by Penny, Laura
Also by Laura Penny:
Your Call Is Important to Us
For my family and my fellow nerds
CONTENTS
One Don’t Need No Edjumacation
Two At the Arse End of the Late, Great Enlightenment
Three Is Our Schools Sucking?
Four Screw U or Hate My Professors
Five Bully vs. Nerd: On the Persistence of Freedumb in Political Life
Six More Is Less: The Media-Entertainment Perplex
Seven If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich?
Notes
A portrait of the author as a young Poindexter.
Chapter One
DON’T NEED NO EDJUMACATION
When I was a bespectacled baby nerd, pudgy, precocious prey for bullies, my parents consoled me with a beautiful lie. Someday, in magical places called college and work, being smart would be cool. I’d have the last laugh while the bullies were slaving away at crummy jobs. My mom and dad said youth was their time to shine, the high point for the popular, truculent lunkheads who mocked spelling bees and science fairs. Their lives would be all downhill after grade 12. Then nerds like me would become doctors and lawyers and maybe even prime minister, and profit from the dimwittedness of our former tormentors. Let ‘em have their stupid dances and hockey games, they said. The future belonged to the weird kids who dug microscopes and dictionaries.
This, like many of my parents’ reassuring fibs, was partly true. There was no Santa, but there were plenty of Santas in the malls every December. The power of nerdiness did indeed propel many of my fellow Poindexters into respectable professions. The Poindexters – the pallid, indoorsy, owlish sorts who always got picked last for teams – have become coders and chemists and brokers and communications experts. But the struggle between bullies and nerds certainly did not end, as promised, when we graduated. Nor do nerds always emerge victorious in the contests of adult life. The bullies persevered and proliferated, went online and on TV and the radio, into politics and industry, and found new venues for numerous variations on a familiar theme: Fuck you, four-eyes.
I am not surprised that bullies continue to hate nerds, that the dudes who shove weedy science fair winners into lockers grow up to reject carbon taxes and vote for “strong” leaders. No, what shocks me is the number of self-hating nerds who are willing to pander to the bullies, the countless pundits and politicos who deploy their A-student skills in the service of anti-intellectualism.
This anti-intellectualism is at odds with all our talk about the importance of good schools. North Americans lavish a lot of rhetoric and resources on education. Politicians, pundits, business leaders, and concerned citizens natter on about the need to train workers to stay competitive in a global information economy, where knowledge is power. Post-secondary enrolment has reached record highs and private colleges of varying legitness have sprung up all over North America to cater to our seemingly insatiable hunger for classes. We also spend millions on books, toys, DVDs, video games, and supplements that claim to boost young – or aging – brains.
Never have so many been so schooled! But all this extra education has not turned the majority of North Americans into nerds, or nerdophiles. Our well-intentioned attempts to push and prod every semi-sentient kid through university seem to be backfiring. More people spending money and time on degrees has produced a surprising toxic side effect: more people who hate school – and nerds.
The bachelor’s degree has become a costly high-school diploma, the new middle-class normal. Ergo, higher ed has been demoted to the level of a racket, a swindle, a series of pointless exertions one must complete to get the golden ticket to a good job. Listen to talk radio, watch Fox News, and you’ll learn that nerds are the real bullies. We dastardly bastards run the continent’s most widespread and shameless kid-snatching operation, spiriting people’s beloved offspring away for years so we can make them think (and drink) strange things for our own amusement and enrichment. The con has gone so well that we’ve started hustling suckers of all ages, luring hardworking adults and innocent seniors into our cunning scholastic traps. We extort money, effort, and time from taxpayers, students, and their families by threatening them with the dread spectre of unemployability. Then we teach material our students will never, ever use at work – or anywhere else, for that matter. What do we know-it-alls know about work? It’s not like any of us has ever been there or done any.
Some of the people who spin this spiel are dropouts, such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who matriculated in morning-zoo shows and Top 40 Countdown radio. Beck and Limbaugh present their lack of academic credentials as proof of their moral and intellectual purity. At the same time, they ape the academics they claim to abhor: Limbaugh refers to himself as a professor from the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, and Beck scribbles Byzantine charts on a chalkboard as if he’s lecturing undergrads.
Then there are all their fellow-travellers, folks like Ann Coulter and Mark Levin, who have perfectly respectable degrees from elite schools – the very academic institutions they incessantly deride. Politicians such as Dubya and Mitt Romney pull the same act. Pay no attention to my fancy degree or Harvard M.B.A. or the family fortunes that funded my first-class credentials. I’m a commonsensical commoner, a straight-talkin’ shitkicker just like you.
This exceedingly cynical summary of education – that it is a swindle perpetrated by sophists – is not that much of an exaggeration, alas. I’ve seen this view of education, phrased in much more vulgar terms, on many a message board. I’ve encountered more genteel versions of it in political speeches, editorials, and letters to the editor. This dismissive attitude is also evident in other popular phrases. Overeducated is now common parlance. Yet you never hear that someone is over-rich or oversexy. Perpetual student is rarely a ringing endorsement of someone’s commitment to “lifelong learning,” to bum a bit of educratic euphemese. When we come across terms such as academic or theoretical in the media, they usually mean “irrelevant” or “imaginary,” mere mental exercises at a remove from the serious business of life. “You think you’re so smart” is never a compliment; the only thing worse than being smart is thinking that you are.
