The American Right To Be Stupid

What's going on in the United States is truly puzzling. Michael Enright writes:

In February, 2013, in one of his first public utterances as U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry told a group of Europeans that in America, people have the right to be stupid.

As his listeners choked on their canapés, he went on to explain. Sort of:

“Now I think that’s a virtue, I think that’s something worth fighting for. The important thing is to have tolerance, to say, you know, you can have a different point of view.”

Recently, it appears that Americans have become tragically tolerant of stupidity:

A recent analysis of IQ test scores indicates that the Intelligence Quotient test scores of Americans has dropped over a 13-year period.

For researchers, this is a troubling reversal of the so-called Flynn Effect, which suggests that IQ scores rose consistently during the 20th century and would continue to do so. However, this does not mean that Americans are stupid.

In a 2006 study of IQ and global inequality in 190 countries, the American levels pretty much averaged those in other industrialized countries.

In his important 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the noted historian Richard Hofstadter traces a suspicion of intelligence back to the founding of the republic by religious fundamentalists. The early settlers were uncomfortable with glorifying any virtue that wasn’t godly.

Hofstadter links the historic rise of religious and evangelical fundamentalism with anti-intellectual bias in all walks of American life, particularly pronounced in the politics of the country.

It appears that when religious fundamentalists rise to positions of power, stupidity becomes a pandemic.

Image: Psychology Today

Just How Dumb?

Eugene Robinson asks an important question: How dumb can a nation get and still survive? In the United States these days, dumb is everywhere:

Our elected representatives in the U.S. Senate, which laughably calls itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” agreed Thursday not to wreck our economy and trigger a global recession — at least for a few weeks. Republicans had refused to raise the federal debt ceiling, or even to let Democrats do so quickly by simple majority vote. They relented only after needlessly unsettling an international financial system based on the U.S. dollar.

The frequent games of chicken that Congress plays over the debt ceiling are — to use a term of art I recall from Economics 101 — droolingly stupid.

Covid-19 is a bipartisan killer. In the tribal-political sense, the safe and effective vaccines are a bipartisan miracle, developed under the Republican Trump administration and largely distributed under the Democratic Biden administration. People in most of the rest of the world realize, however, that vaccination is not political at all; it is a matter of life and death, and also a matter of how soon — if ever — we get to resume our normal lives.

Why would people not protect their own health and save their own lives? How is this anything but just plain stupid?

Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools. I put the term in quotes because genuine critical race theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What’s being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism.

And then, of course, there’s the whole “stolen election” farce, which led to the tragedy of Jan. 6. Every recount, every court case, every verifiable fact proves that Joe Biden fairly defeated Donald Trump. Yet a sizeable portion of the American electorate either can’t do basic arithmetic or doesn’t believe that one plus one always equals two.

Shockingly, people who know better are leading the Drive Toward Dumb:

The whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation’s top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they’re being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off.

Lincoln warned that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. A nation in a race to prove who is more stupid than whom can't claim to be a nation at all.

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