Tilting at the Enlightenment

Some people go through life like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

Then there’s Rick Santorum. He wants to repeal the Enlightenment.

I’ve been mulling over Santorum’s recent attack on higher education, part and parcel of his rejection of so many aspects of modernity: evolution, reproductive autonomy for women, separation of church and state, equality for gays and lesbians…There really isn’t much about  the 21st Century (or the 19th or 20th, for that matter) that he seems willing to accept.

I think Santorum’s hostility toward education is very real, despite his own MBA and Law Degrees, and it is at the very heart of his worldview (I hesitate to call it a “philosophy,” a word he would obviously consider “snobby.”) Many people have suggested that his own degrees are evidence that he doesn’t really believe his charges that colleges and universities “indoctrinate” young people, make them lose their religion and become more like the hated Barack Obama–i.e., intellectual. I don’t agree; Santorum’s degrees are professional ones–high order job training. (I”m not throwing rocks; I have a law degree too.)

What Santorum loathes and fears is education. Real education doesn’t “indoctrinate,” of course–it does something more pernicious. It questions.

Education is the arch-enemy of certitude.

If I do my job properly, my students will leave my classes a bit more confused, a bit less sure they have “the answers” and a lot more aware of the magnitude of the questions. They will encounter the diversity with which we mortals approach the uncertainties and complexities of the world we inhabit. They will have a greater appreciation of what they don’t know. If I do my job well, they will also have some “critical” tools with which to assess the credibility of the information with which they are increasingly bombarded.

That is the education Santorum detests, because he is cut wholly from Puritan cloth.

The Puritans came to America for religious liberty–defined as the right to practice the True Religion, and the even more important right to impose that Truth on their neighbors. They approached education much like TV’s Jeopardy–you started with the correct answer, which the Bible provided, and then you went looking for the explanations that would justify that answer. Usually, in the early colonies, those explanations came from the preachers and biblical scholars who’d preceded you.

The philosophical and scientific movement that came to be called the Enlightenment changed the nature of knowledge. You no longer began with the answer; instead, you examined the world around you, based some initial conclusions on careful empirical observations, and then tested those conclusions, which were always considered conditional and subject to change if new information emerged. The Enlightenment gave us the scientific method–as well as a more scientific approach to questions like “how should governments be constructed.”

The U.S. Constitution was a creation of the Enlightenment. So was ambiguity. If all truth is provisional, if all conclusions are subject to revision based upon new information, how can anyone really, really be sure of anything?

Education–real education, as opposed to job training–prepares students to live with that ambiguity.

Puritans find it intolerable.

Comments

Essential Reading

This morning’s column by David Brooks is a dead-on accurate description of what has happened to the GOP.

I was going to excerpt a paragraph, but I couldn’t decide which one, because Brooks goes from pointed observation to perfect analogy and back. (He notes that the primaries haven’t been about policy differences; rather, they’ve been a “series of heresy trials.”)

David Brooks is exactly the sort of thoughtful conservative who used to exemplify the Republican Party, back when I was an active member of the GOP. Now–next to the raging troglodytes and the culture warriors and the know-nothings who want to keep kids out of college and repeal the Enlightenment–he is an anachronism.

He has a lot of company.

Read the column. And weep.

Comments

Costs and Benefits

A colleague and I were in a conversation last night with someone thinking about moving to Indiana. My colleague noted–somewhat proudly, I thought–that despite the recession, and unlike so many neighboring states, Indiana has a budget surplus. He attributed that to sound “money management” by the Governor.

This morning’s Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette has a somewhat different take on how that surplus was achieved. 

As the paper noted,

The dirty little secret behind Indiana’s budget surplus is exactly how it came to be. Not the bounty of a booming economy but the result of nicks, cuts and downright slashing of programs critical to the safety of vulnerable Hoosiers and to the economic future of all its residents.

The article focused especially on cuts to child services, noting that DCS returned an “astonishing” amount of money to the state at the same time that repeated reports of abuse went un-investigated, and at least six children died.

In a forthcoming article, Morton Marcus notes that Indiana’s unemployment remains among the highest in the country, despite the recovery. He makes the point–so often ignored–that government jobs are, in fact, jobs. When the state lays off workers, cuts teachers, police officers, child protective workers and others, it not only reduces the effectiveness of services we all depend upon (with sometimes tragic results, as the Journal-Gazette article documents), it reduces employment. It reduces the number of people paying taxes, and increases the number of those needing public services.

