacity to run does not mean everyone will become an Olympic sprinter—and so they set up the necessary checks and balances for governing a society where everyone is a potential monarch (a system enshrined in the U.S. Constitution to this day).
There is a danger, though, to an entire culture of nothing but Kings and Queens, and that is how easy it is to go from understanding everyone as political equivalents (we are all equally capable of rational decision making) to thinking we are all epistemically equivalent (every thought, belief, and idea in my head is just as valid and true as the one’s in anyone else’s). When the latter happens, the highly trained expertise associated with the intellectual becomes dismissible, perceived as a threat to the political equivalency, or both. Regardless, we then have a serious problem on our hands.
The Value of Science
To illuminate what that problem is, I need to digress briefly and explore that nature and character of the process of science. I use the word “process” here deliberately because when I use the word “science,” I am not talking exclusively about the formal investigation and experimentation methods employed by people who engage in professional scientific research. Instead, I am speaking about a way of thinking (on which such research is based) where claims about the world are made based on observable, verifiable empirical evidence and then tested to see if the truth of that claim can be falsified by objective reasons independently of the individual making it. In other words, when I use the word science, I mean a self-corrective way of thinking that “demands that we use our senses and our capacity to reason. And it demands that we take the world on its own terms and not conform our perceptions to accord with our preconceived notions…” (Judd, pp. 120-121).
That last part about not conforming to (potentially naïve) preconceptions is perhaps the most critical feature of this way of thinking, and the consequences of this 17th Century revolution in thought would prove profound. It is because of science that humans have transformed the world from a strictly authoritarian pre-industrial one where the average lifespan was 30 to the democratic, technological societies of today where the average lifespan is 78. In fact—returning momentarily to the country’s origins—our founders were so convinced that “the natural sciences would be the engine of America’s technological and economic advancement [with science and democracy progressing together],” that “their commitment to science was second only to their commitment to political and religious liberty” (Forrest, pp. 131 & 136). Today’s prevalent scientific illiteracy and widespread anti-intellectual attacks on science would have appalled the framers of the Constitution.
Inconvenient Truth
What happened, then, to change how we once perceived the value of science in our society to the culture-wars we find ourselves in today? The answer, I think, lies in that ellipse I deliberately left at the end of Diana Judd’s quote. The full conclusion to that quote reads: “…and not conform our perceptions to accord with our preconceived notions, no matter how cherished they may be” (my emphasis). Here is where that egalitarian strain in our society that wants to equate “politically equivalent” with “intellectually equivalent” gets us into trouble. Science produces objective truths about the world—independent of our cherished notions—and we don’t always want to hear those truths. Therefore, if I can somehow justify that my claims (e.g. that the world is flat) are just as valid as everyone else’s because “all people are created equal,” then I don’t have to listen to science’s truths (e.g. that the world is a rotating sphere). Worse, I now have a justification—one associated with our most deeply held political beliefs—to attack those scientific truths I don’t want to hear.
Which, in the past 30 years, is precisely what has happened. Among the academic intellectuals, the assault has been postmodernism’s argument that all truth claims are inherently and concurrently claims about power and, therefore, simply tools for social ordering. Furthermore, since truth claims are fundamentally about power, the argument continues, then the validity of any given claim can only be determined by social struggle and political competition and not some appeal to any “objective” reality. Therefore, according to the postmodernists, “truths are decided upon, not discovered” (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 209) and the world of today’s “alternative facts” becomes validated.
Not that the political and religious Right’s populist uses of such “facts” has needed the postmodernists to justify their own attack on the concept of truth. For years now, the Right’s rhetoricians have successfully generated the cultural myth that expertise of any kind is intimately associated with elitism, and this connection has “fostered [in the public] a [far] deeper distrust of the very idea of truth” than any turbid scholarship from some academician (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 204). Indeed, the Right has been so successful at linking claims of truth to the perceived “elites” whom many of them believe are running our country that “truth is increasingly treated as the enemy of the people…meant to discipline the common person” by taking away their most cherished beliefs (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 216).
