by Bill Moyers
And Clinton? What about Clinton?
Everything in my view that’s being written about the failure ten years ago of the Clinton health care program, in relation to Hillary Clinton, is wrong. Its failure is usually attributed to their failure to bring the insurance industry groups to the table, all of the interest groups in advance. No. The reason that health care reform was dead on arrival was that the American people hadn’t been educated and prepared for any kind of change. Bill Clinton just announced his plan, which had been developed more or less secretly, without much public participation. The health insurance industry jumped in with its Harry and Louise commercials. I’ll bet everybody remembers Harry and Louise, and nobody remembers a detail of the Clinton plan, the health care plan. It is the job of the president to get his message out before Harry and Louise. Bill Clinton didn’t do that.
You also write about the difference it makes to talk about troop and troops instead of soldier and soldiers.
Very Orwellian. Troops used to be a word reserved only as a collective noun. We would say, “Allied troops have landed at Normandy.” Troops meant a massive military operation. We never talked about a soldier who was killed in action as a troop. We don’t lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop. We lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. That kind of euphemistic language—talking about troops takes individuality away from them.
They become an abstraction.
They become an abstraction, right. Not an individual soldier who is dying. And, by the way, I offer a theory about how this substitution happens. And it’s not very Machiavellian at all. It’s part of, again, how dumb our culture has become. I think some PR person somehow decided that soldier could mean only a man. And they were looking for a noun that sounded more neutral. It’s utterly stupid, of course; a soldier can be a man or a woman. But my guess is that some dopey PR person suggested this. And somebody in the army said, “Great.” And the newspapers just went along.
So what prompted this book?
In a way it was an outgrowth of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. After Freethinkers was published I welcomed the opportunity to go out and speak across the country, to educate people about a secular tradition that has been lost, downgraded, and denigrated. I soon found my audiences consisted almost entirely of people who already agreed with me. Conservatives report exactly the same experience. This was not always the case in our country. In the nineteenth century, Robert Ingersoll, who is known as “the Great Agnostic,” had audiences full of people who didn’t agree with him. But they wanted to hear what he had to say. They wanted to see whether the devil really has horns. Now what we have is a situation in which people go to hear people they already agree with. What’s going on is not so much education as reinforcement of the opinions you already have.
Why is it we’re so unwilling to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints? Or to imagine that we might learn something from someone who disagrees with us?
I think it is part of a larger thing that is making our culture dumber. We have over the past forty years resorted to shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans. One of the most important studies I’ve seen was by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They found that, on average, children under six spend two hours a day watching television or video—it’s called “infantainment”—but only thirty-nine minutes a day reading or being read to by their parents. I don’t see how people can learn to concentrate and read if they watch television when they’re very young as opposed to having their parents read to them. The fact is when you’re watching television, whether it’s an infant or adult, or staring glazedly at a video screen, you’re not doing something else.
What does it say to you that half of American adults believe in ghosts? I take these numbers from your book. One-third believe in astrology. And four-fifths believe in miracles.
The flip side of this is that half of Americans don’t believe in evolution. And these things go together. Because what they do is they place science on a par almost with folk beliefs. If I may inveigh against ourselves, I think the American media in particular has a lot to do with it. Because one of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture is the way the media constantly talks about truth as if it were always equidistant from two points. Sometimes the truth is one-sided. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks there was a huge cover story in Time magazine in 2002 about the rapture and endof-the-world scenarios. There wasn’t a singular secular person quoted in it. They discussed the rapture scenario from the Book of Revelation as though it was a perfectly reasonable thing for people to believe. It’s exactly like saying, “So-and-so says, ‘Two plus two equals five.’ But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four.” The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.
You call it a kind of dumb objectivity. What does it say to you that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism based on the Book of Genesis to be taught in our public schools along with evolution?
It’s that evolution is just a theory, it’s just another opinion. Just as some people believe that the account of the six days of creation in Genesis is literally true, some people believe we’re descended from lower animals. In other words, it places belief on the same level as science, subject to proof. I should say, however, that it may also mean that a lot of Americans aren’t exactly sure what creationism means. Because, in fact, the recent Gallup poll shows that only 30 percent of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. Many—most—Americans believe the Bible is divinely inspired. But you can believe the Bible is divinely inspired and still believe in evolution, but you can’t believe that the Bible is literally true and still believe in evolution. There’s a wonderful book, Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero, which cites a poll that half of Americans can’t name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. This is part of the dumbing down of our culture. One of those books that 50 percent of Americans apparently aren’t reading is the Bible, or they would know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. It’s sort of like, “I don’t know what Genesis is, but I believe it.”
