America is really screwed at the moment, staring down the barrel of a gun it pointed at its own head. The problem isn’t merely the racists, the science deniers, the Religious Right, or the modern “libertarians.” The problem isn’t merely the Sean Hannity’s, the Mitch McConnell’s, the Breitbart.com’s, or the Koch’s. The problem isn’t merely radical partisan divides, social media memes, or our collective failure to communicate.
One of the largest, and most prominent, problems really dogging America right now is the embrace of anti-intellectualism and the social opposition to logic and reason.
This problem will destroy us all if we allow it to continue much longer.
CNN recently published a poll?that showed American attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag haven’t really changed much in the last 15 years and that opinions of the Confederate battle flag are divided by race. Further, among whites, views are divided by education level.
Why is this significant?
The Confederate battle flag exists because of racist and white nationalist attitudes that really amounted to treason. If the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of “Southern heritage,” then Southern heritage is itself treasonous. Further, the Confederate battle flag was resurrected in opposition to integration and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Unfortunately, it’s that simple — the Confederate battle flag exists because of treason and has been used as a racially combative symbol as recently as 50 to 60 years ago. Yet, staggering portions of the American population in the South are either malignantly ignorant of that or refuse to acknowledge it. Or they know exactly what it stands for and are perfectly fine with it.
It is important to state that even intelligent people can hold certain prejudices. Intelligence and prejudice are not mutually exclusive. Someone cannot be a politician, for example, without having at least some level of intelligence. It further doesn’t mean that they won’t do some really stupid things to make a really stupid point.
Consider that a sitting Congressman once said that human evolution and the Big Bang were “lies straight from the pit of hell.” the chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works comittee used a February snowball to prove climate change is a hoax, and a former House Representative stated that victims of “legitimate rape“ rarely get pregnant as a result because female bodies have “ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”
These aforementioned men, along with hordes of other Americans, exist in a vacuum dictated by raw emotion and crippling fear, devoid of critical thinking and rationalism. This vacuum is a paradise, where answers to really staggering problems are simple and don’t require much thought — blame the liberals,?the brown people, and the atheists, read Ayn Rand, worship Reagan and Jesus, assemble an arsenal of firearms, and become apathetic toward everyone except your family and friends.
These solutions amount to tribalism. Your tribe is important and every other tribe can go sit on a really big stick.
But why is tribalism an issue? Well, we don’t exist in a world where tribal attitudes are beneficial to the betterment of human society. Since we live in a world where societies thrive or collapse in full, our tribal identities are counterproductive to the means by which human society functions. No one man or one group is of more importance to the functioning of society than any other. The squeaky wheels on the bus can bring the whole thing to a dead stop.
We exist in a society where large portions of the population object to the legitimacy of a scientific finding with 97 percent?consensus and where subdued ailments that killed tens of millions are coming back because of unfounded fears regarding mercury usage and autism. We exist in a society where every conflict is a battle between “good and evil” and where the only way to stop a “bad guy” with a gun is a “good guy” with a gun. Possessions and money mean more to social welfare than relationships, incarceration trumps rehabilitation because of profit-margins, and a significant portion of children are educated using materials compiled by a group of people who think Moses is a “founding father.”
We exist in the middle of a civil war fought on mental battlefields. We’re not smart, but we need to be. We’re not rational, but we need to be. Our social embrace of anti-intellectualism and our aversion to logic and reason will really be what destroys us. Not ISIS. Not the economy. Not government overreach.
We are on track to commit mental seppuku, all because we are more concerned with ourselves and with easy solutions than actually using our highly advanced brains to come up with overarching, rational solutions.