Thus, just like for the postmodernists, so-called “truth” becomes about control, enabling the Right to use their own brand of anti-intellectualism to attack the objective reality of scientific understanding, and the irony that the Right can use one of their own regular targets, the postmodernists themselves, to rationalize the Right’s own position shows just how far down this rabbit hole we have plunged as a culture. It does not help (as I discussed in Chapter 9) that digital technology and “the production of ever-more time-wasting features for [our] smartphones” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 13) are threatening both the social bonds and cognitive faculties that might enable us to crawl out of that hole. But the bottom line is that the notion that there can be singular, objective truths that apply to all of us—the essential foundation on which science stands—has essentially become politicized as “the very concept of truth is treated as an ideological construct” (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 216).
The Danger of Willful Ignorance
A society, however, that has made its standards for truth totally subjective is headed for disaster. As Alan Sokol points out, “We live in a single real world [and] it makes no sense to use one set of standards of evidence in physics, chemistry, and biology, and then suddenly relax your standards when it comes to medicine, religion, or politics” (p. 31). Simply denying the reality of objective truths just because we don’t like them or find them inconvenient doesn’t make them any less real or make them have any less real impact on us.
COVID-19, for example, does not care whether you believe in evolution or not; it will continue to mutate, evolving into new forms in response to the natural selection pressures of the human immune system and those new forms will continue to kill. Refusing to believe this objective truth is not going to prevent a person from becoming infected in the successive waves of the disease and possibly dying.
Nor does a Louisiana senator’s dismissal of the reality of systemic racism as “that’s rhetoric” stop this racism from being the root cause of the underlying health conditions putting African Americans at greater risk of dying from this novel virus. The harmful impact of the stress of systemic racism on the health, well-being, and shortened life spans of people of color is well documented, and simply refusing to acknowledge this objective truth is not going to prevent or stop the consequent racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates we are now observing.
Finally (and at a different scale), the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels do not care whether you believe in climate change or not. The structure of this molecule’s electron orbital cloud is such that it will always reflect the earth’s radiating heat back on itself, warming both the atmosphere and the world’s oceans. Hence, the more of it there is, the warmer our planet gets—permanently altering both climate and weather patterns in ways that threaten our civilization. Again, refusing to believe this objective truth is not going to stop the immeasurable suffering of our future children.
While these are only a few examples, the reality is that science in all its forms produces actual truths that have actual consequences. Those truths are constantly being refined (e.g. as we have learned more about COVID-19, we have come to realize that we all should be wearing masks in public after all since far more people are asymptomatic than originally realized). But that is the beauty of science: it is always producing a more and more accurate picture of the world (of which we are a part!) so that we can take better and more informed actions I am not unsympathetic to the postmodernist agenda, namely that the so-called “common good” which the methods of science have served in the past has been that of white males, the military-industrial complex, and a consumerist economy. However, just because the white patriarchy has been determining which questions science has been exploring does not make the system of thought itself is innately political in character. We can use science to ask other questions—such as those that allow us to know the source of racial disparities in COVID-19s impact on health (and the digital divide I have discussed in other posts)—and when we ask these other questions, the consequent truths are no less objective. It is what we then do with that knowledge that matters.
Unfortunately, the human brain can and does operate in such a way that individuals have the capacity to choose to believe that the laws of the natural world are “alternative facts” and don’t apply to them. Fortuitously, most of the resulting pseudoscience, mythology, and superstition is relatively harmless, and the odd person who truly does choose, for instance, not to believe in gravity quickly earns a Darwin Award and is weeded out. But in the real world, trace amounts of lead, whether in paint or the water supply, cause irreparable brain damage when ingested over time, and lowering emissions standards, whether for cars or power plants, causes lung damage linked to a lifetime of asthma. These and many like them are not “alternative facts;” they are truths (however inconvenient to someone’s pocketbook), and a civilization that bases its public policy on anything less than the objective truth is doomed.
