Science & Government Funding
An excerpt from AmericanThinker:
How did we get into such a sociopolitical morass? The signs of a culture in precipitous and perhaps terminal disarray proliferate everywhere, in the corrupt and partisan media, in an entertainment industry that has devoted itself to the production of unadulterated trash, and in an academy that has sold its soul to mere credentialing, politically correct indoctrination and totalitarian impulses, operating, in the words of Daren Jonescu, as “re-education camps” in the interests of “an artificially restrictive and pre-packaged pseudo-world.” These forces swoop darkly over the political landscape like Ringwraiths, further devitalizing a debilitated population. The result is what political scientist Samuel Popkin in The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns called “low information signalling,” a term picked up by comedian manqué Bill Maher as “low information voters” and applied to dunning effect by Jonah Goldberg in The Tyranny of Clichés.
Low information voters, however, are far preferable to the class of citizens — like the young lady whom my acquaintance queried — arising among us who may be designated as no information voters, driven by hidebound ideology and complacent ignorance of almost limbic proportions. Crucial decisions are taken by those who are either uneducated, having given themselves over to what Victor Davis Hanson calls a crash and burn culture, or miseducated, having been lobotomized by a heavily politicized pedagogic curriculum controlled by the Left. And that, I suggest, is the root of our dilemma.
We live in a society that has lost both its moral compass and its intellectual focus. Any serious psephological study would have to conclude that the voting public is too incompetent to exercise the franchise. As Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Today, I’m afraid, a half-minute would suffice. Nevertheless, it is best to remember that no political system is perfect and many are patently reprehensible. The authority of Aristotle should be consulted here. In Book 4 of the Politics, the philosopher lays it down that of “the diverging systems of government” (parekbasis), tyranny is the worst, oligarchy is somewhat better, and democracy is the most moderate or least worst. Regrettably, as our low-and-no information voters, subject to the extremophiles who dominate the culture, make alarmingly clear, democracy is no panacea. As James Lewis wryly puts it apropos the Progressivist power complex and its deluded victims, “Great power goes together with great stupidity.” Later historians, if there are any, will probably describe the years we are living through now as the Age of the Dummy — indeed, an age that has spawned those aptly named books “for Dummies,” an era facile, ludicrous, puerile and moronic.
I confess that I don’t see how our current dilemma can be resolved without a sea change in the gradients and vectors of the culture at large or, as I greatly fear, a high-magnitude catastrophe that may possibly educate us with respect to our self-betrayal and compel us to rebuild. Barring the miracle of an epistemological recovery across the culture, which seems unlikely, we may have to depend on the most infallible of preceptors, historical agency, that from time to time may bring what the Romans called a felix culpa, variously translated as a “happy fault” or “fortunate fall.” Even this is moot, for a fortunate fall is no guarantee of social revival and cultural reintegration. The consequence of collective stupidity that causes political, social and economic collapse may be not reconstruction but archeology.