Anti-Intellectual Arguments Against Anti-Intellectualism Are Always Such Fun! Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
In a
recent NYT Op-Ed Nicholas Kristof points out the frightening and lamentable facts that “40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is… One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.” He rightly goes on to claim that this is “a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.”
From this he goes on to make a frankly flabbergasting accusation: “The problem isn’t just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of… well, of people like me—and probably you.” Just to be clear at the outset, I personally don’t think that snooty literary intellectuals (so-called) have much if anything at all to do with the current debased state of science education in America today.
But I think what we need to pause to contemplate here is not only the fact that Kristof thinks America’s superpowerful band of effete esthetes may indeed be a menace standing in the way of a more continent and respected practice of consensus science—implausibly enough, given the general disrepute and lack of funding that freights the actual lives of almost everybody who actually answers to anything like that job description—but that he thinks these snooty literary intellectual types constitute a larger problem to science education than crappy science education does.
“In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it’s considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares.” What lovely cocktail parties Nick Kristof must be hobnobbing in! I must admit that I consider it delightful and rare to find myself in the company of anybody at all who is familiar with Dickens, Plato, or quarks for that matter.
“A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity—making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789—but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.” I have to say that my circle of acquaintance rather differs from Kristof’s. Among the “educated people” I happen to meet—and I suspect Kristof means by this phrase formally educated people, which isn’t a usage I particularly approve of as it happens, but even in this restricted sense our experience seems to differ—I am quite as likely to talk to somebody who understands and can discuss relativity in a reasonably knowledgeable way as somebody who understands and can discuss Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker in a comparably knowledgeable way.
I must admit that I feel less eager to generalize from my own parochial experience in these matters, to go on to symptomize from there the state of American culture as a whole—probably one has to be a columnist for the New York Times or something comparably august before one begins to entertain such curious fancies. But I will say that my counterexample is enough, at least from a logical standpoint, to puncture the pretensions of Kristof’s own immodesty on this score.
In any case, against C. P. Snow’s reasonable and now rather notoriously framed worries about the radically disempowering consequences of general scientific ignorance in ever more conspicuously technoscientific societies, Kristof goes on to propose as apparently the one and only imaginable counterargument (he calls it “the counterargument” and leaves it at that, but the effect is much the same): “we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it’s Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity.”
In moments like these I have to wonder at Kristof’s earlier claim to be a representative of literary intellectual culture (one who seems especially keen to wallow masochistically, and quite unecessarily, in a lurid technicolor spectacle of self-hating self-blame at that), inasmuch as this sort of ethnocentric Arnoldian canon fluffing is hardly the sort of thing self-respecting literary intellectuals are comfortable indulging in these days. And curiously enough it tends to be because they are no longer eager props to such silly Establishmentarian parochialisms that such intellectuals tend to get charged with rampaging relativism and “fashionable nonsense” and anti-science pomo-paloozaism in the first place.
“[D]on’t pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education,” Kristof sternly warns… somebody, who knows who, maybe this is some sort of premonitory admonition to his nineteenth century readers: “the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe.”
Yes, and Hitler was a vegetarian (actually, not really, but no matter). So, you know, I don’t know, be sure to eat cows or something or you might find yourself, and quite to your surprise, promoting genocide?
Ever so reasonably, Kristof soldiers on: “[S]imilar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible—or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics.” Forgive my humanistic pedantry (I teach argumentation in a rhetoric department) but note well the restrictiveness entailed in the all in the phrase “all x needed was y” as opposed to the wonderfully qualified “some” in Kristof’s marvellously capacious alternative viewpoint: “Without some fluency in science and math, we’ll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, I’d say pretty much nobody who reads Kristof’s column with comprehension would argue that all the world needs are more Shakespearean scholars oblivious to basic science, and pretty much everybody who reads his column would agree as a matter of course that it’s good for people to understand science in a technoscientific society.
“Increasingly, we face public policy issues—avian flu, stem cells—that require some knowledge of scientific methods,” Kristof writes, and on this point he is obviously correct. “[Y]et,” he bemoans, “the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists.”