Coda
By now, I am confident that at least some of my readers are wondering: Haven’t we strayed a little far afield from where this started? Why should we care about the nature of science, the arcane critiques of postmodernism, or the politicization of “truth?” What does any of this have to do with the value of having a formal education?
For starters, ignorance of any kind can be dangerous. But the kind of deliberate, willful ignorance which we have been discussing IS dangerous, potentially even catastrophic, and the only way to combat either is by thoroughly, adequately educating the general public—a fact recognized quite early in the life of our republic by an individual whom many consider the father of public education, Horace Mann. Mann saw that if the foundation of democracy is the belief that all humans have an equal capacity for rational thought, then we had better thoroughly train that rationality if we want to have effective citizens who make sound governing decisions. What’s more, he recognized that every citizen needed access to such training if people were to resist the threats of irrationality and demagoguery present even in his own time. Hence, he pushed for the creation of public schools at a time when nearly all formal education in this country was private, work that would lay the foundation for the kind of modern public-school system we have today.
Mann, though, I think would be deeply saddened at the depths to which we have allowed education to fall in this country, and I think he would have been appalled at the amount of anti-intellectualism observable in so much of our populace—precisely because of the threat he understood it presented to democracy. We are at a crossroads in America, and only as we make the commitment to fix our broken educational infrastructure can we confront and dispel the current and dangerous ignorance that threatens our very future. It is one of the foundational reasons I started this project in the first place.
But another reason I started this project—and a second thing I think that makes this current discussion relevant to education—is that many so-called “inconvenient truths” aren’t just inconvenient, they are threatening. If I am a coal miner, the only rational solutions to addressing climate change endanger my very existence; take seriously how contagious COVID-19 is and suddenly more than 30 million people are unemployed in a matter of weeks. Education, in its broadest sense, is the only tool we have to help people understand the unwanted truths in their lives and to learn how to cope with them (whether that is retraining for eventual alternative employment or teaching mindfulness to alleviate stress and stay healthy in a time of quarantine). It is only by empowering people to address reality’s difficult (and frankly sometimes unpleasant) truths that we can mitigate the resistance to such truths, and it is only through such mitigation that we can “remedy the public ignorance to which our children’s future is currently held hostage” (Kitcher, p. 239) and avoid catastrophic consequences for those yet unborn. An authentically engaged education is our path to doing both.
References
Fact Sheet: Health Disparities and Stress (2020) American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/health-disparities/fact-sheet-stress
Forrest, B. (2018) Betraying the Founder’s Legacy: Democracy as a Weapon Against Science. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 131-150.
Judd, D. (2018) The Scientific Revolution and Individual Inquiry. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 105-121.
Kitcher, P. (2018) Plato’s Revenge: An Undemocratic Report from an Overheated Planet. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 225-240.
Lemann, N. (2014) The Tea Party is Timeless: Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Reviewed. Columbia Journalism Review. https://archives.cjr.org/second_read/richard_hofstadter_tea_party.php
Mann, H. (1891) Life and Works of Horace Mann, Vol. 1-3. Google Books. https://books.google.com/. For a quick, more accessible overview of the life and thoughts of Horace Mann, https://www.biography.com/scholar/horace-mann is a reliable source.
NPR’s Morning Edition (April 7, 2020) Sen. Bill Cassidy On His State’s Racial Disparites In Coronavirus Deaths. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/07/828715984/sen-bill-cassidy-on-his-states-racial-disparites-in-coronavirus-deaths
NPR’s On Point (March 17, 2020) Why People Distrust Experts and What We Can Do About It. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510293/on-point-books
Roser, M.; Ortiz-Ospina, E.; & Ritchie, H (2020) Life Expectancy. OurWorldInData.org. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Smulewicz-Zuker, G. (2018) The Myth of Expert as Elite: Postmodern Theory, Right-wing Populism, and the Assault on Truth. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 203-222.
Sokal, A. (2018) What is Science and Why Should We Care? Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 17-33.
Thompson, M. & Smulewicz-Zucker, G., ed. (2018) Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society. New York: Prometheus Books.
Light a Candle 