Many decades ago, when I briefly pursued the professional career for which I had been prepared, college-level English instruction, I taught an essay (the authorship of which, I'm afraid, is lost to me) whose theme was that after a monumental struggle in human history, many Western societies had achieved a colossal leap forward, a moment in which literacy, the ability to read and write, was near universal. The point of the piece was that having arrived at this extraordinary condition, an unhappy circumstance prevailed. The newly won power of literacy was shockingly underutilized. In what the author argued was a "post literate generation," people in general did not, in any significant way, employ their newly won ability as a means to acquire information or to examine the ways in which their perspectives were supported or challenged by others.
Today, the problem of "post literacy" is back in vogue, but the context has changed. Now the complaint is that our youth are being "dumbed down" by exposure to digital sources of information which discourage them from the discipline of actually reading and writing. I think means and ends are confused here, that my lost author of fifty years ago had it right. Public access to information is clearly greater today, in the digital world, than it ever has been. The problem is not access, the problem is the casual way that many ignore the opportunity to employ it.
Politicians, in the exercise of their craft, are well aware that their constituents are largely affected by, and responsive, to intuitive beliefs, not rational considerations. The result can be described as "post literate politics," and it would be hard to find a better illustration of it than the present efforts of the Republican Party to secure the support, and votes, of the least inquisitive, most pre-judical segments of its constituency.
How else to account for a political climate in which the Republican Party will not discourage a constituent fantasy that our current President is a foreign born Muslim who hates white people and has treasonous designs on America?
How do Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry achieve party preeminence while being associated with the Dominionist strain of evangelical theology which explicitly contradicts the Constitutional mandate that the government may not "establish a religion"?
How explain that evangelical Republicans are the most likely social category in American society to reject evolution as an established fact?
How explain the condition recently acknowledged, at his peril, by John Huntsman, that Republicans are in danger of being perceived as "anti-science"?
How explain the comfort level of a Donald Trump who recently asserted, speakng of the President, that he was a man "who takes more vacations than any human being I've ever seen"?
And so on.
Neither political party is innocent of the temptation to pander to ignorance, but
Republicans have raised the practice to an art form, which creates a real political problem for Democrats, especially Progressives. The third rail of American politics is any hint that the democratic process is threatened by constituent ignorance. A vehement Tea Partier without the slightest interest in examining an issue for its factual validity or relevance has, and apparently deserves, the same voting rights and influence as the most thoughtful and objective citizen. The committee of the whole represented by the voting electorate includes irresponsible idiots and responsible adults, without distinction. By the design of our founding fathers, that reality, however painful, is our cultural heritage. The trade off, long recognized and accepted in America, is that the danger of a ruling elite is greater than the occasional missteps of "common sense" wisdom. With the growing elitist authority of corporate influence, we seem, unhappily, to be getting the worst of both concerns.
