Noam Chomsky once advised that citizens of democracies take courses in intellectual self-defense. To this end, Professor of Education Fundamentals Normand Baillargeon has written the appropriately titled
A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense (Seven Stories Press, 2007), a compact and accessibly written guide to the detection and treatment of things sneaky and mendacious.
Drawing on works by critical thinking heavies like Chomsky, Carl Sagan, and James Randi, Baillargeon covers language and logic; statistics, probability, and data presentation (what he calls "citizen mathematics"); the scientific method; and media criticism (including an introduction to
Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model).
"(E)xercising intellectual self-defense is an act of citizenship," and each "advance of irrationalism, of stupidity, of propaganda and manipulation," can be "confronted by means of critical thinking and reflexive assessment," he writes.
There are those who disagree about the desirability of critical thinking, or perhaps the meaning of citizenship. Max Blumenthal reports in his
Republican Gomorrah (Nation Books, 2009) that the members of the Wasilla, Alaska Assembly of God, Sarah Palin's church, recognize "an explicitly anti-intellectual creation myth" that holds that "smart, educated people" and "the intellectuals" are literally the decedents of Satan.
Using Eric Fromm's
Escape From Freedom as a guide, Blumenthal examines the bent personalities in the Fundamentalist Christian movement that has taken control of the Republican Party, from RJ Rushdoony's vision of a Leviticus-governed American Christian Reconstruction through child-abuse enthusiast James Dobson's army of loyal radio listeners and "real American" Sarah Palin's sinking of John McCain's 2008 Presidential campaign.
Blumenthal describes an extreme religious movement characterized by a culture of personal crisis, sadomasochistic power structures, and self-reinforcing false-dichotomies (as among the closeted gay fundamentalists who, forced to find release in brief, unfulfilling and secret encounters, reinforce Fundamentalist myths about the inherent misery of homosexuality) with influence reaching deep into the
military and Federal government.
With "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression growing more calamitous by the day," he writes, these "entrepreneurs of personal crisis" are celebrating "ideal market conditions for their next great crusade."
The anti-intellectuals at Sarah Palin's church will be happy to know that their team appears to be winning the recruiting race against Baillargeon's reasoning citizens. "Nearly a third of the (US's) population is illiterate or barely literate," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedge's writes in his powerful
Empire of Illusion (Nation Books 2009), adding, "In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book."
Hedges, a seminary graduate and former New York
Times war correspondent possessing George Orwell's double-gift of "a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts," investigates pro-wrestling, pornography, insular academia, positive psychology, pseudo-politics and other popular escape routes from freedom.
America "has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate," he writes. "This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture."
And among the illiterates, those robbed of "the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth," he warns, "fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded."
Nick Holt's website is Grits and Roses.
