Because Vidal and Buckley's sparring got such high ratings for ABC (the climax of which consisted of Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," to which Buckley called Vidal a "queer" and threatened to "smash (him) in the goddamn face"), the media, according to the film, immediately constructed the debate template for the late 20th and now 21st century. They figured, just get two people in front of the camera who disagree with each other and watch them slug it out. Only now, instead of just talking heads, we have talking networks (Fox and MSNBC most likely the predominant example) that have transformed television news into one big shoutfest. And look where we are today.
This narrative, while seductive, seems more simplistic to me now than it would have five or ten years ago. For one thing, the "opposing sides" we're talking about pretty much all serve the same corporate masters. Because one wants to speak about the discord and cacophony of the media today, one has to sound unbiased and evenhanded, and as a result, one has to pretend like both sides of the spectrum are equally insane. Which is nonsense. It's not my business to defend liberal media--having seen precious little of it, I'm in no position to do so--but let's at least not inflate their liberality while supposedly advocating a free press.
Sure, there's shrill hysteria and propaganda along the political and ideological spectrum, but where does most of this lie? The media's op ed content is overwhelmingly right-tilted, while the American electorate, not so much. If you replace our children's school milk with Mountain Dew, you can yell at the kids for choosing to drink it. Or you could, conceivably, go after whoever made the switch. Right?
The State of the American Mind makes similar errors in its reasoning. A collection of sixteen essays that self-consciously iterates Alan Bloom's famous jeremiad of the 1980s, it supposedly seeks to investigate, and provide a solution for, the decline of intellectualism and cultural literacy in America. But in places, it does just what Best of Enemies did at the end: ignore its own premises and simplify the conflict. David T.Z. Mindich's essay, "A Wired Nation Tunes Out the News" makes some excellent points about the dumbing-down of mainstream news and argues that this kind of "fluff" is a huge problem to address when discussing the uninformed voter of the 21st century. But after laying out his case there, he puts it all aside to make a rather perplexing suggestion:
That's just one example. Building ostensibly upon ideas generated and championed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. decades ago, the book's essays argue that there is a cultural and intellectual currency that all Americans should know in order to fulfill their civic duties and correct the decline the authors see in our pop culture, educational institutions, political involvement and other barometers of democracy.
And that's all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. Championing the need for knowledge is something I find hard to dispute. "The American mind possesses specific knowledge, too, not just an attitude," Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow write in the foreword. "You must remember the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Bible…along with stories of the first colonists, the Founding, and the pioneer experience."
Fine. Dandy. I'm all for the currency of knowledge. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I used to teach Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation in a synthesis unit in my AP Language class. Not, I hasten to add, because I bought into his thesis, but because I figured it was a surefire way to get my students steamed, and thereby involved in the critical reading process.
So this is all not a line of thought I find repellent. But where the authors lose me, and lose, I suspect, a great percentage of potential converts, is when they stumble over their own endorsement of hegemony and disdain for perspective and diversity. It's a fine line, but it's there, and it doesn't take much of a careful reading of certain passages to ferret out this disregard for anything they see as extraneous or nonessential.
Take Daniel L. Dreisbach's essay on the importance of Biblical literacy. He writes, "Because of the Bible's role in shaping people's thoughts and speech during the forming of our nation, it matters deeply that Americans today know so little about the Bible and its influence on their culture. It matters because the Bible has informed diverse aspects of the culture in innumerable ways. To understand themselves and where they come from, Americans must know something about the Bible."
If he'd stopped there, he might have been okay. But to argue that familiarity with the Bible is currency for anyone seeking to understand the Founders is one thing; to argue that, without a spiritual component to one's civic literacy, one is spiritually doomed, is something else:
The book is on firmer ground when it points to a deficit of college-ready skills, as measured by Gallup polls and various education research institutions ("College Graduates: Satisfied but Adrift," by Richard Arum), or the problems with democratic activism in an era of staggering apathy towards the political process ("Political Ignorance in America," by Ilya Somin). Ditto our obesssion with pharmaceutical drugs as a cure-all ("Anatomy of an Epidemic" by Robert Whitaker). With a little practice, you can learn the most horrifying stats by heart and reel them off at parties: more Americans can name more of the Simpsons family on television than can name the freedoms afforded to us by the First Amendment, for example, or the astounding percentage of Americans on antidepressants.
I'm just as frustrated with this as any of these writers. But it's one thing to bemoan a lack of engagement and knowledge; it's quite another to marginalize the very values and concerns of the people you're trying to engage.
