I work in irony the way other artists might work in oils or clay. Or, at least, I try to. Want to.
As an aspiring ironist, I seek out irony wherever I can find it. So when The Duke sent out his weekly list of primo opinion possibilities, I had to jump at one in particular: “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”
Getting past the dated and cliché reference, this article was rife with potential.
The gist of this article is that Americans are hostile to knowledge and to counter this, Susan Jacoby has written a book, titled “The Age of American Unreason.” The point of the book is that Americans are both “anti-intellectualism (the attitude that ‘too much learning can be a dangerous thing’) and anti-rationalism (‘the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion’).”
Getting beyond the grammatical errors, these two arguments are sound. These past years we have suffered under a government that has politicized global warming. At the same time, we’ve had to live under the threat that intelligent design, a pseudoscience, at best, will be taught in school alongside evolution. But some people actually believe that global warming doesn’t exist and that evolution is merely a theory.
Jacoby blames the educational system, which makes sense. If I’ve learned anything over the course of my college career it’s that school is not about learning; it’s about survival. I like to think this is what Jacoby means when she writes, “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more.”
This is all well and good. But now that we’ve established that there’s a problem, and even found someone to blame for this idiocracy, where do we go from here?
If you’re Jacoby, you write a book about it. This seems like the course of action to adopt, except there’s one question that I just can’t seem to shake: Who reads books?
Ding-ding-ding.
At the risk of overstating my point by a large margin, I’m going to say that the same people who think global warming is a conspiracy are not the same people who are going to pick this book up. Who’ll read it?
Maybe this book is supposed to act as a kick in the pants for the people who are going to read it. Maybe the literati are supposed to read this book and be so outraged that they run out the door and force books into the hands of compromising evolutionists. Maybe it’s simply a call to action for those who can enact change.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” That kind of thing.
Or maybe we’re just spinning intellectual wheels. Saying something is better than nothing. That kind of thing.
But I don’t like that one. It’s too ironic. It’s like the first step to solving a problem is admitting that there’s a problem to begin with. All we need is for everyone to read this book. Once that happens, we can move to the second step. You know, action.
But don’t expect me to get involved until they publish the book-on-tape.
Stephen Sabetti is a senior journalism major and the assistant investigations editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.