Doesn’t this also say something about the level of science education in our public schools?
I think it says everything about the level of education in our schools. One out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth. But you shouldn’t have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. There’s been a huge failure of education. I do agree with many cultural conservatives about the emphasis on African American history, women’s history, and so on. These are all great additions, and necessary. But what they’ve done in addition to adding subjects is to place less emphasis on the overall culture that everybody should know. People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don’t. This feeds back into our current political process. You wonder why more of the American public doesn’t understand it. Well, if you don’t know that there are nine judges, then you don’t know that George W. Bush’s last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court that’s likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices to know how really important the composition of the Supreme Court is in the next election. Our schools are doing a bad job of teaching history and science.
You claim that right-wing intellectuals are dangerous because they have command of a vocabulary that makes wishful thinking sound rational.
One of the great successes of the intellectual right is that they have succeeded brilliantly during the last twenty years at pinning the “intellectual” label solely on liberals, so that a lot of people think that to be an intellectual means that you are a liberal alone. And one of the reasons that I think that right-wing intellectuals are so dangerous is they’ve been so clever at doing this. They’ve been much more clever than liberal intellectuals
have been. They’ve made it look like liberals are the only “elites.” But right-wing people get huge salaries from business-financed right-wing foundations. They’re not the elites? Of course they’re the elites. I object to their ideas; I don’t object to the people. But the liberal intellectual community is really caught asleep at the switch by these people. One of the points I make in The Age of American Unreason, which is why I think I’m going to get killed from both the right and the left, is that antirationalism in America is not the province of either the right or the left. It’s the province of both. When you talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq War, it doesn’t matter to them that it hasn’t worked out. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, on false pretenses and so on, doesn’t matter to them.
They make wishful thinking sound rational. It’s the same thing when we hear that the surge is working. Well, the surge is working as long as we have those troops there. There are fewer people being killed in suicide bombings every day because we have a lot more young soldiers there in harm’s way. How many people were killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad before America entered the war? I believe the answer is none. So what they’re doing is comparing apples and oranges.
You’re pretty hard on some liberal intellectuals, too. You say they won’t acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance: “Liberal intellectuals ... tended during the past eight years to define the Bush administration as the root of all evil, and see an outraged citizenry ready to throw the bums out as the solution.” And you say that’s the cheap and wrong way out. Right?
It’s the cheap way out and the wrong way out for this reason: Over and over we have heard from candidates who supported the war and changed their minds. “We were lied to,” they said. “If we’d known then what we know now we wouldn’t have done it.” They say to the public, “You were lied to.” But the deeper conversation we need to be having is why were Americans so willing to be lied to—not only average citizens, but politicians. There was a National Geographic–Roper poll of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-four—only 23 percent of college-educated young people could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Israel on the map, four countries of ultimate importance to American policy. This was a map, by the way, that wasn’t blank; it had the names of the countries lettered on it. They didn’t know where the Middle East is! Only 6 percent of high school graduates could name those countries. This is nothing to be bragging about. Surely this has something to do with why as a country we have such shallow discussions.
You say left-of-center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that makes serious deceptions possible and plausible. Talk about the power and importance of memory.
Well, first of all, one of the things that we don’t remember is what our Constitution actually says. If we don’t know what our Constitution says about the separation of powers, then it really certainly affects the way we decide all kinds of public issues.
George Orwell talked about important knowledge like that being flushed do wn the memory hole. When that happens, the people in power can rule without any reference to the past.
For example, what the right wing says about judges is that our unelected judges are overstepping their powers. They talk as if judges have no right to interpret the Constitution. But that is exactly what the unelected federal judiciary was set up to do. It says so in the Constitution. People confuse the fact that they may not like certain judicial decisions with the right of judges to interpret the Constitution—indeed, the duty of judges under our Constitution to interpret the Constitution.
By ignorant, you mean “lack of knowledge,” “unaware.” You don’t mean “stupid,” which means “dimwitted.”
No.
But I can’t imagine a politician succeeding by saying, “We’re an ignorant culture and an ignorant people.”
