Dumbing America Down

Arthur Brooks is relinquishing his post as president of the American Enterprise Institute. Having led the conservative think tank for ten years he has decided that it’s time to hand over the baton.

To announce his upcoming departure he offered some thoughts on the state of American intellectual life. Obviously, it is bad. It is very bad. We all know, because we see examples of it every day, that far too many American universities have become indoctrination mills, force-feeding students with a single correct opinion, punishing or silencing those who think differently. Increasingly, media outlets have joined the dumbed-down chorus.

Of  course this is tribalism. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out:

One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible. It has been noticed, for example, that primitive tribes can sometimes call their members simply “people” while describing others as some kind of alien. So the word Inuit means people, but a rival indigenous people, the Ojibwe, call them Eskimos, which, according to lore, means “eaters of raw meat.”

Obviously, this refers to those who direct the marketplace of ideas. The worlds of science and technology seem, for now, immune to the lure of tribalism. We face the spectacle of universities and even high schools teaching students how not to think, but how to emote and how to identify as a member of a tribe. Effectively, we saw evidence of it in the student protest marches against guns these last days and weeks.

If there is only one correct opinion, then you need not question or challenge your own. You must accept the tribe’s dogmatic beliefs, unthinkingly.

Brooks expresses it thusly:

… the competition of ideas is under attack. Many would rather shut down debate than participate in it. Politicians from both parties try to discredit their opponents with name-calling and ad hominem attacks. On too many college campuses, people with the “wrong” viewpoints and ideas are unwelcome. Much of the mass media has become polarized, meaning readers and viewers on the right and left are never challenged in their conviction that the other side is made up of knaves and fools.

Part of this stance is pragmatic—no one has ever been insulted into agreement. Further, we need opposing viewpoints to challenge our own. If we’re wrong, the best way to learn it is through challenges from our friends on the other side of the issue.

Why is this awful? If you only care about knowing what you must believe in order to remain a member of  your tribe, you will lose the habit of compromise and the habit of negotiation. If you do not know how to consider different points of view on a political or cultural topic and do not know how to find common ground with an opponent and do not know to engage in the give and take of negotiation, what will you do when you are sitting around with your friends, trying to decide where to go for dinner or which movie to see? 

If you do not know how to negotiate, you will turn any disagreement into open warfare or high drama. We practice negotiation every day in our exchanges and transactions with friend and foe alike. Either you know how to do it or you do not. If you learn in college that you must never compromise or negotiate, you will be ill equipped to conduct any meaningful relationships.

Anyway, our young American intellectuals, having been disembarrassed of their ability to exercise their rational faculties have been ranting and raving about bigotry, all the while defending a bigot like Louis Farrakhan. And let’s not forget the eight year tenure of Jeremiah Wright’s protégé in the White House. Did you notice that throughout the Obama years, any criticism or even questioning of the Savior would cause you to be shunned from polite society? 

The Obama years seriously damaged Democratic debate because any criticism of Obama counted as blasphemy. Today, any praise of Trump similarly counts as blasphemy. If you were wondering why Gary Cohn resigned from the White House, perhaps the tariff policy played a part, but, if I were to speculate, I would suggest that the weight of public opinion in the higher reaches of New York society pressured him out. How did it pressure him: by telling him, his wife, his friends and family that he was colluding with Hitler. After a while, it gets to you.

Brooks makes another salient point, namely that the culture has been so completely flooded with bad ideas that they have driven out good ideas. I had not heard this before and I find it very useful. He compares it to Gresham’s law, whereby bad money drives out good, that is, people are more likely to keep bad money in circulation and to keep good money for themselves:

  

Another threat to the world of ideas is arguably even more insidious: mediocrity through trivialization, largely from misuse of new media. To understand this, remember Gresham’s law: “Bad money drives out good.” If one form of currency is inherently more valuable than another in circulation, the better one will be hoarded and thus disappear.

Famous academics spend big parts of their days trading insults on Twitter . Respected journalists who suppress their own biases in their formal reporting show no such restraint on social media, hurting their and their organizations’ reputations. When half-baked 280-character opinions and tiny hits of click-fueled dopamine displace one’s hard-earned training and vocation, it’s a lousy trade.

If you add this to the point about tribalism, you arrive at the conclusion that the American mind is being dumbed down.

Brooks suggests that social media competition for clicks contributes massively to this dumbing down. Clickbait must be short, pithy and shocking. It need not be reasoned or even well written. It need but engage your mind... like a train wreck. Perhaps more important, it is never really edited. 

Imagine that in the past, editors selected what was worth reading and what was worth ignoring. The role of these gatekeepers has diminished with the blogosphere and the twitterverse. Thus, the free market in ideas has become something of a free-for-all, where quality does not necessarily rise to the top. If quality involves thoughtful arguments written in pellucid prose, then the new free-for-all market makes it far more difficult to publish, if not to find such work.

Looking for an immediate stimulus, especially one that affirms your belief and that makes you feel like a member of the right tribe, does not correlate with serious thought or good writing.

Of course, it would be wonderful if the custodians of serious thought and good writing were still at working. In large part they are not. Academic intellectuals, like those Brooks refers to, have often been lured into twitter feuds, the better to express their deep feelings. It would be nice to think that these people are our best and brightest, but, given today’s academic world, they are more often been hired for their ideological conformity or to fill a diversity quota. The destitution of the American academy has produced a situation where serious thought has been exiled… to where, we would like to know?

And this impacts the world of the media and publishing. To some extent serious intellectuals are still writing and still being published. And yet, the media requires clickbait and twitter feuds to keep itself alive. Even if leftist media did not want to cover the Trump administration fairly, its readers would simply tune out. Their minds have been so completely taken over by leftist dogma that they will get literally ill if they hear a discouraging word.

And one can only wonder whether the keepers of the media flame are the best and the brightest. In the past, careers in journalism conferred high prestige. Is that any longer the case? How many young intellectuals avoid a career in an industry that seems to be like a sinking ocean liner? How many of those who do join are capable of recognizing serious thought and excellent writing? In part, they judge work by the criteria imposed by identity politics. In larger part, they do not know any better.