COLUMN: American stupidity – here’s your sign
The other day I was watching “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” and wondered: How dumb must we, as a nation, be in order to ask ourselves this question? What an insult to our collective intelligence. But then, upon further reflection, I grew concerned. Are we smarter than a fifth grader? I have my doubts.
At the Miss Teen USA competition last year, Caitlin Upton (Miss South Carolina) became a YouTube sensation by butchering a question about why so many Americans are unable to locate the U.S. on a map.
Her now-infamous answer was: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as, uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uhhh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us.” Hilarious, sure, but also painfully true. Only one in five Americans own maps – even fewer care to study them. Take “the Iraq,” for example. We’ve occupied the country for five years, yet 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate Iraq on a map. In the same survey, conducted by National Geographic a couple years ago, 90 percent failed to find Afghanistan, another country we occupy. And 70 percent could not find Iran, a country we may soon attack. The U.S. trailed all but one industrialized country in geographical literacy in that survey, behind Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and Great Britain. Mexico narrowly beat us for last place. According to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, one in four adults read no books at all in the past year. Of those who claimed to read, their favorite books were popular fiction and religious works. So just popular fiction, in other words. A 1999 Gallup poll revealed a quarter of Americans do not know we gained independence from Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. Worse still, nearly 20 percent of Americans believe that-get this-the sun revolves around the earth! In the “debate” over evolution, polls consistently show two-thirds of Americans support teaching creationism and/or intelligent design alongside evolution in public schools. More than a third favor replacing evolution with biblical creationism entirely. A 2005 Harris poll found nearly half of the respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” The well-supported theory that humans share a common ancestor with apes is absurd, these people say, but a bronze-age mythology that states women were created from a guy’s rib only 6,000 years ago…that’s the gospel truth. This scientific ignorance is common, if not celebrated. On the Sept. 18, 2007, broadcast of “The View,” a source of news for millions of American women, panelist Sherri Shepherd, said she didn’t believe in evolution … “Period.” The other panelists, puzzled, asked her if the world is flat. “I don’t know,” she first replied, later explaining that she “never thought about it”-as if that was any less disturbing. Many Americans, far too many, came to Shepherd’s defense. They found her comments to be endearing. This same phenomenon (American anti-intellectualism) is largely responsible for the George W. Bush presidency. Both Gore and Kerry were perceived as erudite elitists, but with brazen displays of ignorance, while Bush (himself a wealthy Harvard-educated career politician) was cast as the common man. The American people elected Bush, not because they agreed with him on the issues (they didn’t), but because they’d like have a beer with him.
To clarify, the U.S. has no deficit in talent or genius. Our problem is not our intellectual capability (IQ scores have actually risen in recent decades), but rather our intellectual curiosity (or the lack thereof). For whatever reason, we simply don’t care about the world, science or politics. No, we’re content to distract ourselves with the latest celebrity gossip and fill our heads with useless sports trivia.
And as an editorialist for The Statesman, I find this disinterest especially frustrating. The torrent of angry e-mails I had expected (and at times hoped for) is nothing but a trickle. This isn’t about me or my column, though. It speaks to a larger issue: apathy, campuswide and countrywide. In our democratic and ever-increasingly globalized society, we have an obligation to be engaged with and informed about the world. Until Americans fulfill that obligation, though, I am relieved only half of us vote.