Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  But there’s more. Not only do we believe that opinion (our own) trumps expertise, we then go further and demand that expertise assume the position; demand, that is, that those with actual knowledge supplicate themselves to the Believers, who don’t need to know because they believe. The logic here, if that’s the term, seems to rest on the a priori conviction that belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler; it comes from the heart; it feels like truth. There’s a kind of biblical grandeur to it, and as God’s chosen, we have an inherent right to it. Knowledge, on the other hand, is impersonal, easily manipulated, inherently suspect. Like the facts it’s based on, it’s slippery, insubstantial—not solid like the things you believe.2

  The corollary to the axiom that belief beats knowledge, of course, is that ordinary folks shouldn’t value the latter too highly, and should be suspicious of those who do. Which may explain our inherent discomfort with argument. We may not know much, but at least we know what we believe. Tricky elitists, on the other hand, are always going on. Confusing things. We don’t trust them. So what if Sarah Palin couldn’t answer Charlie Gibson’s sneaky question about the Bush Doctrine? We didn’t know what it was, either.3

  How did we come to this pass? We could blame the American education system, I suppose, which has been retooled over the past two generations to stamp out workers (badly), not skeptical, informed citizens. Or we could look to the “great wasteland” of television, whose homogenizing force and narcotizing effect have quite neatly corresponded to the rising tide of ignorance. Or we could spend some time analyzing the fungus of associations that has grown around the word elitist, which can now be applied to a teacher driving a thirteen-year-old Toyota, but not to a multimillionaire CEO like Dick Cheney. Or, finally, we might look to the influence of the anti-elitist elites who, burdened by the weight of their Ph.D.s, will argue that the words educated and ignorant are just signifiers of class employed by the oligarchy to keep the underprivileged in their place, and then proceed to tell you how well Bobby is doing at Princeton.

  But I’m less interested in the ingredients of this meal than in who’s going to have to eat it, and when, and at what cost. There’s no particular reason to believe, after all, that things will improve; that our ignorance and gullibility will miraculously abate; that the militant right and the entrenched left, both so given to caricature, will simultaneously emerge from their bunkers eager to embrace complexity; that our disdain for facts and our aversion to argument will reverse themselves. Precisely the opposite is likely. In fact, if we take the wider view, and compare today’s political climate (the arrogance with which our leaders now conduct their extralegal adventures, the crudity of the propaganda used to manipulate us, our increasing willingness to cheer the lie and spit on the truth, just so long as the lie is ours) to that of even a generation ago, then extend the curve a decade or two into the future, it’s easier to imagine a Balkanized nation split into rival camps cheered and sustained by their own propaganda than the republic of reason and truth so many of us want to believe in.

  Traditions die hard, after all. Anti-intellectualism in America is a very old hat—a stovepipe at least, maybe even a coonskin. We wear it well; we’re unlikely to give it up just like that. Consider, for example, what happens to a man or woman (today as ever) the minute they declare themselves candidates for office, how their language—their syntax, their level of diction, the field from which their analogies are drawn—takes a nosedive into the common pool. Notice how quickly the contractions creep in and the sleeves roll up. The analogy to high school seems appropriate; the pressure to adapt is considerable, and it’s all in one direction—down. In American politics as in the cafeteria, the crowd sets the tone; it determines how to talk and what to think and who to like. It doesn’t know much, and if you want in, you’d better not either. Should you want out, of course, all you have to do is inadvertently let on—for example, by using the word inadvertently—that you’re a reasonably educated human being, and the deed is done.

  Communicate intelligently in America and you’re immediately suspect. As one voter from Alaska expressed it last fall, speaking of Obama, “He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly.” This isn’t race talking; it’s education. There’s something sneaky about a man like Obama (or even John Kerry, who, though no Disraeli, could construct a sentence in English with a beginning, a middle, and an end) because he seems intelligent. It makes people uneasy. Who knows what he might be thinking?