Take Greg Lukianoff's "How Colleges Create the 'Expectation of Confirmation.'" He spends quite a bit of time drawing a portrait of a system of higher education concerned with insulating its students against contrary opinion. His opening narration describes an effort by Brown University students to prevent a campus speech by former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2013 because of their disapproval of his stop-and-frisk program. Advocates saw his methods as crime-reductive; critics saw them as racist and tyrannical, and to Lukianoff, this is all in an effort that students expend in order to "not be offended." The idea that they are protesting what they see as a gross endorsement of backwards policing is apparently not even worth discussion.
Maybe Lukianoff is correct when he argues that colleges are full of students unwilling to hear contrary points of view, but I doubt it--his evidence, garnered from what he has "noticed" in his work at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, seems anecdotal to me. A broader look at, for example, commencement speakers across the country in various colleges sees a host of figures that students are not wild about (Lukianoff is quoted in the linked piece), and their protests are in the same spirit of discontent that kept the Sixties (the period these authors alternate between praising and condemning) such a firestorm for student activism. It makes little sense to me that students protested, say, John Roberts and Ann Coulter's presence out of offense. What makes more sense to me is the notion that these students were protesting the speaker's ideas, and the university's tacit endorsement of them by extending an invitation. We could debate where to draw the line between free speech and academic endorsement of that same speech, but that's a decidedly different debate than the one Lukianoff offers here.
There's also Dennis Prager's "We Live in the Age of Feelings," where he scoffs at college students consulting their emotions first when confronted with decisions and conflicts. "Call it emotional relativism," he writes,
It goes on like this throughout the book, over and over again. America needs a cultural and intellectual currency, and if you want to know what it is, just ask us smart guys (Bauerlein and Bellow's Foreword). Americans are dumb and we know this because two-thirds of them think there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, and yeah, the news is dumb too, but we'll just ignore the folks who peddled that lie in the first place because it's easier to attack the lied-to than it is the liars (Mindich). A man decides he identifies as a female and undergoes surgery and harrowing life adjustments--well, that's just him jumping to fulfill an immediate desire, just like you get a Big Mac attack and run to your car to hit the nearest drive-through; it has nothing at all to do with figuring out who you are and taking painful and courageous steps to become that person ("The New Antinomian Attitude," by R.R. Reno). We have more people on government assistance because of an addiction to entitlements, and this has nothing to do with the $2 trillion that left our economy in a matter of days in 2008's banking crisis or the subsequent housing collapse ("Dependency in America" by Nicholas Eberstadt). The reason we're so dumb is because government is so big, so if people vote with their feet and move somewhere else, that'll lead us to make smarter shopping decisions at the ballot box (Somin).
In a recent book about the news consumption habits of Millennials, Paula Poindexter noted the importance of caring about every generation's news consumption. Imagine, Poindexter asks rhetorically, if the Coca-Cola Company didn't work hard to get the latest generation interested in soda. It would risk losing lifetime customers. So why aren't we doing more to interest young people in the news?In order to "get" the latest generation hooked on Coke, the company spends a gargantuan amount of money selling a transparently fake image of its product and attempting to attach a sufficiently hip and cuddly lifestyle to it. That's more or less the "fluff" CNN et al has been generating these past decades, and suddenly Mindich wants more of it?
That's just one example. Building ostensibly upon ideas generated and championed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. decades ago, the book's essays argue that there is a cultural and intellectual currency that all Americans should know in order to fulfill their civic duties and correct the decline the authors see in our pop culture, educational institutions, political involvement and other barometers of democracy.
And that's all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. Championing the need for knowledge is something I find hard to dispute. "The American mind possesses specific knowledge, too, not just an attitude," Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow write in the foreword. "You must remember the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Bible…along with stories of the first colonists, the Founding, and the pioneer experience."
Fine. Dandy. I'm all for the currency of knowledge. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I used to teach Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation in a synthesis unit in my AP Language class. Not, I hasten to add, because I bought into his thesis, but because I figured it was a surefire way to get my students steamed, and thereby involved in the critical reading process.
So this is all not a line of thought I find repellent. But where the authors lose me, and lose, I suspect, a great percentage of potential converts, is when they stumble over their own endorsement of hegemony and disdain for perspective and diversity. It's a fine line, but it's there, and it doesn't take much of a careful reading of certain passages to ferret out this disregard for anything they see as extraneous or nonessential.
