More Money Than Brains (7 page)

This holistic vision of the relation between commerce and culture is one of the most important of the Enlightenment’s legacies, but it has been hijacked by market fundamentalists. They see commerce as an – arguably, the – end in itself. A piece of woollen cloth can be wrought by children or monkeys or robots for all they care, astronomy and ethics be damned.

The balance between culture and commerce is out of whack. We’ve lost sight of the thing that really is great about capitalism in our relentless pursuit of increased productivity and profit. We work ourselves into our graves, but Enlightenment thinkers embraced capitalism because increased efficiencies created more free time, which allowed people to pursue greater goals than merely subsisting and grovelling or getting and spending. Enlightenment thinkers were chuffed about the liberalization of trade and the first rumblings of the
Industrial Revolution because they were optimistic that hours once devoted to manual drudgery could now be spent figuring out clever new ways to cheat nature and God, to break the curse of unrelenting shitwork with further industrialization and technology. This would mean less and less drudgery and more time for tinkering with the things that really matter in life, such as poetry, classical philosophy, political polemics, amateur experiments, wine collecting, and the free exchange of ideas. Which brings us to …

I won’t linger on this topic too long either, as I will be looking at the press in detail in
Chapter Six
. But it is worth noting that the thinkers of the Enlightenment were fervent advocates of press freedom, and some, like those radical Frenchies Diderot and Voltaire, were martyred by censors and the police for writing smack about the Church and the aristocracy.

Here again we see that these Enlightenment freedoms are inseparable. Free inquiry, free votes, and free markets require public forums that allow us to exercise our reason. Free discourse and lively disputes, dissent, and debate are necessary if we are to pursue truth, be it in the form of a scientific experiment, a satirical poem, or a political system. This is why Kant argues that freedom of the pen is one of the most important freedoms. He says that “freedom of the pen is the only safeguard of the rights of the people.” It also benefits the ruler, he argues, insofar as a ruler who stifles the opinions and complaints of the people “is thereby put into a self-stultifying position”
¹⁷

England was the first country to allow a relatively free press, though one could still be prosecuted for libel and sedition. Enlightened despots such as Frederick II of Prussia also allowed more press freedom than their predecessors. The American Revolution was a pamphlet-fest, a flurry of polemics in partisan papers. And some states, such as Virginia and Massachusetts, already had clauses in their constitutions supporting freedom of the press.

There were bouts of backlash. Nevertheless, in spite of attempts to roll back press freedom, in Europe and North America the number of papers and publications, and the size of the literate public, grew by leaps and bounds throughout the eighteenth century. For example, the United Sates had only a handful of papers in the early 1700s, but more than three hundred by 1810.
¹⁸

Now stories of the death of newspapers are ubiquitous, as everyone but the blue-hairs migrates from the antique broadsheet or tabloid to the electronic wilds of the Web, and papers die or cut entire departments such as book reviews or copy editing. Our press is suffering a slower, more ignoble demise than death by censorious tyrants. It is bleeding money and credibility, and its attempts to make more of the former mean liquidating more of the latter. The press tries to sell itself as an ally of the people, fighting for the common man, but polls show that the public does not believe this shtick. The media is not a forum for the free public exercise of reason, but simply another hated elite.

All four of these fields – religion, politics, markets, and the press – are rife with examples of the recrudescence of old authorities and traditions and a trivial sense of equality and liberty. The idea that your opinion, or my opinion, is just as good as anyone else’s casts away evidence and reason, which play important roles in Enlightenment thought. The empirical bent that we see in many Enlightenment thinkers is an attempt to ground opinions and ideas on facts and observable phenomena that every rational sentient person has access to, instead of just saying “God says,” “the King says,” or “because it’s always been this way.”

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were guardedly optimistic about human potential, as they were quite skeptical about whether we could learn to think for ourselves and shuck off the pernicious influence of alien guidance. This is why education is so essential. Education helps us develop opinions based on evidence and to better evaluate others’ opinions. It is also crucial in the development of common knowledge: a set of facts and standards we can all deploy in debates. This was the goal of one of the greatest Enlightenment projects, the French
Encyclopédie
. Diderot, the mastermind behind this project, said “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard to anyone’s feelings.”
¹⁹

Is this the case today? Sadly, no. A goodly chunk of media-speak and political rhetoric exists for the express purpose of provoking feelings rather than reasonable arguments about the facts. Then there are the forbidden facts, concealed in the interest of national and corporate security. Any number of
examinations, debates, and investigations can never bubble up to the level of public attention lest they adversely affect some industry, leak strategically valuable information, spark litigation, or transgress one of our new articles of faith. And one of those new articles of faith, conveniently enough, is that we are the freest people in the world.

I saw an ad on
TV
not long ago that began and ended with the declaration “Free expression is what I’m all about,” a sentiment sure to meet with near-universal approval. But the product the ad was pushing was Botox, a poison that freezes your face into a stiff rictus that creepily approximates youth. Again – and in the most literal way – we see immaturity and consumption marketed as freedom.