This attitude affects the way students approach university. Many want to get credentials that guarantee them super-awesome careers, but they don’t need no edjumacation. I’ve taught useless liberal-artsy subjects such as English and philosophy for a decade, and some of my students have been quite frank. No offence, Miss, but reading, thinking, and writing are wastes of time and boring as hell. They were never gonna use English … even though they had to do precisely that to bitch about its uselessness.
I love teaching, but there are days when I feel like a goddamn cartwright, like a practitioner and proponent of archaic and eccentric arts the kids will not need in the glorious analphabetic future. Sonnets, semicolons, and history might as well be alchemy or phrenology. As long as, like, people can, like, understand you, like, what’s the diff, y’know? Nobody cares about that old stuff. Nobody understands those long words. Nobody ever got hired because they could parse rhyme schemes or pick an argument apart or write a sentence, except for nerds like me, who squander our lives totally overanalyzing every little thing.
It would be a gross generalization to simply say that North Americans are ignorant and anti-intellectual. That would also make a really short book; I could print it in a hundred-point font, illustrate it with pictures of boobs and monster trucks, and then wait to see if it pro
ved itself with boffo sales. It is more accurate to say that North Americans have a love-hate relationship with knowledge. We overestimate the value and reliability of certain uses of intelligence and can be quite disdainful towards mental pursuits that do not result in new stocks, synthetic foodstuffs, pills, or modes of conveyance. If we’re going to endure the insufferable tedium of learning, we do so for one reason: to make the big bucks.
We have, for the past few decades, steadily favoured money over brains. This is not to say that the moneyed are stupid. No, sir! The money-minded would not be so very moneyed if they were not armed with intellect, if they had not invested gross-buckets in their own stable of brains. It takes a surfeit of intellect to create complex financial instruments such as derivatives or to convince people that they need to deodorize, adorn, or alter yet another part of their body. The difference between money and brains is not a matter of how much either side of this divide knows. No, the big difference is the way they see knowledge and why they think intelligence is good. When I say “money,” I mean those who think you learn to earn, that our relation to knowledge is instrumental. When I say “brains,” I mean those who want to learn, who see knowing as an end in itself rather than the means to an end.
The mental work we have been exhorted to pursue is valuable because it is lucrative, not because it is smart. The kinds of thinking we have praised and celebrated, like the innovations of the Internet geek and the heroic entrepreneur or the efficiency of the ruthless CEO, are shrewd, technical ways of assessing the world, interpretations that turn complex states of affairs into calculable measures such as commodity prices and page clicks.
The irony is that our overwhelming emphasis on money, our conviction that markets are the smartest systems of all, has resulted in three recessions and one global market meltdown in the past thirty years. The more-money-than-brains mindset has obvious disadvantages for brains, and the 2008 fiscal collapse suggests that it is not so great for money either. But this crash also gives North Americans a chance to reassess our values and reconsider what we want from our political institutions, education systems, and markets. It is an opportune moment to think about we think about thinking, to examine our domestic intelligence failures and recalibrate the relation between money and brains.
The most obvious example of this shift is Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 U.S. election, which pundits described as a victory for brains, a Revenge of the Nerds moment after the long, idiotic Bush nightmare. Carlin Romano, a professor and critic, wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 that sums up this sentiment nicely: “Philosopher-prez in chief and cosmopolitan in chief. After all this time, you figure, we were entitled to one. It looks as if we’ve got him.”1
Obama has made admirable statements about education and his own good old-fashioned liberal arts degree. This is, admittedly, pretty sweet after nearly a decade of presidential pissing in the general direction of fancy book-learnin’. But I think it is way too hasty and optimistic to assume that Obama’s election means smarts are cool again, and that America resolves henceforth to be kinder and gentler to its oft-mocked eggheads.
Saying that Obama’s win marks the end of anti-intellectualism is a lot like saying it means the end of racism. Sure, it’s a good sign, but it’s not like the guy is six feet of antidote. Moreover, Obama’s presidency has inspired a seething right-wing backlash and stupefying coverage of his every snooty foible and flash of hauteur. Jeez, President College can’t even eat right like regular people! When he visited a greasy burger joint for the express purpose of supping with slovenly commoners, he had the audacity to request Dijon, a notoriously French mustard. A sign of Eurosocialist allegiances? Bien sûr.
The post-electoral Republican leadership vacuum was promptly filled by some of the right’s most gleefully proficient nerd-bashers, figures such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. All present themselves as mavericks, the only ones brave enough to speak emotive truth to factual power, outsiders marginalized by the uppity chattering classes in Hollywood, New York, and Washington.
