“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
H.G. Wells
If the preservation of a democracy and scientific progress rely on a knowledgeable and well educated populace, then America may be teetering toward an uncertain future.
The first warning came with the publication of, “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Since then, dozens of international exams covering a wide spectrum of academic disciplines have demonstrated consistent results; American students score well below their contemporaries from other industrialized countries. Concurrently, the results of a series of national literacy tests have illustrated many adults lack even a fundamental knowledge of the humanities, geography, history, math, science and even writing skills.
However, while the extent of what many Americans don’t know may be disconcerting … what many of them do accept as fact can be down right alarming.
During the past thirty years, a pseudo-intellectual subculture has emerged on the American landscape. This movement has found fertile ground in our society where schools have become social service agencies at the expense of educational excellence, passive entertainment has replaced reading and other pastimes requiring active involvement, tabloid journalism has become a substitute for hard news, instant gratification is increasingly perceived as an inalienable right and astrologers outnumber astronomers 10:1.
The pursuit of cognitive truths and intellectual integrity have fallen victim to political correctness movements, unsupported scientific allegations and the promotion of the narrow interests of social, religious and other pressure groups.
Some adherents to this phenomenon have adopted the new canons of revisionist history. Theirs is a reality in which such dubious disciplines as Afrocentrism, woman’s studies, analysis of daytime soap operas and native American anthropology hold the truths to our political and social progress.
Their brave new world would be centered around fads of political correctness and enforced by intrusive squads of thought police. The constitutional freedoms which today protect their rights to publicly air their offbeat ideas would become marginalized and eventually nonexistent for their critics.
More sinister are extremists motivated by radical political agendas. Their numbers include both those who would disavow the historical record of the Holocaust as well as advocates of racial or ethnic purity.
Their morally bankrupt rewrite of history is aimed at promoting their antisocial ends and justifying their often violent means.
Then, there are the new-age cynics who willingly embracing every crackpot theory they stumble across. They are particularly obsessed with ideas which overtly challenge governmental pronouncements or authority.
Only a week ago, a Washington Post poll revealed nearly two of every ten Americans don’t believe or seriously doubt Armstrong, Aldrin or any other earthlings have ever walked on the moon. Many in this dissenting minority are convinced the “one small step for man …” we witnessed twenty-five years ago was cooked up on, and broadcast from, a NASA sound stage in the Arizona desert … a scenario closely paralleling a 1970s movie, “Capricorn One”, co-staring (would you believe) O.J. Simpson.
Another group has been galvanized by unwavering and literal acceptance of Biblical and other fundamentalist religious teachings. High on their list of goals is the replacement of the various scientific theories of evolution with their alternative of creation science.
Without questioning the faith of their disciples, their agenda calls for the institutionalizing their views of divine revelation at the expense of any social systems or scientific facts which challenge their gospel.
Finally, there are legions of UFO and paranormal partisans as well as the legions of seers whose predictions are sought by millions, including a former First Lady, who order their lives around such daily doses of destiny.
The former tend to play fast and loose with scientific facts .. while the latter include an array of self-proclaimed prophets running the spectrum from astrologers to those regularly forecasting biblical rapture to prognosticators who concoct tangled webs of societal predictions from such natural phenomenon as the 1982 straight line planetary alignment or this month’s collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter.
These attitudes represent but a small sample of a frontal assault now underway against knowledge, facts and our collective cultural memory. Their proponents would have us believe neither history nor the natural laws governing scientific phenomena have more than a passing relevance.
Such intellectual rubbish must be rejected. Individuals and organizations espousing revisions of history or discrediting of scientific facts must be held accountable for proving their allegations.
To demand any less will guaranty reasoned discussion and debate on important political, economic or scientific issues will degenerate into a low-fact or fact-fee opinion poll among the uninformed. Democratic institutions may then fail and scientific exploration will enter a new dark age.