Take Daniel L. Dreisbach's essay on the importance of Biblical literacy. He writes, "Because of the Bible's role in shaping people's thoughts and speech during the forming of our nation, it matters deeply that Americans today know so little about the Bible and its influence on their culture. It matters because the Bible has informed diverse aspects of the culture in innumerable ways. To understand themselves and where they come from, Americans must know something about the Bible."
If he'd stopped there, he might have been okay. But to argue that familiarity with the Bible is currency for anyone seeking to understand the Founders is one thing; to argue that, without a spiritual component to one's civic literacy, one is spiritually doomed, is something else:
Moreover, biblical literacy is essential to understanding not only the Christian tradition and Christianity's continuing influence in the world today but also core cultural components of Western civilization and the intellectual roots of the American political experiment. Biblical literacy, in short, mattered to America's founders, and it still matters to those engaged now in cultural and civic life.First of all, it begs the question a teensy bit to argue you need to understand the Bible to understand Christianity. Second, the Founders, while leaning towards Christianity in private matters, made it clear that religion and government were two distinctly separate things; I don't know why this point still has to be continually made in the 21st century. And finally, does anyone seriously think that Christianity isn't still seeping into our pores throughout our common culture already? I saw no shortage of nativity scenes over the holiday season; if there's a War on Christmas, the Christians are winning it. Americans have more trouble than I'm comfortable with distinguishing between what the Bible says and what the Koran says; maybe we should be calling for a better understanding of the Muslim faith instead?
The book is on firmer ground when it points to a deficit of college-ready skills, as measured by Gallup polls and various education research institutions ("College Graduates: Satisfied but Adrift," by Richard Arum), or the problems with democratic activism in an era of staggering apathy towards the political process ("Political Ignorance in America," by Ilya Somin). Ditto our obesssion with pharmaceutical drugs as a cure-all ("Anatomy of an Epidemic" by Robert Whitaker). With a little practice, you can learn the most horrifying stats by heart and reel them off at parties: more Americans can name more of the Simpsons family on television than can name the freedoms afforded to us by the First Amendment, for example, or the astounding percentage of Americans on antidepressants.
I'm just as frustrated with this as any of these writers. But it's one thing to bemoan a lack of engagement and knowledge; it's quite another to marginalize the very values and concerns of the people you're trying to engage.
Take Greg Lukianoff's "How Colleges Create the 'Expectation of Confirmation.'" He spends quite a bit of time drawing a portrait of a system of higher education concerned with insulating its students against contrary opinion. His opening narration describes an effort by Brown University students to prevent a campus speech by former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2013 because of their disapproval of his stop-and-frisk program. Advocates saw his methods as crime-reductive; critics saw them as racist and tyrannical, and to Lukianoff, this is all in an effort that students expend in order to "not be offended." The idea that they are protesting what they see as a gross endorsement of backwards policing is apparently not even worth discussion.
Maybe Lukianoff is correct when he argues that colleges are full of students unwilling to hear contrary points of view, but I doubt it--his evidence, garnered from what he has "noticed" in his work at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, seems anecdotal to me. A broader look at, for example, commencement speakers across the country in various colleges sees a host of figures that students are not wild about (Lukianoff is quoted in the linked piece), and their protests are in the same spirit of discontent that kept the Sixties (the period these authors alternate between praising and condemning) such a firestorm for student activism. It makes little sense to me that students protested, say, John Roberts and Ann Coulter's presence out of offense. What makes more sense to me is the notion that these students were protesting the speaker's ideas, and the university's tacit endorsement of them by extending an invitation. We could debate where to draw the line between free speech and academic endorsement of that same speech, but that's a decidedly different debate than the one Lukianoff offers here.
There's also Dennis Prager's "We Live in the Age of Feelings," where he scoffs at college students consulting their emotions first when confronted with decisions and conflicts. "Call it emotional relativism," he writes,
...the idea that the best foundation for judgment is emotive response and the best one for choice is emotive preference…To apply any broader criterion that is based upon nonemotive, impersonal reality or truth is not only mistaken, it's oppressive--which is why the young lean so far in the direction of liberalism: not because of its political content (they know little about progressive tax policy, regulations, and specific government programs), but because conservatism sounds too much like someone telling them what to think and do.I've always marveled at Prager's ability to dichotomize incredibly complex issues (like when he dismisses societal transformation, and thereby civil rights), but this is particularly impressive. The youth of America couldn't possibly have their emotions filtered through intellect or reason. They aren't suspicious of a political wing that advocates bombing the Third World into the Stone Age because they know anything about history. They're just squeamish over it, and by his yardstick, that makes their take on the situation worthless.