These pseudo-populists insist that intellectuals are the real idiots. Ivy League city types think they are so smart, but that only goes to show how deluded and distant from common sense they are. As St. Ronald Reagan said in one of his most famous speeches – 1964‘s “A Time for Choosing” – “it’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” The right-wing message is loud and clear: complex matters like climate change and foreign relations and the economy are complex because the elitists and the bureaucrats make them that way, to serve their own agendas and exclude just plain folks from the political process. Have any of these brainiacs ever done something really complicated, like run a Podunk town or make payroll? Didn’t think so!
The most rudimentary business skills or beavering one’s way to bosshood beat teaching or studying at some of the world’s finest universities. Once we’ve established that universities are a joke, a fiendishly elaborate scheme to overcharge people for beer, it is easy to discount any body of facts or ostensible expertise that emanates from them. If expertise in general is fake, a self-serving liberal chimera, then it stands to reason that experts are the biggest frauds of all: empty suits who have nothing to offer but words and dipsy-doodle ideas they expect working people to pay for. The people and the pols become fact-proof, and those who huck information at them align themselves with the patronizing pedants of Team Pantywaist.
This sort of anti-intellectualism is not new. It has been part of American political life ever since Andrew Jackson played the role of Old Hickory. Canadians like to fancy themselves above this sort of pseudo-populist politicking and think that it is the neighbours’ problem. But the Conservative Party’s campaigns against Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were just as anti-intellectual, in their own stolid Canadian way, as the invective of the red-meat, redstate crowds at McCain-Palin rallies or anti-tax tea parties.
Professors like Romano, and the mainstream press, have covered Obama’s cosmopolitanism approvingly. They hope it will help ameliorate American relations with the rest of the world. Of course, this is also one of the things that drives Obama’s detractors wild. Drawing huge crowds in Europe, pronouncing Middle Eastern place names correctly, and nabbing a Nobel for nothing are all suspect. Being far’n-friendly is an un-American affectation.
Stephen Harper and company appealed to the Canadian version of this provincial small-mindedness when they ran negative ads that sneered at Ignatieff for describing himself as “horribly cosmopolitan.” His success in and familiarity with foreign lands was not an asset. No, instead he was cheating on Canada, whoring around with the likes of the BBC and Harvard.
I am not a fan of the man, but the Con campaign against him is so frigging brutal it makes me want to like Count Iggy. Consider this gem from their website, Ignatieff.me:
… Ignatieff has written next-to-nothing about the economy – the most pressing issue facing Canada (and the world) – today. Sure, he’ll talk your ear off about abstract poetry, nationalism, the importance of public intellectuals and the British Royals. But when it comes to the practical issues that affect real Canadian families – especially in a recession – he’s invisible.2
I love that they lead their shit list with abstract poetry, like Ignatieff is Björk or the ghost of Ezra Pound. The only thing worse than poetry? Abstract poetry, which exists solely to make students feel stupid and professors feel smug. Then there’s nationalism. Nope, can’t see how that relates to governing a nation. (Silly Libs, always thinking this is a country instead of an economy!) The gratuitous monarch-bashing is odd, given that HRH is still smiling gravely from our legal tender; perhaps a right-wing plan is in the works to replace her visage with the image of an oil derrick – our one true queen and head of state.
The Cons and their ad hacks sloppily conflate two kinds of elitism. They mock Ignatieff for living in chi-chi digs in downtown Toronto instead
of in the sticks or the burbs, the real Canada. He sips espresso and dips biscotti rather than sucking back double-doubles and Boston creams at the coffee dispensary of the people. Then they attack him for being a brain and a bore, for his sojourns in Yerp and at Harvard. To slam Ignatieff as “cosmopolitan” is typical right-wing nativism, divvying up the citizenry with criteria such as their proximity to livestock and dirt roads and their distance from gay bars and a decent latte. What is hilarious is seeing them mock Ignatieff’s wealth and privilege. This from Conservatives? They love money, and the people who make lots of it.
Efforts to paint Ignatieff as a tourist, a mere visitor in his own land, play on the idea that intellectuals are always foreigners, outsiders from some theoretical fairyland. We see an even more extreme version of this notion in the Birther conspiracies that allege Obama was not born in America.
The small-town values message – on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel – is clear. Real patriots stay wherever Jesus and their mama’s cooter drop ‘em.
This hostility to all things foreign or urban rides shotgun with anti-intellectualism; it’s all part of the same virulent reverse snobbery. Canadians and Americans express their reverse snobbery in slightly different ways, which I will return to later on when we look more closely at politics, in Chapter Five. I’ll also look at some of the differences between righty and lefty anti-intellectualism in that chapter. Republicans and the Alberta wing of Canadian politics have made exceptional contributions in the field of reverse snobbery, but they certainly do not have a monopoly on pseudo-populist poses and ideas. Democrats, Liberals, and the NDP also drop their G’s, chug brewskis, and sing the praises of Joe Six-Pack. They can’t attain high office without pandering to the lowest common denominator, especially when their opponents are spending so much money trying to convince the public that educated candidates are supercilious snobs.