The Desire to Instruct

I've been thinking lately about why people like Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh gravitate to blackboards and presentations and pontification.

One thing they share is a lack of any sort of rigorous education. It's as if, never having had the blessing or curse of a rigorous academic experience, they crave that mantle of authority more than those who have.  


They want to pull on the cap and gown, as if magically, they can acquire by the accourments, the authentic power of knowledge.


Of course, there is a big difference between being formally educated and being intelligent.


And you need only come to New Hampshire to meet a lot of people with no more than a high school education, who are highly intelligent, highly competent but not very educated in the sense of academic ladders.


Lincoln, of course, had little formal education, but he was one of the finest writers and thinkers of his time. And his time included Thoreau, Emmerson and so we're talking about a pretty fast track. But, somehow, he used what he learned more effectively than anyone else, even those who had been educated at Harvard.


He had the power to see through and past convention to truth. When he was upbraided for not being religious he replied, "I feel bad when I do wrong. I feel good when I do right. That is my religion." Considering that religion was the basis for most formal education in the 19th century, and the learned were schooled in the languages in which the Bible was written so they could read it in the original--Greek and Latin, that was a pretty big statement.


When asked if he thought God was on the side of the Union Army and the forces of Union, he replied, "I simply hope the Union Army is on God's side."


In a sense, I have the feeling had he been sent through Phillips Exeter Academy (where he sent his son) and Harvard, Lincoln would have been better educated, but less brilliant.


There is a story about Anthony Fauci, who is the chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the head of the federal government  task force on AIDS. Having finished his year as a Chief Resident in the Department of Medicine at Cornell University Medical Center, New York Hospital, he was ushered into the sumptuous office of the Chief of Medicine, where various luminaries of the hospital staff had gathered around some bottles of good congnac and, as was the tradition, the Chief of Medicine shook his hand and intoned that Dr. Fauci would receive his appointment to the staff of Medicine at the New York Hospital and an appointment to the faculty of medicine of the medical college. This was something akin to being given the keys to heaven. A Park Avenue practice, keys to the Doctor's Coat Room, the doctor's lounge, the good life.


Fauci refused the prize.


The news raced through the hospital. Every intern on every ward, every nurse, evry medical student, every "Made Man" on the medical staff was talking about it.


Finally, when one of his friends could contain his curiosity no longer, he asked Tony how he could turn down this glittering opportunity.


"I told them, " Fauci is reputed to have said, "Someday, I will be either very rich or very famous. If I stay here at Cornell, I will be neither."


Fauci has never publicly confirmed this story, but everyone loves it.


So, for those who came up through elite academic institutions, the glow of academic respectability may not be as bright as it is for the Glenn Becks, and Michele Bachmann's and Rush Limbaugh's, who can only dream of what that experience would have meant for them.


But one thing most people get out of such training is a strong sense of what rigor in thinking means. How do you prove something?  How do you ask questions? What else? What are the possible deficiencies of this argument? 


All of which makes me wonder why people want to believe what they believe.


One of my co workers told me, quite appalled, that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, that he refused to say the Pledge of Alliegance and he refused to wear an American flag lapel pin. 


She listened to Rush Limbaugh and learned Obama was trying to detroy America.


I asked her why she wanted to believe these things.

She replied she did not want to believe these things. They were simply true. She had to face the truth.

And how do you know they are true?


Because she had heard them on the radio.


And do you think everything you hear on the radio is true?


That stumped her.

When the report on the causes of the financial crisis came out, there were over 400 pages of data, interviews, pretty straightforward accounting and about 100 pages of analysis.

The committee of four Democrats and three Republicans agreed on the "facts" in the 400 pages but the 100 pages of analysis split them along party lines.


Basically, you could understand where the analysis differences came from: They came from dearly held prior beliefs. The Democrats believe business and the free market pursue only one thing, profit, and ignore every moral, social and patriotic imperative which may impede the maximizing of profit.  The Repulicans believe the source of most, if not all, civic evil is the over reaching arm of the government.


So the Republicans  said the crisis was caused by government--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which made responsible, professional bankers give mortgage loans to undeserving, untrustworthy, dead beat low lifes who were probably Democrats. That caused the housing markets to crash and that caused the meltdown.


The Democrats said the bankers, CEO's and Wall Street tycoons dreamed up the idea of packaging mortgage loans and once they saw they could make money by selling these packages, they didn't care what was in them and so they sold damaged goods, bundles of mortgages which were loans made to people no self respecting banker should ever have approved. The whole idea of due diligence went out the window when the vision of huge profits flitted in front of these money movers.


Pundits of all stripes jumped in immediately, not having done the tedious, difficult work of reading the 400 pages of data and declaimed for one side or the other, because they wanted to believe their own dearly held darlings, the beliefs they had espoused for years, were supported by what is in those 400 pages. But few or none of them actually want to do the heavy lifting of reading through it all. 


I sure have not read through it all.


Don't know I ever will. 


I'll just believe, for now, the fault lay with the rapacious money guys, the Goldman Sacks crowd, and the government may not have done much to catch them or to prevent them from raping the system, but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just whipping boys.


So I can understand why people cling to certain beliefs--mental laziness, fear of being shown to have been wrong in basic beliefs.


But why does that woman want to believe those things about Obama?


Why do people want to believe fluoridated water is a government plot?  Why do they want to believe the deficit is more important than spending money to create jobs and to improve infrastructure?  Why do they want to believe the new Healthcare law mandates death panels? Why do they want to believe Glenn Beck when he says the government is out to get your pancreas?


How does that work?


In What's the Matter With Kansas? The author spent hundreds of pages exploring the sources of resentment which caused people to believe crazy things which made them vote against their own economic self interest. 


There were class resentments, the resentment of the farmer whose son could not go to Harvard but that son could a rebuild a tractor engine and re wire a house, things few Harvard seniors could do--so why do the powers that be confer on the Harvard kid the respect and prizes and denigrate the farm kid from Kansas? 


There is the guy who never went to college, but worked at General Electric for thirty years as a welder, progressing up the ranks to the point he was doing the welds on airplane engines, which is so far beyond basic welding as to be the difference between shop class and astrophysics and ceramic chemistry, but when he came up for promotion to a managerial position, GE told him he didn't qualify because he didn't have a college degree.  And he said, "My brother went to college with a bunch of frat boys who were drunk in their fraternity for four years. Why are they more qualified than I am to manage the welding of airplane engines?"


So he wants to believe all regulations are ridiculous and the government makes regulations by the truckload.


But I still don't understand the woman who wants to beleve all those things about Obama.


Where does that come from?