  But doesn’t this past election, then, sound the all clear? Doesn’t the fact that Obama didn’t have to lower himself in order to win suggest that the ignorant are outnumbered? Can’t we simply ignore the one-third of white evangelicals who believe the world will end in their lifetimes, or the millennialists who know that Obama’s the Antichrist because the winning lottery number in Illinois was 666?

  For starters, consider how easily things might have gone the other way had the political and economic climate not combined into a perfect political storm for the Republican Party; had the Dow been a thousand points higher in September, or gas a dollar cheaper. Truth is, we got lucky; the bullet grazed our skull.

  Next, consider the numbers. Of the approximately 130 million Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah Palin and the first dude inheriting the White House. At the same time, those of us on the winning side might want to do a cross-check before landing. How many of us—not just in the general election but in the primaries, when there was still a choice—voted for Obama because he was the it thing this season, because he was so likeable, because he had that wonderful voice, because he was black, because he made us feel as if Atticus Finch had come home? If nothing else, the fact that so many have convinced themselves that one man, thus far almost entirely untested, will slay the culture of corruption with one hand while pulling us out of the greatest mess we’ve known in a century with the other, suggests that a certain kind of “clap your hands if you believe” naïveté crosses the aisle at will.

  But the electorate, whatever its issues, is not the real problem. The real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy, is the 38 percent of the population who didn’t move, didn’t vote. Think of it: a country the size of Germany—83 million people—within our own borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo perpetuate itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and immaturity, its unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that in every election there is a better and a worse choice. Millions of others, however, are adults who don’t know what the Bill of Rights is, who have never heard of Lenin, who think Africa is a nation, who have never read a book. I’ve talked to enough of them to know that many are decent people, and that decency is not enough. Witches are put to the stake by decent people. Ignorance trumps decency any day of the week.

  Praise me for a patriot or warm up the pillory, it comes down to the unpleasant fact that a significant number of our fellow citizens are now as greedy and gullible as a boxful of puppies; they’ll believe anything; they’ll attack the empty glove; they’ll follow that plastic bone right off the cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact. If they’re ever activated—if the wrong individual gets to them, in other words, before the educational system does—we may live to experience a tyranny of the majority Tocqueville never imagined.

  1. Ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it, is good for business, whether your particular business happens to be selling Prada handbags or presidents. It makes it so much easier to manufacture and manipulate those communities of habit and desire, those homogeneous blocks of consumers—sorry, citizens—who chant or vote on cue. “Drill, baby, drill.”

  2. That an overwhelmingly Christian nation like the United States would have a belief-based polity should not surprise us, though it might well terrify us. In a country moved and swayed by the tides o
f faith, the separation of church and state is quaint, a legislative vestigial limb.

  3. The notion that our elected officials should be our equals, or at least have the decency to hide it if they’re not, must be one of the stranger offshoots of democratic liberalism. One suspects that, like most blooms, it is the result of stress. Suppressed everywhere it might have some practical or moral efficacy, egalitarianism in America has emerged in the bizarre notion that the congressman should be a regular guy, like me. This is equality we can believe in.

  Dehumanized

  On the Selling (Out) of American Education,

  and What It Costs Us

  2009

  Knowledge of human nature is the

  beginning and end of political education.

  —HENRY ADAMS

  Many years ago, my fiancée attempted to lend me a bit of respectability by introducing me to my would-be mother-in-law as a future Ph.D. in literature. From Columbia, I added, polishing the apple of my prospects. She wasn’t buying it. “A doctor of philosophy,” she said. “What’re you going to do, open a philosophy store?”

  A spear is a spear—it doesn’t have to be original. Unable to come up with a quick response and unwilling to petition for a change of venue, I ducked into low-grade irony. More like a stand, I said. I was thinking of stocking Chaucer quotes for the holidays, lines from Yeats for a buck fifty.

  And that was that. I married the girl anyway. It’s only now, recalling our exchange, that I can appreciate the significance—the poetry, really—of our little pas de deux. What we unconsciously acted out, in compressed, almost haikulike form (A philosophy store? / I will have a stand / sell pieces of Auden at two bits a beat) was the essential drama of American education today.

