Post a Comment On: Vigilance

This blog started in 2004 as a kind of defense of our suburban county's decision to implement a sex-ed curriculum in the public schools that talked about contraception and sexual orientation. At that time, contraception was not really an issue, the Nutty Ones complained about the district's choice of a cucumber to serve as a phallic surrogate in the video but nobody even tried to make the point that there was any problem with preventing sperm cells from traveling towards an ovum. Now, can you believe these guys are complaining about birth control? Man, talk about going backwards!

But of course the really controversial part was where the school district intended to tell students that some people are gay or transgender. Way too much information for some people. They wanted to recall the whole school board over it. The bottom line was that the rebellion in our county was against education itself, against the propagation of knowledge to the community.

The Republican primaries have been the occasion for revelation of the party's core beliefs. And this week, one central message came out, perhaps more explicitly than some strategists would have liked, but if you want to win GOP voters you have to prove you are on target with the message. Speaking to a Tea Party group, Rick Santorum argued that President Obama's attempts to make higher education more available to Americans amounted to snobbery.

The Washington Post blog:
“Not all folks are gifted in the same way,” Santorum told a crowd of more than 1,000 activists at the Americans for Prosperity forum in Troy, Mich. “Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. Some people have incredible gifts and ... want to work out there making things. President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.”

As the crowd applauded, Santorum continued.

“There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them,” he said. “Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

Santorum graduated from Penn State with a B.A. in 1980, then earned an M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. In 1986, he earned a J.D. from Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law. Santorum: Obama is ‘a snob’ because he wants ‘everybody in America to go to college’
This is revealing on several levels. First, of course, the obvious, there is the sheer, bald hypocrisy of a person with a doctorate complaining about higher education being for snobs. We are no longer shocked by those kinds of contradictions, though, "pro-family" politicians who have been married a bunch of times and had a bunch of extramarital affairs, small-government politicians who want government to control who you can marry, hypocrisy is sort of the expected standard these days.

The real point has to do with education. Santorum can get applause by complaining that Obama is trying to indoctrinate people into the liberal lifestyle by sending them to college.

Our community's 2004 attack was a response to an attempt to implement a sex education curriculum that was scientifically and medically accurate. The RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com group that became Citizens for Responsible Whatever wanted to overthrow the county's school board when they voted to teach students that some people are gay, some are transgender.

There is no controversy about those facts. Everybody knows there are LGBT people in the world and in our community. The curriculum didn't propose an explanation for why people have different sexual orientations, it just said that there are families with two dads or two moms, and that some people fall in love with someone of their own sex.

There isn't really much to get upset about there. Sexual orientation isn't contagious, it isn't an ideology that you can choose to subscribe to, it is just how people are. But to say it out loud, to teach students that there are gay people, was too much for a certain group of fanatics in our county.

You can look at the history of the human race in terms of the evolution of knowledge. At first, there were preferred ways to chip flint to make arrowheads and knives, and the educated members of the tribe learned those techniques. Knowledge accumulated about the behaviors of animals, the hope-inspiring cycle of the seasons, the lay of the land, and over the millenia the state of human knowledge improved. Early man might not have distinguished crisply between reality and dreams, but over time, through testing hypotheses against outcomes, it was possible to derive something we call knowledge about reality and pass it on to the culture, so everyone could benefit.

But knowledge is fundamentally in competition with tradition. Learning, if it is worth anything, means changing the way you do things. New knowledge is added to existing knowledge, and so facts that are inconsistent with the traditional narrative are troublesome and easily rejected, or else the whole corpus needs to be thrown out. Learning is a challenge, information is uncertainty, knowledge is essentially revolutionary.

The core debate, in our county and elsewhere, is bigger than sexual orientation or marriage or morality, the controversy is about how a society should manage knowledge. One side says, the way we used to think about things was good enough, and the other side says, no, we need to rely on the actual facts as we know them now, whether they support or contradict our customs.

Santorum is making an us-versus-them argument on the basis of knowledge. "They" have knowledge and are snobs, "we" don't need no stinking knowledge, we're smart enough without it. We have seen politicians assert that they would shut down the Department of Education, but that is kind of distant and bureaucratic, it doesn't mean anything to most people, really. But to call a guy a snob because he wants to make it easier for people to go to college, now you're getting close to home, people can relate to that. For Santorum and his Tea Party audience, ignorance is a cherished quality to be maintained carefully.

I understand that there is comfort in tradition, there is pleasure in doing things that we learned from previous generations; I'm an old-fashioned guy in my private life, in many ways. But when we as a society are deciding how we will manage the environment, how the government will treat its citizens, when we are determining our stance in relation to other countries, I am in favor of using the best knowledge that is available to us.