Fred Reed is a smart and insightful man. Courageous as well, caring more for truth than for conventional opinions and public myths. And a friendly, neighborly sort of fellow so that just “Fred” is usually sufficient.
In the recent article, The 145 Solution: Sapience, not Sentience, Fred writes:
If fourteen percent [of American voters] are illiterate, a larger number must be nearly so. People who can barely read don´t. People so little engaged as to think Iraq attacked New York—forty-six percent!—vote almost at random, or in the direction in which they are shooed by cunning electoral mechanics and fixers.
The educated and thoughtful may have no idea of the night in which the rest live. We tend to associate with people like ourselves. Consequently if you know where Iran is, you probably don’t know anyone who doesn’t. But–a pre-Copernican quarter of the population believes that the sun moves around the earth? As we said in the Sixties, that’s a whole nuther head-space.
Thus a test of literacy, or more correctly of competence to vote. It might involve reading a paragraph of prose at the level of college, or of what used to be the level of college, and answering questions about it. There might be questions such as how many Congressmen are there, name a country bordering of Iraq, list three rights guaranteed (ha!) by the First Amendment, and when did World War Two take place.
When we address the sheer ignorance and functional stupidity—on mostly public matters—of the American citizenry, voters and non-voters alike, there is so much to write about or talk about as to be overwhelming. When we add in the moral issues: self-righteousness to the point of antinomianism grounded upon ignorance of much including the wider possibilities of human being, we come to the real horror. I addressed this horror to some extent in an earlier essay, Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American. I’ve also pointed to Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, where he claimed that we Americans feel the world exists to give us opportunities to feel good about ourselves. (The novel was a story about a romantic competition of sorts and was also a political thriller about terrorist, that is—criminal, acts that American government agents were committing in Vietnam by the early 1950s.)
A digression on the title of this essay. Historically, the Antinomians were a sect originating in Germany in the 16th century. They took the Protestant doctrine of faith so literalistically as to claim that the moral law was not obligatory on those who have a Christian faith; in the United States, this often means simply those who have come forward at an Evangelical revival and declared their faith in Jesus Christ. Whatever nuances might have been in Luther’s writings and sermons were wiped away and “faith alone” assures salvation and frees the true believer of moral obligations. (Sometimes it might be a Gnostic doctrine of “knowledge of the divine alone,” but I’m not sure I would consider either flavor to be truly separate. And, no, I’m not denying that most American Christians, Evangelicals and Catholics and others, are well-behaved in their own neighborhoods and workplaces, only that they hold themselves and the United States above moral rules when dealing with other peoples.)
In various essays, I’ve dealt with the problems of misformed minds in the modern world, especially American minds. For example, in this essay— Unreliable Memories, Minds Like Silly Putty, I more or less claimed Americans have willing allowed themselves to be turned into compliant objects for the propagandizing of primarily the American government but also other American institutions.
Morality in a complex world is dependent upon intellectual understandings, not just because the social and cultural worlds of men are complex but also because the world becomes complex when men learn more about God’s Creation of which we are a part; simplicity returns with a greater understanding—see Enriching Our Moral World: Simple Is Digested Complexity. But the world is recursive in some crucial ways and intellectual understandings of the better sort come only with the application of certain moral characteristics—honesty and humility. We must be honest and open in dealing with reality. We must be humble enough to realize there are few answers inside our heads and those few answers are sometimes unreliable instincts about how the world works, though reliable enough to have aided in the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. We must also expend a serious effort if we would wish to understand a very complex world which often seems so messy as to be unordered—curiosity can energize the actual effort and even turn it into a game, though a quite serious game.
Most Americans are muddleheaded thinkers because they imagine the world to be transparent to their penetrating minds. They don’t think to seek information and this is true of most of the smart Americans I know. They certainly don’t seek to find new ways of thinking or to refine their existing ways of thinking. From their ignorance and muddled thought comes the self-righteousness that hardens into outright antinomianism, perhaps the “invincible ignorance” which Jefferson detected in Americans, or at least overlapping with it. This is both a general view of the world and also a way of dealing with aspects of the world, human and non-human, which don’t act according to our American standards. If the Russians don’t accept that we good Americans just want a strong presence on their border to do some more good, then they must be evil; and certainly we would never suspect that our American leaders are up to more or up to something different than their words indicate. If the world doesn’t have enough petroleum which can be cheaply extracted, then we’ll plan on an economy which can continue to grow by using petroleum which is expensive to extract and refine; we certainly won’t consider improving our school system to nurture the better quality minds which might find new ways to provide abundant energy. We like our current school systems with all those pep rallies and homecoming games. We like our library systems all the more as they get rid of all those hard-to-understand books and replace them with thriller novels and computer terminals and DVDs.