No, but I can imagine a politician succeeding by saying, “We as a people have not lived up to our obligation to learn what we ought to learn to make informed decisions.” I can imagine candidates saying, “And we in the Congress have been guilty of that, too.” Because it’s not just the public that’s ignorant. We get the government we deserve. You wouldn’t say to people, “You’re a dope.” You would say, “We have got to do better about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy.” We can’t learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can’t learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themselves on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other and from books. We’ve become satisfied with too little. We’ve become satisfied with the lowest common denominator.
JIM YONG KIM
When the trustees of Dartmouth College chose Dr. Jim Yong Kim to be the school’s seventeenth president—the first Asian American to head any Ivy League institution—they knew he would bring the woes of the world with him to the idyllic New Hampshire campus, and they were more than okay with it. They were, in fact, counting on him to challenge Dartmouth’s students, as he had recently challenged a graduating class of young doctors, to act as if “the world’s troubles are your troubles.”
It’s no pious sentiment on his part. Kim has seen the world’s hurt up close and made an extraordinary life’s work out of helping to heal it. As a founding trustee of the global organization Partners in Health, he has worked for twenty-three years with the legendary Paul Farmer on a crusade to transform health care for the poor worldwide. He once supervised all of the World Health Organization’s work related to HIV/AIDS, co-founded the Global Health Delivery Project in collaboration with Harvard University’s medical and business schools, and developed the Web-based “communities of practice” (GHDonline.org), which enable health practitioners from Haiti and Peru to Lesotho and Siberia to engage in real-time problem solving.
Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Muscatine, Iowa, where he was quarterback of the football team, point guard on the basketball team, and valedictorian, Jim Yong Kim graduated magna cum laude from Brown, where he had thought of becoming a philosopher. His father’s imperative to “get a skill” instead spurred him on to Harvard, where he earned both a medical degree and a doctorate in anthropology. He became chairman of the school’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, director of its François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Oh, yes—in addition to his administrative duties, writing, and research, Dr. Kim taught overflowing classes of students. All of this accomplished by the time he was fifty!
So what do you do when you are already one of Time’s one hundred most influential people in the world, one of U.S. News and World Report’s “best American leaders,” and a MacArthur Foundation “genius”? Well, if you are Jim Yong Kim, you take on yet another challenge—decamping to the hills of western New Hampshire and the presidency of one of America’s oldest colleges, founded in 1769 on the colonial frontier and poised now to take on “the world’s troubles.”
—Bill Moyers
You have spent the last twenty-five years of your life working with the sickest and the poorest people in the world. And here you are, sitting in the corner office of a wealthy, elite school with fewer than six thousand undergraduate students. What in the world did you tell the search committee?
The call from the search committee was entirely unexpected. I was minding my own business, working with colleagues who were interested in global health, but also colleagues at the Harvard Business School and the systems engineering department at MIT, to try to figure out how to make health care programs in developing countries work more effectively. Dartmouth came out of the blue and said, “Would you look at this job?”
One of the reasons I took the job was my experience with Paul Farmer, who was chronicled in the b
ook Mountains Beyond Mountains. He’s one of my heroes and my closest friend in the world—a great public health advocate who has made a lot of personal sacrifices in his life. They call him the modern-day Albert Schweitzer. He is a person who works tirelessly for the health of poor people, and I have been very touched by the extent to which young people are motivated and moved by his life story.
There’s always a sense in young people that they want to do something great, but a lot of them don’t think they can make a difference. That’s really why I am at Dartmouth, to tell young people, “A few committed souls can change the world.” You know the famous Margaret Mead line that you should never doubt the capacity of a small group of committed souls to change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. I am at Dartmouth to give them that message.
But that’s not the most popular message right now. When you told those young doctors graduating from medical school last May, “The world’s troubles are your troubles,” that’s the last thing many people in America want to hear, because we have so many of our own troubles right here at home.
I don’t think that I would exclude our troubles. One of the projects that I started just before leaving Harvard was an effort to improve the health care of Native Americans in New Mexico. The life expectancy of certain Native American groups in the United States is one of the great moral crises that we face, life expectancies that are at times even lower than life expectancy in some of the developing countries that I work in, in the forties and fifties in some communities. So the world’s troubles are right here as well.
There’s something else. I was tantalized by the notion of reaching back into the undergraduate curriculum and trying to think hard about what it would take to train a group of young people who would leave the college energized, inspired, and really thinking there’s no problem that they couldn’t tackle. This is a good time to get them thinking about climate change, the crisis in the health care system in the United States, as well as global health problems. What do you need to do to prepare yourself for a meaningful life, tackling those kinds of problems?