It isn’t just that we are frittering away our freedom by succumbing to the parental charms of dogma and backsliding into alien guidance. North Americans have also chosen and created some really shitty, insipid dogmas. Hectoring demagogues run the gamut from ham-fisted literalist Christians and talk-radio yapflappers and marketeering mammonists to paranoiac 9/11 conspiracy theorists and condescending vegans. There is also the healthism that every gym and diet product and lifestyle pill consecrates, that every smoking ban and anti-trans-fat law enshrines, a nannying that thrives cheek by jowl with rampant unhealth and obesity. And then there’s the less sweaty version of this me-centricity and its twee New Age variants: the self-helpist narcissism that keeps the publishing industry alive.

The freedom that North American leaders extol is largely content-free, and duty-free too. Once in a while we have to
pretend to remember the soldiers who died for it back in the day and send warm fuzzies to the ones dying for it now. Other than that, freedom-speak is a whole lotta “you can be whatever you want to be” hogwash, punctuated by orders to shop and to work.

We are not adults in the sense that Kant intended, but adolescents. This is a problem, because we are also the world’s most heavily armed teenagers. We have relentlessly extended the bounds of technical reason to the point that it has supplanted humane reason – the kind of thinking you find in history, literature, and philosophy. The problem is that technical reason is not Thought 2.0, an upgrade that replaces the buggy betas of ethics and history. Technical reason cannot replace humane reason. Rather, it demands great lashings of it. Comedian Patton Oswalt has a hilarious routine about a sixty-seven-year-old woman giving birth. At one point in his rant, he says that science is “all about the coulda, not the shoulda.”
²⁰
He’s right. We’ve augmented our coulda powers in fantastic ways, but our capacity for thinking about the shoulda has shrivelled. Enter Glenn Beck and Dr. Phil to fill the void.

Jefferson was adamant that an educated populace was necessary to maintain the republic, and he wrote about the need for public schools where everyone could learn to read, write, reason, do math, and study history, as these were the basic skills required for self-governance. Without education and general knowledge, the people were all too susceptible to flattery, fear-mongering, and demagoguery. In one of his
many letters on this topic, he anticipates the bumper-sticker chestnut “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

In his final years, Jefferson made his ideas about education concrete, founding and designing the University of Virginia. It was one of the first schools in America to offer a political science program, and it had no faculty of theology or a campus chapel. Instead, the centre of Jefferson’s campus was the library, housed in a rotunda he modelled on the Parthenon.

It’s very picturesque and makes for a great photo op. Perhaps this is why, way back in 1989, when Bush the Elder called a meeting of the fifty U.S. governors to discuss national standards for the education system, they met at the University of Virginia. It may be difficult to remember this two decades later, after watching his son play the role of edjumacation prezdint, but Bush the First also pitched himself as an education president. Speaking from the steps of the Rotunda, he called for national performance indicators for schools and urged “tradition-shattering reform.” First on the agenda? “I
see the day when every student is literate,” quoth Poppy, shooting for the stars.

I have to give the man points for insisting that America must be a “reading nation,” even though he wrapped this fine principle in the usual blah-dee-blah about staying competitive in the international market. He omitted the salutary effects of reading that Jefferson endorsed, such as not becoming – or voting for – complete fuckwits, but he did ask the following excellent question:

More than a decade later, in 2000, his son posed a similar question: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” The difference between these two quotes says a lot, and none of it good. Even the president’s childrens is not learning. Is this because our schools is sucking?

E
ven though the school systems in the U.S. and Canada are governed by a patchwork of state and provincial regulations, schools sucking has become a trusty political football all over North America. Education is a campaign stump staple and a perpetual crisis, one many crusaders can cut to fit their cause. Fundies, lefties, righties, and customarily apolitical people worried about their wee ones all spin the state of the schools to support their opposing pet initiatives. They can advance their particular agenda, be it religious, political, environmental, or purely selfish, in the
name of the children, thus racking up double concern points. Triple, if you equate children and the future. Recycling/Jesus + Babies + All Our Tomorrows = Very Important Issue/Person indeed.

For politicians, education is a reliable source of photo ops and flights of rhetoric, as it gives them a valuable opportunity to wax enthusiastic about children and the future – two things they have yet to fuck up. You know the drill: mouth some well-meaning mush about how much math and science and reading rilly, rilly matter in the twenty-first century, tousle some moppet’s hair, feign interest in the classroom tchotchkes, finagle some mom-and-pop votes.

They can also use the state of the schools to go dire and forecast doom. This sort of school panic-speak is a watered-down long-range version of the politics of fear that has prevailed since 9/11. If immediate perils such as terrorists, a rising China, or wussification by Eurosocialism do not destroy North America first, someday all our stupid children will. Our failed schools will render them too stunned and broke to run the machines and dole out the meds we expect to ease us through our dotage. And our children’s children will be utterly barbaric and bereft, wandering some blasted Mad Max hellscape, barely able to recall the recipe for fire, even though everything around them is burning, endlessly burning.

School crisis stories are a manifestation of our worries about the future and our widespread concern about the children. But they are also one of the ways we express our anxiety about our collective intelligence. “Is our children learning?” is another way of asking, “Is us getting dumber?” If we are, what
chance do we have of remaining competitive in the global market, keeping up with countries that seem to have better school systems, students, and adult literacy rates than we do? Mediocre to crappy student test scores are one of the signs that we may soon end up the bitches of those diligent high-scoring Asians, Indians, and Scandinavians, unless everyone works harder, faster, better, smarter, more.