More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  This is one of Beck’s favourite themes. The audience in the video I watched applauded and hooted when he hollered, voice cracking with fury, that the people in Washington had no right to tell them what to do, or to tell their school district what to do. His fans appear to be firm believers in the myth that nerds are social engineers who want to run everything. They also dig the notion that complexity is an elitist lie. Beck got big yuks for poking fun at the thousand-page climate-change bill. Why, that’s longer than the New Testament. “The government’s attempt to try to control the weather was longer than the story of the guy who actually could control the weather!” Beck yelped, to claps, whoops, and yeah!s.

  Beck uses the tag line “the Fusion of Enlightenment and Entertainment” to plug his radio, TV, book, and Web empire. Like Bill O’Reilly before him, he claims to operate outside the Republican machine, styling himself as a libertarian. But that is not what distinguishes Beck from compeers such as Rush Limbaugh and O’Reilly. Beck blows his stack like O’Reilly and he does nyah-nyah voice mockery like Limbaugh, but he has added some new elements to the mix: hysterical blubbering and over-the-top emoting. He loooves his country so much that his eyeballs runneth over.

  I hope that Thomas Paine, wherever his righteous radical shade may be, cannot see the affairs of this world. That noble rabble-rouser should be spared the indignity of seeing this bawling clown, this yowling toddler, slobbering all over him. Referring to Common Sense, Paine’s genuinely revolutionary tract, allows Beck to market his reactionary, reductive opinions as risky anti-government rebellion. In the book that accompanies his Common Sense Comedy Tour, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, he brags, “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member or just plain crazy is to quote the words of our Founding Fathers.”2

  Ooh-hoo-hoo! This must be the comedy part of his act. Yes, Glenn, you sure are threatening the system, sticking it to the man with your top-rated cable show, radio show, and New York Times bestsellers. Paine did hard time and suffered harsh treatment for his ideas. Beck isn’t even willing to wear period shoes for the cause of prop comedy.

  I hate to see perfectly good ideas get swallowed, sucked into the bilious goo that sloshes inside Beck’s grossly distended brand. With friends like this guy, the Enlightenment does not need enemies. But it has lots of those too. Funny thing, though: even those enemies, the folks who claim to hate Enlightenment ideals, still use their language to make a case for their right to oppose them.

  Consider, for example, the way many in the intelligentdesign camp defend their position. Stumping for his odious documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein argued that those who oppose creationism in the classroom are squelchers of free inquiry, politicizers befouling the objectivity of scientific research. This is one of the most common God-botherer gambits: to demand that the enlightened virtue of tolerance must encompass their intolerance.

  Are persistent appeals to Enlightenment ideals evidence of their robust health? Would that it were so. We pay lip service to freedom and reason but we repeatedly backslide into good ol’ superstition, credulity, and authoritarianism, the enemies of enlightenment. Religious and fiscal fundamentalism, rigid political ideologies, and the immaturity lionized by mass culture compromise our ability and willingness to exercise our most fundamental freedoms.

  The end of the Enlightenment meme has been bouncing around the scientific community and the press for the past few years. The New Scientist ran a story on its demise in 2005, wondering why so many people are so hell-bent on “rejecting reason, tolerance and freedom of thought.”3 Several op eds in major newspapers have declared that reason and freedom have joined the choir invisible. George Monbiot and Garry Wills wrote the lefty-liberal versions of this eulogy. Monbiot pointed to the crackdown on civil liberties after 9/11, and Wills worried that Dubya’s re-election was a sign that Americans did not really care for reason or science.4 Victor Davis Hanson delivered a right-wing version of this rant, arguing that Europeans and American leftists were betraying their noble Enlightenment heritage and wimping out of the war for modern freedom – the war against barbarous Islam.5

  The end of the Enlightenment is one of those bipartisan declinisms. Libs bemoan censorship, the Patriot Act, and creationism as evidence of our diminished commitment to freedom and rationality. Cons crab about political correctness, market regulation, and the cult of global warming, citing similar concerns about freedom. The issues and culprits differ but the substance of these complaints is comparable: too much arbitrary authority, too many babies trying to dodge certain truths, comporting themselves like spoiled brats.

  This is also the complaint we hear in the Kant quote that opens this chapter, lines from one of the most oft-cited examples of Enlightenment thinking, his short essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” For Kant, being enlightened means being a grown-up. Those countries, cultures, and individuals that remain dependent on “alien guidance” are still stuck in the ignorance and irresponsibility of childhood, sucking up to Big Dad. He goes on to say:

  If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.

