The NYT on June 21, 2012, posted a startling frank statement by retiring Queens, NY Congressman Gary Ackerman in response to a query concerning ”how things have changed” over the nearly three decades of service Ackerman has served in Congress (and please note these fellows can only be honest when they are being ushered OUT of office). The Congressman’s response was that Americans have "gotten dumber over the period of time I have been in office”.
I do believe him. And yesterday, in a piece in the HUFFINGTON POST by Dan Froomkin entitled: "Poll shows how GOP botches the facts",( June 21 2012) author Froomkin presented some astounding statements that reinforce Ackerman's contention that our citizenry has simply "gotten dumber". To support his thesis, concerning how the GOP botched facts, Froomkin quotes a new poll prepared by Dartmouth University Professor of Government, Ben Valentino, and conducted by "YouGov" between April and May of this year. The poll found that "fully 63 %” of Republican respondents, still beleived, now nine years after the 2003 invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The truth is that there is no "reality based" argument that Iraq ever had such weapons or the capabillity to produce them. It is simply not true. What is true is that George Bush and Dick Cheney lied to get us into that war.
According to the same poll, an even larger majority, (64%) believe, contrary to all facts, that President Obama was born in another country. Others contend he is a Muslim. Again in the same poll, nearly 67% of Republican respondents believed that if Iran, which presently has no nuclear weapons, if it produced one, would use it against Israel. These two-thirds of Republican voters must be blissfully unaware that Israel, which has a stockpile of hundreds of both atomic and hydrogen bomb war-heads, would not hesitate use them to annihilate Iran, one of their weaker but pesky competitors for hegemony in the ME if they were to even contemplate building such a weapon (as Israel has stated repeatedly).
Adding to these distressing facts about American’s level of knowledge concerning foreign affairs, some years back, a Washington-Post Poll in 2003, found that 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9-11 attacks. It is simply not true.
All these polls seem to underscore Congressman Ackerman’s statment concerning how poorly informed and ignorant the American public is or has become.
In a similarly distressing piece on the dumbing of America entitled: ”Darwin Still Losing After All These Years” in the July issue of ”The Nation”, Katha Pollitt, the author, reprises several Gallop polls on the public’s general acceptance of established principle of evolution. The results demonstrate how ignorant Americans are in this basic area of science. Pollitt states that according to a recent Gallop poll, nearly half our nation (46%) of the population are creationists. Thirty-two percent believe in ”God-controlled" or ”theistic” evolution. And most distressing for Pollitt, is that the same percentage of college graduates--46%--state that they believe that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is literally true. Furthermore, 25% of Americans with graduate degrees agree that humans and dinosaurs ”romped together before Noah’s flood”. What do these facts mean? It may mean that half the population can forget all those trips to the NYC American Museum of Natural History where most of the displays require one to accept real world facts based on scientific inquiry. The displays rather than elucidating observers, would appear to nearly half of the US observers as some form of blasphemy!
Pollitt asks why does it matter that nearly half of the nation ”rejects the overwhelming evidence of evolution..?”. She quotes Prof. Kenneth Miller of Brown University, who states: ”There’s a potential for great harm when nearly half of the population rejects the central organizing principle of the biological sciences." Indeed! How could this ignorant half of the population ever understand the concept of the scientific method, the threat of climate alteration, intricacies of energy policy, extinction of species, aspects of medicine, almost all of biology, genetics, and the basic underlying principles of geology, archaeology, paleontology, etc.
But how do we here in the US rate in these matters when compared to other nations? In England, for example, a nation with the same language, similar laws and culture, a poll in 2009 (Guardian, March 1, 2009) found that four out of five Britons were unconvinced about Creationism. ” National average figures revealed that 89% dismiss intelligent design, and 83% reject Creationism as plausible explanations for the existence of human life.” Thus, overall in the UK, at most 17% believe in Creationism vs 46% in the USA. Are the Brits so much smarter than we?
And in this regard, the polls are no different around the world. In a Pew study on the acceptance of evolution, published by National Geographic News in October 28, 2010, adults were asked, among other questions, to respond to the statement: "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." The graph illustrating these data depicts the acceptance of evolution theory in 34 countries in 2005. Out of the 34 countries polled, the US stands starkly at the bottom of the list. It is the only modern, industrialized, non-Muslim nation with such a low score on acceptance of evolution. The results ranks the US next to the last on the list (at 33), right before Turkey which ranks (34) last. Thus, in the US, only 40% of the public accept the concept of evolution, while even fewer, or 25% do so in Moslem, Turkey. The rest of the modern, western world, have vastly higher numbers agreeing with the poll statement. These nations (Sweden, France, Denmark, UK, Australia, Iceland, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc.) generally have acceptance levels of between 60-80%. The US ranks down at the bottom of the list below Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, all of which have acceptances values above 50%.
Furthermore, ”a study of several such surveys taken since 1985 has found that the United States not only ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory but researchers also point out that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory's validity has increased over the past 20 years."
But more than simple factual ignorance, which could be after all remedied, what this author finds most troubling is that such a large proportion of the nation can be so easily duped. It indicates that about half of the population have little ability at analysis, discrimination of facts and critical thinking. This is an indictment not of the mental acuity of our citizenry, but more seriously of our political system, our controlled media, our too-close-to-business-and-government-tied newspapers, and mostly our poorly supported educational system which fails to develop and institute modern methods of inquiry and critical thought in our students and citizenry. Instead our system tends to foster a form of ”group think”, a medieval mode of ”accept what ’authority’ states as true”. The political overtones are dangerous for a supposed democracy. Too often our system encourages lemming-like behavior in which the unsophisticated masses follow some unseen and unknown ”leader” unaware of where he will lead them--perhaps as in recent times over a cliff into war and economic disaster. Perhaps ”the powers that be” prefer it that way. But in a modern nation claiming and for some aspiring to be democratic, we can no longer tolerate such abject rejection of logic and clear thinking. We need much, much, more investment in education than the foundering, ineffective, and erroneous goals of "No Child Left Behind”. We must not focus on the ”child left behind” but on entirety of our student body and on the development of critical thinking, of instinctively questioning authority and of always seeking, seeking, and more seeking for excellence.
Get the picture?
rjk
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