When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View?

[jamesq]

Niked it from jblaque (which is the somewhat easier to read version, since it doesn't have Esquire's ads.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Greetings From Idiot America - Charles P. Pierce

Comments

[wackynephews.livejournal.com]

There's a billboard on Barlow that seems to prove that the Idiot American has invaded Canada...and he has more money then brains.

[jamesq]

I'm not sure what billboard you're talking about.

I will agree that there's no shortage of idiot Canadians though.

[wackynephews.livejournal.com]

It's between 27th and 32nd on Barlow...it starts with "An Inconvenient Fact: Glo-bull Warming doesn't exist:

[ersatz-marduk.livejournal.com]

I can't get either the lj or the original link to load on either of the computer's I'm using, for some reason.

I'm not really impressed by the position either. It's not like this is unique to our times: "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contest in vain."

That's not my main problem with the view, but I'll take that to my own space and not waste yours.

[ersatz-marduk.livejournal.com]

Well, I finished the article, and thank you for the additional link that made it possible. Interesting.

A pity it was so poorly written, however. For all the author's talk about the intellect, he never rose beyond appealing to the gut. At least he included quotations that more effectively argued his point for him, but he'd have done better to emulate them.