Stupid people are easily swayed for money. Glorifying anti-intellectualism ensures that the masses who want entertainment will be kept so. It’s also the path of least resistance. It’s *hard* being smart. It takes a lot of work, not just work but self-motivation. You don’t get paid to be in school, you have to *pay* to be there. It’s an uphill struggle. Even I, smart as I consider myself to be, still struggle with things like trig [okay, I get the angle stuff, but tan(x-y) + tan(y-z) + tan(z-x) = tan(x-y)tan(y-z)tan(z-x) ? Adding a bunch of shit together really shouldn't equal multiplying that same shit together, but it does. Yeah yeah, periodicity and repeating etc. Just doesn't compute yet. If I ever tackle calculus, I'll probably understand why trig is useful.] and electron diffraction calculations. So not only do you have to cram an unbelievable amount of difficult to understand and sometimes seemingly nonsensical knowledge into your brain, you have to pay, or, more like, rack up heap big debt for it, which you then have to work double-hard to be able to both pay back that debt (student debt is the only unforgivable debt in our society. It will even fail you the Bar exam to be a lawyer in New York. I mean, WTF?).
There’s another problem, the parents. Somehow, despite being raised by folks with nothing higher than highschool education (and that being from the 1930s – mom wasn’t really around and dad, well, only met him four times so far in my life) I, at an early age, learned to teach myself stuff (autodidact), learned to enjoy reading. My mom did read to me at a young age, Garfield books, I think that’s some of the first stuff I learned to read, but I didn’t learn any reading or writing until halfway through kindergarten. I lived with my mom from age 0-4, and then was raised by my grandpa and great aunt until about age 12, when the overprotectiveness drove me back to live with my mom by choice. My grandpa didn’t have much book larnin, but he was clever, especially with mechanical systems. He probably deserves the most credit for teaching me how to figure things out on my own. My mom… had a troubled childhood and never really recovered from that trauma. She did intend well, and made stabs at bettering herself, only to be fucked over by bad decisions during her raucous teenage years.
So the upshot is I have a weird educational capital in my family. Not everyone is so lucky. If my mom hadn’t been my grandpa’s daughter, had instead been her mother’s daughter (loooong story as every-fucking-thing to do with my immediate but tiny family), assuming I was still born with the same genetics, I would be on Jerry Springer or Cops. And not the good kind of on Jerry Springer, the “I’m Jerry Springer” kinda on Jerry Springer, the toothless and getting more knocked-out kinda on Jerry Springer. Why? Because that’s what I would have been taught as a child. Yes, some children go through that and still manage to pull it together and get with it. If they’re lucky enough to have a stable adult somewhere around to help them, be it at school, a neighbor, whatever. Maybe they’re at the unusual end of the bell curve for willpower and intelligence and just pull themselves out by their bootstraps – but that’s the unusual end.
For the average Jane, sometimes even having well-educated parents doesn’t get you off to the best start. My fiancée’s father is a doctor, wicked smart – but because he’s a doctor, and has to work hospital doctor hours, he has odd home times, and when he was younger had even worse hours. A lot of kids and a little time and a mentally absent mother = bad combination. All you want is your parents attention, but you get shoved onto tutors and nannies instead. You don’t understand why, you just understand you’ve been shoved aside. A powerful demotivator. You set yourself back, but you can’t know that until a lifetime later.
And, of course, we have the ever so omnipresent sapper of wills, the tele-vision. Where your brain is less active than when you’re sleeping, lulled into a semi-comatose state by the whispering of your stories, implanted with suggestion by the blaring of the advertisements. To reach the widest audience possible, the stories are constructed so the least among us can grasp them and participate. The same people, incidentally, that spend the highest percentage of their incomes. Since everything is geared towards the lowest common denominator, everyone spends … what, is it 30 hours a week now, average? … endlessly looping the lowest common denominator through their brains lulled into that highly suggestive state. The more you repeat it, the more you will become it. You are what you think.
There isn’t enough humor and drama and sex in science and intellectualism. It’s cold and logical. It has to be, otherwise it doesn’t work. There are no bridges, only leaps. No bread, no circuses, just baking and putting up the 3-ring tent. We need science-artists, science-fictions, science-musicians, science-poets, yes, even science-philosophers. Science-moms, science-dads.
How are we going to get this? We are going to get this either when money decides we should, or when enough of the people decide we should. You can always make more money when you deal with ignorant people (knowledge is power, lack of knowledge is lack of power), and science ain’t easy.
We should probably start with children’s books though. “Jack and Jill Electron went up the hill, excited into a higher energy state. Jack fell down and emitted a photon, and Jill quantized after.” (Yes it’s terrible, that’s why I’m studying electron microscopy, not children’s book writing – but there have to be capable scientist-parents out there that could write such things.
Inspired by a post at RealClimate.org
Tags: bitching, personal, sad, trouble in paradise, we're fucked, wild speculation