More Money Than Brains (5 page)

These insults and indignities are flesh wounds compared to the damage that anti-intellectualism inflicts on some of the groups that embrace it ardently, that defend their ignorance as a virtue, be they the too-cool-for-school kids who inadvertently consign themselves to lives of poverty and drudgery or the electorates that must endure policies enacted by plutocratic pols playing just plain folks in order to pick their pockets.

Jeremiads against the nerd elite play on our egalitarian sympathies, but they seem misplaced and daffy given the obeisance we render to other, much more powerful elites. Anti-intellectualism and ignorance have crummy socio-economic consequences, and they do some serious ethical damage too. Institutions such as the free press, democracy, and free markets collapse into farragoes of corruption and incompetence without the scrutiny of an informed populace. Notions such as universal suffrage and inalienable human rights are inextricably linked to the idea of universal human reason, the sense that we are all thinking people who can disagree and
debate matters without resorting to fisticuffs or deadly force. When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old-fashioned phrase from Kant.

I
n the summer of 2009, Fox News bloviator Glenn Beck embarked on his “Common Sense Comedy Tour,” a title that contains precisely one accurate descriptor. Beck, a dry-drunk Mormon shock jock, dressed in Founding Fathers regalia accessorized with a pair of sneakers. Beck said that he wore the eighteenth-century costume to illustrate that the founders were regular folk, just like the lumpenyanks in the audience. Oh sure, they might have been geniuses, Beck concedes, but they couldn’t come up with deodorant or pockets,
haw haw haw. The Enlightenment luminaries who wrote America’s founding documents were not that different from them. They loooved their country and stood up for it. Were the good people in the crowd willing to do the same – to rise up and resist the threat of out-of-control government?

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:

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.

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: