Alan: To get a quick handle on the wreckage of America's educational system and the obstacles that must be cleared to right what's wrong, Howard Zinn's "A People's History Of The United States" should be an integral part of the American History curriculum at every American high school.
In recent decades -- at least since Ronald Reagan's "Me Generation" -- "American citizens" have morphed into "Consumer Units" whose overarching guidance is the dictum: "S/he who dies with the most toys wins."
Psycho-spiritually, this transformation has been as drastic as what "the pods" achieved in "The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers."
Consequent besottedness - a sure sign of America's abject surrender to materialism - is most common among conservatives.
On the other side of the aisle, a large (and growing) number of "liberals" and "progressives" prefer life-enhancing experiences -- service, travel, and immersion in "the natural world" -- to the "things" that America's "Merchants Of Materialism" pander to "consumer units" in grotesque mimicry of prostitutes selling their simulacrum of "love" to people who never learned the difference between pleasure and joy.
In recent decades -- at least since Ronald Reagan's "Me Generation" -- "American citizens" have morphed into "Consumer Units" whose overarching guidance is the dictum: "S/he who dies with the most toys wins."
Psycho-spiritually, this transformation has been as drastic as what "the pods" achieved in "The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers."
Consequent besottedness - a sure sign of America's abject surrender to materialism - is most common among conservatives.
On the other side of the aisle, a large (and growing) number of "liberals" and "progressives" prefer life-enhancing experiences -- service, travel, and immersion in "the natural world" -- to the "things" that America's "Merchants Of Materialism" pander to "consumer units" in grotesque mimicry of prostitutes selling their simulacrum of "love" to people who never learned the difference between pleasure and joy.
Although traditional American History textbooks should remain part of high school curricula, Zinn's book - which, like any book, is imperfect - should stand alongside them to provide dialectical counterpoint.
Imagine if American History curricula (preferably in an obligatory two-year high school sequence rather than a perfunctory single semester course) were designed so that students could "pass" only if they learned "how to think" - a significant demonstration of which would be a 20 page essay comparing and contrasting Zinn's "A People's History" with a mainstream text such as James A. Henretta's "America's History." (If American History were taught as a two year sequence, the first year could be based on a mainstream textbook; year 2 on Zinn's "A People's History" (which, by the way, is also available in an edition designed for young people).
Much of our cultural upheaval and social degradation is due to the fact that "deplorables" cannot fathom what "thinking" (and its educational run-up) entail.
At the same time, "the dimwitted" are imbued with an intuitive sense that "thinking" threatens to upend their simplistic "sound bite" worldview and so they belittle thinking (and its cultural/political implications) as "elitism" when, in fact, richly-contextualized thinking is the very activity that makes "homo sapiens"... well ... sapiens.)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect:
Stupid People Don't Know They're Stupid
Currently, my 18 year old son, Danny, is walking The Appalachian Trail from north to south. At the moment -- while crossing Vermont -- the only book in his pack is "A People's History Of The United States."
Here is an online copy of Zinn's landmark volume: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html
"A Republican Lawmaker Is Trying To Ban All Books By Howard Zinn From Arkansan Schools"
Rick Santorum's Vilification Of "A People's History Of The United States"
Fact-Checked By Pulitzer Prize-Winning PolitiFact
16. A People's War?
19. Surprises
Finally, I must mention a singularly important book by 20th century Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset.
"Frog Hospital" And "Pax" Discuss Rednecks, Ignorance And Conservative Christianity
("The Revolt Of The Masses" is discussed following the first Trump meme)
With striking accuracy and prophetic insight, "The Revolt of The Masses" details how the economic empowerment of "the masses," (absent any engaged understanding of economics, politics and social dynamics), would lead, inevitably, to uneducated people's contempt for the cultural subtleties-and-interactivities that birth, nourish and sustain civilization.
Instead, the under-educated masses view the world with tunnel-vision intensity, blindly clamoring for more "purchasing power" to acquire "things" that satisfy their visceral drives for food, sex and comfort, with negligible understanding of the sprawling socio-political-economic-and-cultural matrix that makes civilization possible.
Instruction And Education Aim At Antipodes
http://paxonbothhouses.
Ortega y Gasset argued that the growing political and economic power of the aggressively ignorant would make them increasingly contemptuous of the "elitist" rubrics-and-restraints that comprise the foundation of civilization.
In Ortega y Gasset's view, the masses -- drunk on purchasing power and the presumptuous (often quasi-solipsistic) individualism it breeds -- would become contemptuous of any guidance, statement, suggestion or obligation set forth by educated people whose breadth-and-depth learning, coupled with their commitment to The Common Good and General Welfare, enable them to perceive the indispensable rubrics of social and political cohesion, not to mention the linchpin communitarian goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" - and not "just me and my almighty, fact-free opinion."
That why lies destruction.
I will contrive a single-sentence to epitomize "The Revolting Masses."
Increasingly confined to dug-in "ideological silos," "the uneducated masses" -- motivated first-and-foremost by their wallets, their loins and the acquisition of pleasurable "stuff" -- cleave to social, economic and political postulates that prioritize their own opinions and beliefs over knowledge and facts.
However, successful operation of any modern democracy obliges society to rely on scientific knowledge which, unlike opinion, can be corroborated by The Scientific Method.
For those who would minimize the importance of The Scientific Method -- perhaps arguing, as St. Paul did, that "the wisdom of the world is folly before God" -- let's be clear: Every electronic device, every motorized vehicle, and every surgical procedure owes its existence to The Scientific Method.
And no one's God will save humankind from self-destruction if The Scientific Method is not held in the same sacred esteem as any religious postulate.
However, when religiously-predicated personal views seek to impose themselves on The Body Politic, they "universalize" theocratic/autocratic impulses that are intrinsically inimical to democratic governance.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
If people who seek to impose their non-factual (or, increasingly, fake-"factual" and even anti-factual) opinions-and-beliefs on The Body Politic were to admit their core hostility to scientifically-informed Democracy, we would at least have an honest debate.
As it is, most American Christians are not interested in honesty-and-truth, at least not when these qualities contradict their religious and ideological passions.
Insofar as conservative Christians are responsible for spearheading the recent right-wing assault on knowledge and factuality (mostly to protect their "literal" understanding of The Bible or to validate their diehard passion for "salvation assurance") it has become crucial that a "critical mass" of Christians subscribe to a new kind of "Christian Science" in which scientifically-demonstrated "findings" will be considered central to humankind's understanding of the world, and, correlatively, beliefs-and-personal-opinions will be held in such a way that the verb "believe" is central. Belief will no longer masquerade as certain knowledge and believers will no longer publically deny scientifically demonstrated data, facts and information.
In our commonly-apprehended world of sensory experience, scientific evidence is primary.
Similarly, for this new generation of "Christian scientists" scientific evidence will be considered a necessary prelude to the formation of an individual's political, economic and social views.
Obama’s 2006 Speech on Faith and Politics: Abraham Prepares To Kill And Immolate His Son
It is also true that every citizen is free to use The Scientific Method to try to overturn scientific findings currently considered true by scientific consensus. (Notably, The Scientific Method is the only epistemological technique so far devised by humankind which actively tries to prove that its findings are wrong. Religionists are wisely advised to pay close attention to this "miraculous" fact.)
Thomas Aquinas, widely revered as Catholicism's guiding theological light, summarized the interaction between science and faith. Arguing against those who said that natural philosophy was contrary to the Christian faith, (Aquinas) writes in his treatise "Faith, Reason and Theology" that "even though the natural light of the human mind is inadequate to make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with by nature. One or the other would have to be false, and since we have both of them from God, he would be the cause of our error, which is impossible." "Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through The Islamic World," by John Freely
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Jul 4, 2015 - One or the other would have to be false, and since we have both of ... dictum in his text "Tantum Ergo" which I'm sure you sang thousands of ...
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