  That, friends, is one daisy-fresh eighteenth-century bitch-slap. It effectively indicts half of the current best-seller list, taking out most of the self-help, spirituality, and diet tomes. It spanks the televangelical hucksters who promise blessings – including cash – in exchange for cash. It clips Oprah, at least half of her guests, and her hideous progeny Dr. Phil. It’s the sort of sentiment that makes me think the Enlightenment is worth revisiting.

  Scholars quibble about when the Enlightenment began and ended, but many nerds have agreed on a long eighteenth century, one that starts around 1660 and ends in 1830, encompassing events such as the Glorious (British), American, and French revolutions and luminaries such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant. Whichever way you bracket the period, the United States and Canada are its children.

  You can see our dependence on this Enlightenment legacy in the things we brag about when we brag about our countries. We also turn to its terms when the going gets rough, huffing and puffing on the fumes of the Age of Reason whenever we need words and values to define and defend ourselves. After 9/11 and throughout the War on Terror, there was a lot of Enlightenment-flavoured talk, a succession of speeches from U.S. administration officials and Canadian leaders underlining the importance of freedom and democracy and insisting that the freedoms North Americans enjoy are universal human rights.

  It is echt Enlightenment to insist upon the universal character of freedom and reason, to argue that men should be autonomous self-governors. It may have taken the social movements of the intervening centuries to extend that definition of man to include broke men, women, and non-honkies, but this idea of human freedom is a legacy of the eighteenth century.

  It’s reductive to boil down a big cosmopolitan pan-national period into a single Enlightenment project or program, and that is not my intention. But this chapter, being brief, will necessarily involve a little philosophical violence and some summary takes. Nor am I cheerleading for reason. There are legitimate criticisms of the Enlightenment, cautionary polemics about the dangers of reason and science turning into dogmatic rationalism and scientism.

  In their 1944 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno begin by asserting that the “wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”6 as the utopian schemes of the nineteenth century culminated in the totalitarian slaughter-benches of the twentieth. They argue that, for the Enlightenment, “anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability or utility must be viewed with suspicion.” This is worth underlining, because the part of the Enlightenment legacy that Horkheimer and Adorno criticize at length is also the part that remains most vital for us. We
are exceedingly enthusiastic about quantification and technological advancement. The idea that knowledge is a way of mastering nature is deeply ingrained in our culture.

  Consider how we discuss global warming. Those who deny or oppose doing anything about climate change occupy a position that simultaneously endorses our mastery over nature and shrugs it away. They argue that we are actually subject to nature (or God), but only so they can conclude that it is stupid to blame ourselves for the freaky weather. We can and must cheerfully continue exploiting nature, since our complex modern economies and comfy lifestyles depend on this dominion. To do otherwise is to deny the glorious march of progress.

  Those who favour action against global warming also accept the premise that we are masters of nature, but they argue that we are very bad ones indeed, and must move from dominion to stewardship. Both factions – the environmentalists and the righties who oppose environmentalism – are working two sides of the same Enlightenment coin. They also accuse each other of being anti-enlightened: climate-change deniers are against science, and greens are against modernity, or so go the slurs.

  Our mania for quantification and utility affects every sphere of human endeavour, even the artsy ones. Movies are judged by their special effects budgets or box-office totals, humanities professorships are determined by how many articles the candidate has managed to publish, and the press is simply nutty for listicles and star ratings, which are ways of converting culture into easily telegraphed quanta.

  But utility and technology were not really ends in themselves for most Enlightenment thinkers, as they often are for many of us. For them, things like science and markets mattered because they contribute to human freedom. Here are some of the defining characteristics of that freedom.

  Theological freedom, or freedom of conscience

  The Protestants inaugurated the notion that we do not need any fancy-schmancy pope or bejewelled ecclesiastical hierarchy to mediate the relationship between man and God. Lamentably, that Lutheran brainwave also sparked years and years of brutal religious warfare. Then and now, the Enlightenment call for secular states or for the separation of Church and State is an attempt to halt such internecine bloodshed and to recognize that divisions in Christianity mean we can no longer live in states governed by a single dogma.

  Enlightenment thought is not totally godless. But it isn’t Christian the way Glenn Beckheads claim it is, either. Many Enlightenment thinkers believed in a hands-off deist god, one we could see at work in nature. And some of them objected to religious dogma and clerical power precisely because they spread coercive, divisive religious precepts that corrupt rational or natural religion. Locke says as much in his “Letter on Toleration.” Thomas Paine offers a much more radical version of this argument in his Age of Reason, where he writes:

  I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

  All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

  I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine.7

  That final caveat is very important. Paine may reject institutionalized religion in the strongest possible terms, but he also maintains that we all have the right to our own beliefs, provided that those beliefs do not transgress or suppress others’ freedom of conscience.

