The Idiotization of America

PZ Meyers has written a fantastic post (hat tip Green Knight) about Charles P. Pierce’s Greetings from Idiot America from the latest Esquire. The whole thing is really worth your time to read, so I won’t comment much, although I’d like to highlight one of PZ’s thoughts:

You would be surprised at how much email is sent to me telling me to stop being so derisive, that harsh language and ridicule turn people off and repel the very ones we're trying to persuade. My reply is like the one above; by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an environment where idiots thrive unchallenged. We have a twit for a president because so many people made apologies for his ludicrous lack of qualifications—we need more people unabashedly pointing out fools.

I'm doing my part to fight Idiot America. I hope more people join me.

I couldn’t agree more. In addition to the regular missives I receive about my foul language, I also get similar comments regarding my refusal to take anything but a hard line on any issue on which I feel accommodating the “alternative” viewpoint indulges the idiotization of America. As I’ve said before, I’ve got no problem if someone wants to personally believe in Intelligent Design and teach it to their own children; I do, however, have a big problem as soon as that person asserts it ought to be taught in a science class—and that has nothing to do with my personal beliefs about Intelligent Design and everything to do with my belief that only science ought to be taught in science classes. I’m not dogmatic; I’m pedantic.

The fabricated evolution v. ID debate is only one part of a larger movement to frame irrationality not just as the definitive opposite of rationality, but as an equally viable, opposing epistemological process. It is a rejection in whole of critical thought—the attempt to undo the successes of the Age of Enlightenment. Who needs the rigors of logic when you’ve got faith-based reasoning?

There is, however, a secret truth behind the Irrationalist Movement. Most of those who purport to subscribe to such instinctual, or inspired, reasoning, don’t. It’s not their faith that guides them, but authority. The encouragement to eschew facts in favor of faith, or instinct, or inspiration, is, for most people, little more than a justification for intellectual laziness. Bush tells them he gets divine inspiration from God, and so they listen to what he (Bush, not God) says. And Bush may make outrageous claims about what God tells him, but, in the end, his decisions are suspiciously well-aligned with the interests of his base. It seems if God, or his gut, is telling him anything, it’s “Play politics.”

Bush is coldly calculating, not divinely inspired. And he and his team know that faith-based reasoning is a sham—a righteous delusion that puts a friendly mask on the ugly mug of authoritarianism.

It’s the same mask used by a particular breed of preachers who instruct dutiful compliance, not expansive love, who rain down on the bowed heads of their parishioners, week after week, the fire and brimstone of an angry and vengeful God. These men of the cloth are useful servants indeed to the Bush administration, conditioning their flocks with a predisposition toward tyrannical benevolence, telling them not to question, encouraging them to eradicate all threats to their fragile faith. And all the while, the justification for, and legitimization of, such blind belief is being insidiously woven into the national discourse. Make way for the faithful…and their dictator.

This is not an argument against religion; it’s an argument against granting equal footing in the national discourse to a particular type of thought associated with a particular brand of religion. And I will not water down my criticism into a mannered circumlocution, because the future of this country may very well depend on those of us who don’t. Authoritarianism is the enemy of democracy, and I don’t give a shit what mask it’s wearing when it comes to my doorstep.