There are many reasons for the dramatic divide between Americans who voted to put a mentally-ill convicted felon back in the White House, and the rest of us. All of those reasons, however, connect to deep wells of resentment and grievance, a need to blame something–some other–for life’s disappointments.
There is a disinclination to see that divide for what it is, and to blame populist disaffections on the more privileged among us. For example, we are routinely treated to disputations on the supposed “elitism” of educated folks. Despite the fulminations of self-important pundits, however, “elitism”–while it certainly exists– is different from expertise, and much of what is decried as snobbish elitism really reflects hostility to people with knowledge and education.
A few years ago, I read Tom Nichols book, The Death of Expertise. It was a penetrating examination of the way knowledge and expertise have been attacked as “elitist,” a description of how and why people without the specialized knowledge and/or analytical skills increasingly required by modern societies have come to resent those who possess such expertise.
The educational advancements that have enabled social and economic progress, Nichols tells us, have fueled a backlash– “a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues…. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.”
We can see evidence of Nichols’ observation all around us. It reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s often-quoted observation:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Nichols says that this backlash has been facilitated by a number of things: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and especially by the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine.
Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.
To call Nichols’ 2017 book prescient is to belabor the obvious.
This resentment of expertise has been vastly amplified by an information environment that indulges confirmation bias. There’s Fox “News,” of course, and the Internet offers a wide array of “news” sites that allow users to choose the “facts” that they prefer. Want to believe that an election was stolen? That Justice Department’s prosecutions are political vendettas? That vaccines are poisoning us, and Jews are encouraging immigration in order to “replace” White Christians? That those “libruls” are looking down their noses at “real Americans”?
As I used to tell my Media and Policy students, if you are convinced that the aliens landed in Roswell, I can find you Internet sites with pictures of the aliens.
The “Wild West” that is our media environment is a primary reason Americans inhabit different realities. Among other things, the Internet breeds false confidence among those who have “done their research” online, and feeds their disdain for those with actual, hard-won expertise.
And I don’t know what can be done about it.
America’s devotion to Free Speech rests on the belief that in a marketplace of ideas, truth will emerge. But the effectiveness of such a marketplace depends upon an exchange of facts and beliefs by a largely informed and rational public. When facts can be manufactured, when participants in that marketplace have no respect for the opinions of those with relevant education or expertise–when they reject any suggestion that person A’s education or training has provided her with more and better information than person B, who lacks such training –and that to suggest otherwise is “elitism”– society fails to function, let alone advance.
The problem is, there’s no easy “fix” that I can see. (It’s certainly not to give government control of information.) Long term, the answer is education, teaching children how to differentiate between credible sources and propaganda, between what constitutes reliable evidence and what doesn’t. Such instruction is increasingly unlikely, since the nation’s children are increasingly being diverted into private religious schools via vouchers, and legislators are demanding that universities devolve into job training institutions.
So here we are….
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