  It’s a play I’ve been following for some time now. It’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.

  The play’s almost over. I don’t think it’s a comedy.

  State of the Union

  And then there’s amortization,

  the deadliest of all,

  Amortization

  of the heart and soul.

  —Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Despite the determinisms of the day, despite the code breakers, the wetware specialists, the patient unwinders of the barbed wire of our being, this I feel is true: that we are more nurture than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.

  All of which puts me, and those in the humanities generally, at something of a disadvantage these days. In a high-speed corporate culture, hypnotized by quarterly results and profit margins, the gradual sifting of political sentiment is of no value; in a horizontal world of “information” readily convertible to product—the lowest, most reductive definition of utility—the verticality of wisdom has no place. Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism.

  You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there’s something almost chesslike in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It’s all about them now; every move we make plays into their hand, confirms their values. Like the narrator in Mayakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry,” we’re being forced to account for ourselves in the other’s idiom, to argue for “the place of the poet / in the workers’ ranks.” It’s not working.

  What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

  In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Money doesn’t talk, it roars. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it.1 There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits, everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

  That education policy should reflect the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism, after all, has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success (and make no mistake, it is succeeding), we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely, the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

  We’re pounding swords into cogs. They work in Pyongyang, too.

  Capital Investment

  This is exactly what life is about. You

  get a paycheck every two weeks.

  We’re preparing children for life.

  —CHANCELLOR MICHELLE RHEE

  DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SCHOOLS

  The question is straightforward enough: what do we teach, and why? One might assume that in an aspiring democracy like ours the answer would be equally straightforward: we teach whatever contributes to the development of autonomous human beings; we teach, that is, in order to expand the census of knowledgeable, reasoning, independent-minded individuals both sufficiently familiar with the world outside themselves to lend their judgments compassion and breadth (and thereby contribute to the political life of the nation), and sufficiently skilled to find productive employment. In that order. Our primary function, in other words, is to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily—one might say incidentally—about producing workers.

  I’m joking, of course. Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our privileged political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity. Those who can justify their presence in accordance with its terms may remain; the rest will be downsized or discontinued. Alternatively, since studies have suggested that humanizing the workspace may increase efficiency, a few may be kept on, the curricular equivalent of potted plants.

  If facetiousness is an expression of frustration, it does not necessarily follow that the picture it paints is false. The force of the new dispensation is stunning. Its language is the language of banking—literal, technocratic, wincingly bourgeois; its effects are visible, quite
literally, everywhere you look.

  Start with the newspaper of record. In a piece by New York Times editorialist Brent Staples, we learn that the American education system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” No doubt it is, but the sin of omission here is both telling and representative. Might there be another reason for seeking to develop fluent writers? Could clear writing have some relation to clear thinking, and thereby have, perhaps, some political efficacy? If so, neither Staples nor his readers, writing in to the Times, think to mention it. Writing is “a critical strategy that we can offer students to prepare them to succeed in the workplace.” Writing skills are vital because they promote “clear, concise communications, which all business people want to read.” “The return on a modest investment in writing is manifold,” because “it strengthens competitiveness, increases efficiency and empowers employees.” And so on, without exception. The chairman of the country’s largest association of college writing professors agrees. The real problem, he explains, is the SAT writing exam, which “hardly resembles the kinds of writing people encounter in business or academic settings.” An accountant, he argues, needs to write “about content related to the company and the work in which she’s steeped.” It’s unlikely that she’ll “need to drop everything to give the boss 25 minutes on the Peloponnesian War or her most meaningful quotation.”

  What’s depressing here is that this is precisely the argument heard at parent-teacher meetings across the land: What good is it in the real world? When is the boss ever going to ask my Johnny about the Peloponnesian War? As if Johnny had agreed to have no existence outside his cubicle of choice. As if he wasn’t going to be a husband, or a father (or listen to Rush, or Glenn Beck, while driving home from the office). As if he wasn’t going to inherit, willy-nilly, the holy right of gun ownership and the power of the vote.