  Religion becomes a problem when it tries to curb rational inquiry, which is a God-given inclination, right, and responsibility. Scripture, or a particular faith’s interpretation of it, cannot serve as a substitute for individual, independent thought and conscience. Kant is certainly no atheist, but he cautions us that being good out of fear or to curry eternal favour is actually immature and immoral, another instance of our desire to be bossed and dandled by Big Dad.

  The relationship between religion and politics is one of the significant differences between Americans and Canadians, one that helps account for Canada’s liberal policies with respect to issues such as gay marriage and abortion. The U.S. was settled by Puritans, and it remains the most fervently religious country in the developed world. Canada was founded by a mishmash of Loyalists, coureurs de bois, and dirt farmers. Some of them were every bit as devout as their southern neighbours, but Canada’s long, proud tradition of squelching public displays of zeal has discouraged the theopolitical proselytizing that is so prominent in American politics. Twice as many Americans as Canadians regularly attend church, and Americans are much more likely to say that their private faith influences their political choices.

  This is not surprising, but some of their beliefs are. In the year of Our Lord 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention agreed upon the following:

  The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.8

  This sort of Biblical literalism is not merely a pre-modern position but a pre-medieval one, since theologians as early as Saint Augustine argued for an allegorical reading of the Bible. This puts the Southern Baptist Convention and its coreligionists on the other side of 397 AD. They are not goofing around when they sing “Gimme that old-time religion.”

  It is also odd when religion uses the latest heathen innovations in the service of the totally true and trustworthy. The American Creation Museum, which opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, in May 2007, is a state-of-the-art multi-million-dollar facility with more than a hundred displays, a planetarium, and a couple of theatres. Here you can watch “Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers,” thanks to high-tech exhibits engineered by a former designer for Universal Studios.9

  The Creation Museum is a sign of the times, the perfect image of an age that is simultaneously complex and cloddish, sophisticated and wilfully stunned. Museums grew out of the Enlightenment belief in universal knowledge. They were encyclopedias you could walk through, places where you could commune with the seemingly infinite diversity of human reason.

  The Creation Museum explicitly repudiates the Enlighten ment at the same time that it shamelessly rips it off. It employs the tropes of reason and science to lay waste to reason and science, using modern technology to dismiss the kind of inquiry that made such tools possible. The museum’s website boasts, “Our halls are gilded with truth.” It’s a felicitous verb choice, since gilding means applying a thin veneer, a surface coat of gold atop the inferior bulk beneath.

  There are some thickets of Bible-thumpery here in the Great White North, and they have been emboldened by the success of their southern fellows. There is a Creation Science Museum in Big Valley, Alberta, that uses the wealth of local fossils to conjure up visions of dinosaurs on Noah’s ark. However, it is open only by appointment and housed in a modest bungalow that looks like a retiree’s house, save for the dinosaur replica perched above the door, a gargoyle warding off the demons of secular humanism.

  Of course, it would be overstating the case to say that religion is simply a stupefying force. For much of history, churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were essential to the preservation and production of texts, which means it’s hard to go deep into old literature or history without paying attention to sacred works. And studying the Bible, old-timey theology, and other religious traditions is a really good way to combat dunderheaded fundie proselytizing. Good luck launching comparative religion classes in the Bible belt, though; what can possibly compare to the totally true and trustworthy?

  Most mainstream Protestant and Catholic denominations tend to let Jesus and Darwin co-exist as different explanations for different registers of existence. Parents and preachers who cannot abide
this milquetoast moderate position keep trying to drive Darwin and his devilish apes out of their blessed broods’ schools. U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that classes that give “equal time” to creation science and actual science are unconstitutional. Nevertheless, plucky believers in states such as Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have soldiered on.

  In 2009 the Alberta legislature passed a law granting parents the right to pull their young ‘uns out of classes covering hot topics like religion, sex, and sexual orientation. School boards now have to notify parents about impending classes with a high risk of secular hedonism. One MLA, Rob Anderson, said that there were “thousands and thousands of parents, the silent majority, severely normal Albertans that are extremely happy with this legislation.”10

  This declaration of victory reminds me of another summary of parents’ struggles, a rueful admission of defeat that came from a Pennsylvania pastor protesting the teaching of evolution, Ray Mummert. He said, “We’re being attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”11 Then he and his fellow concerned parents got into their gleaming vehicles and drove to their warm homes, where intelligence continued to assail them with light, medicine, clean tap water, and mod cons such as cable TV and the Internet.

  As per the Paine principle, they’re free to be walking contradictions, to believe in whatever blend of Jeebus and “I got mine, Jack” they like. Belief becomes a problem only when it encroaches on those institutions that people of diverse beliefs must share, when it leaks into the law or politics. Like when congregations in the South and the sticks and the suburbs aid and abet the installation of a Big Dad president who is the wonder-working tool of their Big Dad God.