When times are tough, tough decisions absolutely need to be made. Budgets–at least in Indiana, which has a constitutional provision requiring it–must be balanced.

The question is: how? And at whose expense?

Comments

The Difference Between Children and Adults

The facts are relatively straightforward:

In Afghanistan, American soldiers inadvertently burned several copies of the Koran. Apparently, it was an honest mistake; however–predictably–it infuriated many Muslims. Some of them have responded violently, and a recent attack that killed two Americans may have been prompted by the incident.

President Obama apologized for the burning of the Muslim’s holy book.

Newt Gingrich and other Republicans criticized the President for apologizing even before the recent attacks. Locally, Gary Varvel’s cartoon on the matter showed caskets covered with American flags and the President off to the side apologizing–defiantly suggesting, with the attitude of five-year-olds everywhere, that “they’re worse than we are, so we shouldn’t apologize.”

Let’s (patiently–in the manner of parents of small children everywhere) use this as a “teachable” moment. A couple of lessons come to mind.

First, let’s try putting ourselves in the other guy’s shoes. How do you think the bible-thumpers in the United States would have reacted if bibles had been accidentally burned by Muslims? With reason and understanding, acknowledging that “accidents happen”? Of course not.

Now, let’s talk about appropriate/inappropriate behavior. Violence is never appropriate; it is a sign of immaturity and lack of discipline. It doesn’t matter “who started it”–fighting doesn’t solve anything. It makes things worse, and it doesn’t persuade anyone of anything. So the Afghans’ response was wrong.

Lesson three is important. Adults apologize for their mistakes. Those apologies are not a sign of weakness; quite the contrary. As we constantly admonish our children, admitting when you’ve done something wrong–accidentally or purposely–and saying “I’m sorry” when that is appropriate are signs of honesty and maturity.

And as I used to tell my children, you apologize when you’ve done something wrong even if the other guy is a jerk who doesn’t accept that apology. Because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s what separates the children from the adults.

Comments

Lock Up Your 12-Year-Olds!

Sometimes, I’m so distracted by how batshit crazy the right-wingers have become that I forget how utterly despicable they can be.

To appropriate an old Henny Youngman joke (google him), “Take Eric Miller. Please. Take him.”

Miller–who makes a comfortable living pretending that bigotry is religion–has a new “Urgent Legislative Alert” that will be distributed Sunday to the network of far-right churches that support his salary (thinly disguised as membership dues to his organization, Advance America).

The “Urgent Alert” has a banner headline: “BMV Approves Pro-Homosexual License Plate!” In only slightly smaller font is “Help Protect Children-Revoke License Plate Now!” This is followed by the usual sanctimony, text piously bemoaning the harm to children that will be caused if the Indiana Youth Group receives the “seal of approval” that issuance of a license plate would imply.  What is truly disgusting is the assertion, which is repeated three times in the text of the flyer, that IYG “targets” children as young as twelve.

Well, yes indeed it does. It has to, thanks to people like Eric Miller.

IYG is an organization that only exists because people like Miller cause so much pain to so many young people who don’t have the wherewithal to fight back, or even understand what the fight is really about. It is an organization that opens its arms to young, vulnerable, hurting kids –too many of whom have been thrown out of their homes by parents who care less for their own flesh and blood than for the illusory security offered by a rigid, punitive, unChristian theology.

IYG “targets” these teenagers by providing them with acceptance, a healing  message and a safe place to figure things out. The message is simple: no matter what hateful people say,  you are a valuable human being who simply happens to love differently. Being different is neither right nor wrong–it’s just different. So don’t hurt yourself, don’t hate yourself, and please don’t kill yourself.

That’s the “pro-homosexual” message Eric Miller finds so offensive.

I could point out that what Miller wants the State to do is unconstitutional–he wants the State to deny IYG the equal protection of the laws–but I’m sure he knows that. He just doesn’t care–just as he doesn’t care if the children he is helping to hound and demean, the children he is targeting, end up physically or emotionally damaged or dead as a result of the attitudes he is promoting.

We certainly should lock up our twelve-year-olds–not to “protect” them from IYG, but to keep them away from heartless bigots like Eric Miller.

Comments