In Defense of Elitism, Part II: Education vs. Ignorance

I may be misleading a bit by labeling the IDOE parts as if I have some kind of arc laid out. I don't. This is part an unfolding chain of thought that I am currently entertaining in my head almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is as much informed by the things that people write in the comments as it is with conversations I have with friends about this, as it is by what I see in the popular media. To that end, I would like to continue my defense of elitism, and go back to the heart of what I had originally intended to talk about, stripped of the specifics of recent political and economic events. In the final analysis, what I'm talking about is only concerned with the most recent corporate bailout in the most tangential way possible.

So what exactly am I on about? In the last election, particularly after the selection of Miss Gidget Goes to the Reichstag as Juan Songbird's number two, there was a lot of talk about "elites." At the VP debate the moose-hunting cheerleader even made a reference that I thought was as politically outdated as nuclear freezes, desegregation busing, and the Equal Rights Amendment; a reference to "East coast politicians." For anyone under the age of 30, some historical background is probably necessary to even understand the turn of phrase, and for those old enough to remember when it was standard political boilerplate, no small amount of deja vu must have occured.

It is of course no mistake that the east coast- particularly the northeast- is home to not only the most elite (meaning most selective), and prestigious (mostly meaning best funded) universities in America (if not the world). There are also more Universities per capita than in a place like, say, Wasilla, Alaska. Having grown up in New England, I can tell you that "college town" takes on an all new meaning when nearly every town has some kind of college or university, even if it's just a satellite of the local community college. Nearly everyone that I know has gotten at least that level of intellectual attainment referred to euphamistically on forms too numerous to mention known as "some college." And no one that I know thinks that having more education somehow makes you less authentic, or less entitled to have an opinion about something. If anything, people tend to overestimate the degree to which their two semesters of 200-level psychology makes them an "expert."

Of course that's really dumb and limiting. But you know what's even more dumb and limiting? Acting like knowing something about the world is some kind of detriment. I don't think it's too much to ask that our world leaders have seen other parts of America, not to speak of other parts of the world. Thinking that shooting wolves from an airplane is gross isn't the mark of eastern elite pretention, but the mark of an intelligent mind revolted by practices more at home in the more barbaric parts of the Middle East than in a Western post-enlightenment culture. And when you marry a high school dropout, have two kids that don't finish high school, seem utterly unconcerned with your two school-aged children's education, and think it's just peach keen, yup, yup, also that your daughter is marrying a self-proclaimed "fucking redneck" who also couldn't be bothered to sit his warm little buns at a school desk for 13 years it says something about your values that all the speeches in the world won't. It says that you're a Grade A nimrod with no sense of shame who revels in stupidity and ignorance as marks of authenticity.

But is it just western politicians who engage in this kind of posturing? I think the jury is still out on whether or not 3rd Runner Up, Miss Alaska is engaged in demagoguery or speaking in earnest. Her own academic record of five schools in four years says more about that than anything else, barring perhaps the few pictures we have of her from those years. Anyone that went to college can probably place her firmly in the sociological spectrum of college. Again, though, I'm deviating from the point. The point is that politicians like this exist because of a resentful (in the Nietzschean sense) current in American life that not only questions the utility of education (perhaps, but only perhaps, a useful topic to consider) but is aggressively opposed to learning. This manifests not only in rhetoric which rails against those smarty-pants experts with their college degrees coming here to tell me and the other dirt farmers how the economy works, but also in very concrete examples like the teaching of creation science in public schools, or rabid opposition to the scientific consensus of anthropocentric climate change.

Again, we're back at the notion that not only is common sense remarkably uncommon, but it also leads one to believe that the Earth is flat. I'm not sure that I think there's much to be done about any of this except stocking up on guns and preparing for when the "Hills Have Eyes" masses begin to descend on the more educated folk in the country. And not give any fuel to the anti-intellectual ideological currents stinking up the joint.