REPUBLICAN BIBLE THUMPING WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICAN FILTH AND THE RISE OF ANTI-KNOWLEDGE

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https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/29/gop-and-the-rise-of-anti-knowledge/


GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge

October 29, 2015


Ben Carson’s rise to the top of the Republican presidential field shows
that many Republicans, especially Christian fundamentalists, have
decoupled from the real world — and are proud of it. The more that GOP
candidates embrace “anti-knowledge” the more popular they become, as
Mike Lofgren explains.

By Mike Lofgren

In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but
antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of
knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized
fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic
culture in America.

Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years.
“Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be
accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability
to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the
conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new
ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.

Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not
that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of
Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest
rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders
and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all
likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to
topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.

There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a
monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the
fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations
steered clear of such balderdash.

At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to
locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack
Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. Likewise, he
can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident
from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey
and that the earth is 6,000 years old.

And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the
Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the
Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben
Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of
every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare
is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave
owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust
(author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw
Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon
enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.

It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines
Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa
burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure
enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of
Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump
was just not crazy enough for their tastes.

Why the Ignorance?

Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to
what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people after
making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an
accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field? “Because
usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed
doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could
have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and
probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across
the board.”

Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word
for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished
in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a
surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the
sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar
ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor
rates roughly comparable to a doctor).

We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him
commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes
one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where
does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals
come from?

Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make
him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully
answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has
happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?

Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard
Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent
feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism
with fundamentalist revivalism.

The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture,
began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of
fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far
greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its
personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American
political party, the Republicans.

An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism

Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media,
foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of
fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery
Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the
Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue
despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus
“historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of
a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the
publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of
political disinformation.

Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique
imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of
CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle
Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly
by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness
hallucinating of Glenn Beck.

Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether
foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them
out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the
political bloodstream in the United States.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the
right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible
for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and
scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of
empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap
between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.

The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a
subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than
discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a
baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are
frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the
snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into
the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on
Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is
no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political
resistance.

We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder,
Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall
Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market,
the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to
ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were
clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio.

The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience,
however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and
Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone
and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus
nearly had an aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.

State-Sponsored Stupidity

It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government
that the real damage gets done. Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University
of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s
political agenda.

Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the
wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in
Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary
kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was
obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to
minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating
it had nothing to do with the Civil War).

This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than
abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the
department should be used to investigate professors who say something he
doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the
government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a
technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.

It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist,
should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as
fundamentalists. Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that
it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz,
Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are also notorious for making
inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than
deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald
Trump is sui generis).

In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele
Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement
conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. But he will have left his
mark, as they did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further
to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign
to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the
month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem unmoored to a stubborn
and profane thing called facts.