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Back in 2004, in the wake of George Bush's narrow (and most likely fraudulent) defeat of John Kerry, author and historian Garry Wills famously wrote in the New York Times about the clouds of a new "Un-Enlightenment" amassing over us.
In the three years since, the whirlwind of willful ignorance and public denial of nearly every facet of reason, science, and empiricism has only gained strength. It's really hard for me to even begin to understand what is driving this wholesale rejection of the amazing discoveries and additions to human knowledge that are perhaps the only positive hallmark of the 20th Century, but there's no denying that the people who push for a world-view based on fear, ignorance, and the rejection of empiricism in favor of blind faith have gained far more support than I (or anyone else, for that matter) could have possibly imagined when I read Wills' op-ed then.
This Guardian article reviews a new book by Natalie Angier called "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science", and in the process considers a fundamental problem that may go a long way to explaining our culture's breathtaking abandonment of reason: our society relegates almost all of our basic education of science to our earliest years of education, turning away from science, math, and other "hard" topics to "softer" ones when children reach their teen years (literature, art, music). As a result, we are left with a decidedly imperfect understanding of even the most basic tenets of science and math, which, if we do not pursue them ourselves in college, become dim and only vaguely understood at all. Consequently, it's all too easy for the current crop of demagogues, charlatans, and evil-doers to swoop in and convince people with anything that sounds remotely plausible like "intelligent design" or even totally implausible like miracles, faces-in-pizza-slices, hurricanes "punishing" people for "evil", and so on.
Even people who might otherwise know their stuff about their own area of expertise are not immune to this -- see the quiz the Guardian gave to some notable public figures in Britain about basic science facts, and see how poorly they did. In our daily lives, it might not matter if we know why salt dissolves in water or what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, but our collective ignorance weakens our ability to resist the charismatic lures of the Willful Ignorant.
Check out this web page with a whole list of common misconceptions about basic science -- stuff you thought you knew, but you really don't. Or maybe you did when you were 8 or 9 years old, but have long since forgotten. I have to cop to not knowing the first one on the list myself, and these are all pretty obvious items.
Al Gore's new book "The Assault On Reason", takes on some of the other culprits -- our over-entertained culture, the information overload from corporations and agenda-driven media organizations, and others -- but I find a lot of power in the argument that we simply waste the power of education by misdirecting it. And I think it extends beyond the current battleground of science -- how many Americans never learn a shred of history beyond what is taught to them in elementary school, with the result that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not have a realistic picture of the root causes of the Civil War, the political context of American intervention in World Wars I and II, or the misguided foreign policies of the Cold War that have led us to our current disastrous situation in Iraq.
Collectively, we're getting more and more ignorant with each succeeding generation, and the damage is beginning to show. I'm on hiatus from heavy-duty ranting, so I'll share this blogger's screed with you because he sums it up so well.
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