I seem to recall that once upon a time at least one Senatorial doctor proposed to diagnose a medical condition via edited videotape, and so I don’t know that this sort of enumeration is exactly the best way of scouting out indications of scientific literacy. Most lawyers of my acquaintance have exhibited a more than quotidian knowledge of science—and though I seem to be more reticent about overgeneralizing from personal experience I know to be, at bottom, anecdotal, I don’t think I should allow Kristof the unwarranted suggestion that those knowledgeable in the law are therefore ignorant of science.
Anyway, I for one happen to think it is incomparably more relevant to note how many millionaires there are in Congress “representing” a nation of citizens the overabundant majority of whom are not millionaires, than noting how many of those millionaires are millionaire doctors versus millionaire lawyers. But, hey, that’s just me.
“In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we’re Shakespeare-quoting Philistines,” he scolds. Funny, and here I would say that where matters of scientific literacy are concerned the problem is that too many of us seem to be Bible-quoting fundamentalists.
A “disregard for science already hurts us,” Kristof continues. “The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn’t realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be.” This is nonsense, of course. Mr. Bush’s stupid and harmful policy here is a matter of genuflecting to his religious fundamentalist base.
“And we’re risking our planet’s future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change.” Again, arrant nonsense. Our “leaders” are frozen in the gunsights of their market fundamentalist corporate funders. Big pockets in extractive pollutive industries need climate-change denial to stay in business and probably imagine they can weather any actual catastrophic climate-change that ensues behind high walls in posh techno-bubble enclaves they can afford precisely because they profited so massively from these deceptions.
But, by all means, let’s direct our attention instead to America’s pernicious poets and theory-heads: “[T]here’s an even larger”—even larger!—“challenge than anti-intellectualism.” Wait for it. Wait for it. “And that’s the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That’s the hubris of the humanities.”
Notice that once again people reading Mark Twain in English Departments and Hannah Arendt in Philosophy Departments are represented here as more menacing to reasonable policy-making than are the actively hostile endlessly documented efforts of religious fundamentalists and Big Business interests to compromise reasonable policy deliberation in the service of their parochial ends.
Apart from the psychological dimensions that must be afoot this nonsensical expression of hostility to the people with whom he claims to identify (only his therapist knows for sure), what is interesting in Kristof’s argument is that he seems to think there is something about a humanistic education (and I’m just bracketing for now all the facile overgeneralizations and weirdnesses that encumber the very notion of such a thing) that precludes a scientific education.
I, for one, know of almost no scholars in the humanities who would argue for a priority of literature over the sciences, whatever their own temperamental preferences in the matter—rather, most scholars seem to struggle to find the words with which to communicate the relevance and worth of literature in a world of businessmen, statisticians, and bomb builders mostly indifferent or even hostile to its attainments.
Contrary to Kristof’s rather rarefied impression, it seems to me the generous and critical sensibilities inculcated in the best humanistic education are almost completely disregarded in actually-existing American society, and very much to our cost. Surely I can claim to be in a position to contribute in some real if modest measure to my society in my chosen field without being misconstrued as claiming to speak alone, incomparable, and indispensable, from the summit of Philosopher Kings?
As somebody teaching in the almost catastrophically underfunded and widely disrespected humanities in America, let me remind Mr. Kristof that it is possible for most people to walk and chew gum at the same time, and I happen to think it not unreasonable to hope likewise for a world in which citizens understand the contribution of figures like William James and figures like Charles Darwin at the same time.
Needless to say, I agree that too many Americans are scientific ignoramuses, as innumerate as they are illiterate.
But as far as I’m concerned the blame for this calamity rests squarely on a culture that valorizes superficial short-term profit-taking over all else. In such a debased culture and anti-intellectual climate it seems to me pernicious in the extreme to indulge as Kristof seems to me to be doing in the gratuitous scapegoating of any of the few intellectuals who have managed to survive and testify to some alternative in the midst of this too thoughtless and hence too hopeless dance of death-dealing.
There is nothing more needful for, as well as nothing more vulnerable in, democratic civilization than the multiform expressions of human intelligence.
Fundamentalist religion and short-sighted greed, and certainly not the few post-Nietzschean intellectuals who rightly and forcefully anathematize such fundamentalism, are the real threats to a more proper role for consensus science in technoscientific societies. Anybody with any sense—whichever side of Snow’s “Two Cultures” divide or whichever position on the political spectrum one hails from—should surely understand this by now.
Dale Carrico