What is the problem? Is there something unique about the United States, something exceptional? Was that something never as good, as promising of greater good, as was advertised by many? Or did that something go bad in some way? I think the West as a whole went wrong first in intellectual and cultural matters; the moral problems followed from there though, as I said above, all human characteristics are intertwined and all are involved when things go well or badly. Americans are leading the charge into regions of moral and intellectual incoherence but most Europeans peoples aren’t so far behind us.
We human beings can usefully and in substantial truth be described as mind and heart and hands. (See an earlier essay on this blog, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, or download my book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for a discussion of this issue.)
But it’s the mind which is of greatest concern here because it is the beginning of the peculiar form of American decay—it has been said that Americans are the first people to pass from a state of barbarism to a state of decadence without passing through a state of civilization in between. I think it largely true and largely true because of the weakness of the American mind, a mind which functioned well in parochial circumstances but doesn’t function so well in the fluid and dynamic cosmopolis, let alone a globe of civilizations and cultures not linked to specific civilizations.
But we each and all have two intelligences—individual intelligence and intellect or communal intelligence. I consider the intellect to be the communal intelligence of real communities and do not use the word as merely a way of speaking of our collection of long-lasting customs and the stuff in our libraries and the other stuff in our art museums and so forth. But I’ll start with words from a serious thinker who seemed to advocate a view of the `intellect’ which is profound and insightful but—perhaps—more in line with mainstream understandings of human nature. In The House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun tells us, first:
We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine. [page 4]
Later on that same page, Barzun goes on to tell us the difference between that intelligence we Americans have “in plenty” or at least had “in plenty” in the 1950s and the intellect which we largely lack:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
I’m a little uncertain about the exact meaning of Barzun’s words. I agree with him to a large extent but it’s possible I go where he wouldn’t travel: I believe the intellect, “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence”, to be the (abstractly) observable aspects of a true communal mind which is subject to evolutionary and developmental processes which ultimately leads to the mind of the Body of Christ. It’s quite possible Barzun believed communities to have only a nominal existence exist.
In any case, I think that Barzun would have agreed that much of our moral reasoning, certainly when it covers very complex issues, is `done’ at the communal level. This isn’t to say that individuals minds aren’t working hard, maybe just to spin their wheels, but it is to say serious thinking is done, at the very least, in conversation with Jeremiah and St Paul and St Augustine and Shakespeare and Melville and Minogue and many others—a complete list will include geneticists and evolutionary thinkers and brain-scientists and many others as well as far more prophets and poets and theologians and philosophers. Even a book which is morally questionable to a Christian, but also honest, such as Madame Bovary, should be part of the Christian’s deeper thought processes and likely will be, for good or ill, if he’s read it.
There are certain core parts of any communal mind which come from the individual intelligences of those more gifted in speculative or practical reasoning, with the curiosity of individual minds driving much of the development of that communal mind and sometimes providing for less talented thinkers to overachieve. Americans can admire great doers, entrepreneurs and politicians as well as athletes and soldiers. Americans can admire those who are driven by the heart, missionaries and certain poets and musicians as well as mothers and teachers. Americans seem to try to admire great thinkers, even turning Einstein or Watson and Crick into celebrities of a sort. Americans can’t figure out why great thinkers are of great importance because of the reasons I gave above—basically, they think their empty and unexercized and perhaps untalented minds are as capable of getting to the truth as all those analysts at the CIA and the DIA and all those universities. They think it a waste of time to check out a book or two on the history of Iran or that of American diplomacy and military interventions overseas. After all, the world is transparent to their minds; if Iranians act in ways that make no immediate sense to the average American suburbanite, then those Iranians must be irrational and up to no good. Since the world is transparent to our minds, then any confusion we see is clearly irrationality or immorality. And we don’t let any wise-guys try to talk about, say, the different understanding of Iranians which is held by retired CIA or DIA or State Department officers who actually learned the languages and histories of the peoples in and around Iran, who interacted with some of those peoples in hostile or friendly situations. Certainly, we Americans react strongly against anyone who starts a conversation with words such as, “I read a history of Iran which is down at the town library and…”
When we don’t admit into our own minds the knowledge of serious historians and military or civilian intelligence analysts and diplomats or soldiers with boots on the ground experience, we show that there is no American community mind. Furthermore, we show ourselves to be rebels against reality, against the Almighty who made and sustains that reality. (Herman Melville made this latter claim against Americans back in the 1850s.)