It goes on like this throughout the book, over and over again. America needs a cultural and intellectual currency, and if you want to know what it is, just ask us smart guys (Bauerlein and Bellow's Foreword). Americans are dumb and we know this because two-thirds of them think there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, and yeah, the news is dumb too, but we'll just ignore the folks who peddled that lie in the first place because it's easier to attack the lied-to than it is the liars (Mindich). A man decides he identifies as a female and undergoes surgery and harrowing life adjustments--well, that's just him jumping to fulfill an immediate desire, just like you get a Big Mac attack and run to your car to hit the nearest drive-through; it has nothing at all to do with figuring out who you are and taking painful and courageous steps to become that person ("The New Antinomian Attitude," by R.R. Reno). We have more people on government assistance because of an addiction to entitlements, and this has nothing to do with the $2 trillion that left our economy in a matter of days in 2008's banking crisis or the subsequent housing collapse ("Dependency in America" by Nicholas Eberstadt). The reason we're so dumb is because government is so big, so if people vote with their feet and move somewhere else, that'll lead us to make smarter shopping decisions at the ballot box (Somin).
And on and on. The prescription for these writers seems to be, Find the problem, acknowledge one-third of the causes of the problem, ignore the other two-thirds, offer a vague solution, move on.
Even where I agree with these writers, I find myself maddened by their lack of specific suggestions. It's nice when, at the end of "The Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ," Bauerlein points out that "The parents and mentors inclined to heed our exhortations probably already recognize the problem (of the knowledge deficit) and strive to restrain it--they don't need our advice." That's true--I do, and I don't. It's also reassuring to hear Jean M. Twenge point out in "The Rise of the Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest" that, in an effort to combat a praise-heavy academic environment, "those few who resist the trend and stick with lower grades look like curmudgeons and suffer lower enrollments and lower student evaluations." Story of my life.
But over and over again, even when acknowledging problems I would be hard-pressed to deny, their prescriptions are vague and simplistic. Schools should stress critical thinking. Schools should advocate civic engagement. Schools should get kids interested in the news (show me the lesson plan, folks; I'll even pay for it. What do you think I do all day?) Oh, and people should stop living places where they are underrepresented. It's your home? Who cares--it's up to you to make the change, not the country.
The writers put no real onus on the true leaders and powers of this country that I can see. Little or no accountability for the people selling us crap; only on us, for either wallowing in that crap or ignoring it altogether.
When Bauerlein and his pals stick to empirical observations about knowledge, engagement and the like, they make perfect sense. When they tie it to a lack of Christian values, Big Government or young people watching too much Jon Stewart, they sound exactly like their critics paint them: old, grumpy white men yelling at everyone to get off their lawns. Buckley would doubtless find something to agree with there, but that's not the sort of position that leads to any kind of meaningful change.
Even where I agree with these writers, I find myself maddened by their lack of specific suggestions. It's nice when, at the end of "The Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ," Bauerlein points out that "The parents and mentors inclined to heed our exhortations probably already recognize the problem (of the knowledge deficit) and strive to restrain it--they don't need our advice." That's true--I do, and I don't. It's also reassuring to hear Jean M. Twenge point out in "The Rise of the Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest" that, in an effort to combat a praise-heavy academic environment, "those few who resist the trend and stick with lower grades look like curmudgeons and suffer lower enrollments and lower student evaluations." Story of my life.
But over and over again, even when acknowledging problems I would be hard-pressed to deny, their prescriptions are vague and simplistic. Schools should stress critical thinking. Schools should advocate civic engagement. Schools should get kids interested in the news (show me the lesson plan, folks; I'll even pay for it. What do you think I do all day?) Oh, and people should stop living places where they are underrepresented. It's your home? Who cares--it's up to you to make the change, not the country.
The writers put no real onus on the true leaders and powers of this country that I can see. Little or no accountability for the people selling us crap; only on us, for either wallowing in that crap or ignoring it altogether.
When Bauerlein and his pals stick to empirical observations about knowledge, engagement and the like, they make perfect sense. When they tie it to a lack of Christian values, Big Government or young people watching too much Jon Stewart, they sound exactly like their critics paint them: old, grumpy white men yelling at everyone to get off their lawns. Buckley would doubtless find something to agree with there, but that's not the sort of position that leads to any kind of meaningful change.
