During the Battle of Jutland, Admiral Beatty of the Royal Navy, watched as, one after another, England’s newest and biggest battlecruisers, each hit by a single shell from the German fleet, disappeared with a flash and a roar, taking its entire crew to the bottom of the ocean. “Something is wrong with our bloody ships today,” he muttered.
In truth, there had been something wrong with his bloody ships the day they were built – there was an open elevator shaft from each gun turret leading directly down to the powder magazine, practically guaranteeing that a devastating explosion would destroy the ship if a single spark worked its way down the shaft – but it took a day of battle for the flaw to move from the theoretical to the obvious. For historians, it was just one more validation of General Ludendorff’s description of the British military as “lions led by donkeys.”
Today, our economic commodores watch as, one by one, their concepts blow up and drag down the economy down with them. Unfortunately, they lack the wit to reexamine their prejudices and their solution is to just double down on their flawed policies. We are in the midst of a serious battle for economic survival and no one in power has the wit to ask themselves “could I be wrong?” Instead, they just launch ponderous battleship sized “reforms” waiting for the first shell of reality to hit them.
Neither Keynesianism nor monetarism seems to provide the answers for correcting the current state of the economy. Rather than attempting to correct the flaws in their theories or even to provide plausible reasons why those theories have failed, academia chooses to disparage dissenters and speak of the rise in “structural unemployment,” as if unemployment were the fault of some sort of alien influence on the economy which everyone is helpless to confront, rather than the fault of policy.
There is an almost childlike expectation that jobs will magically appear if Congress passes legislation, a sort of Field of Dreams economy: “if you build it, they will come.” When they don’t come, it’s because the legislation wasn’t big enough.
The inability of Washington’s experts to “walk back” their assumptions to figure out what they’re doing wrong is an intellectual flaw, but it has nothing to do with the brain power of the President or his advisors and everything to do with educational system which failed to teach them how to think. Simply put, there is something wrong with our bloody intellectuals today and the flaws have been part of the system for so long that few people in academia have the skills to analyze them.
The record reveals a host of examples proving that our Best and Brightest are neither:
In the late 1990’s, a physicist named Sokol launched a hoax: using the jargon of modern literary theory such as deconstructionism, he submitted a paper to a leading cultural journal, Social Text, in which he asserted that the concept of gravity was merely a fictional construct of society and did not exist. The journal, oblivious to the scam, published the article. This created a few laughs, but it did nothing to alter the way academics taught their subjects. Social Text is still going strong today, published by Duke University.
In early 2009, a leak of thousands of emails written by the world’s leading global warming experts showed them to be conspiring to ruin the lives of scientists and shut down journals who dissented from their sloppy science. To call this McCarthyism is to insult Joe McCarthy, who, for all his flaws and inaccuracies, targeted Communists out to do harm to the Western world. By contrast, the global warming “scientists” sought to destroy better scientists than they were, people whose only flaw was a more honest sense of scientific inquiry. Of course, the only notice The New York Times gave this latter story was to complain about people who opened other people’s mail.
And that’s part of the problem: with the poodle press unwilling to challenge the conventional leftwing wisdom, there is no one able to speak truth to power. Rightwing critics are ignored, so “liberal principles” become an oxymoron and liberal politics become dominated by charlatans and profiteers. But the ideologically driven New York Times and Washington Post are only part of the problem.
As a nation, both left and right, we have put such an emphasis on schooling that we forget that schooling is only one form of acquiring intelligence, and a fairly limited one at that. To quote Mark Twain, “the problem with schooling is that it interferes with your education.” With rare exception, the route to success in a classroom setting is to develop the ability to parrot back to the professor whatever he or she wants to hear. If you do it well enough, you will have a stellar academic record. The problem is that the world requires many different forms of intelligence, not just a good memory.
There is an old redneck insult which shows more wisdom than most output from academia. If one does something really stupid, a redneck will say “you have to be five kinds of stupid to do that.” They, if not the eggheads of the world, know that there is a need for many different kinds of intelligence, including social intelligence, creative intelligence, practical intelligence (aka “common sense”) to name just a few. None of these other forms of intelligence are taught in academia, or even valued very much.
For example, the U.S. Air Force has a concept called Situational Awareness, which is the ability of a person to process different streams of information simultaneously. It is a significant achievement to stay on top of constant bombardments of data, some important, some not. Those pilots who have situational awareness are the ones who remain alive and successful. Those who don’t have it don’t live very long.
Situational awareness is crucial for a soldier in a battlefield, a teacher in a crowded classroom, a trader on a Wall Street trading floor, an entrepreneur running a small business and just about any kind of leader. All of these professions need the ability to observe or absorb new information coming from many different sources, gauge the importance of each item of information, weigh the probable accuracy of contradictory information, combine the information into the best course of action and act, all in the fastest time possible.
So, how does the educational system treat such promising leaders when they are students? Well, children with this sort of intelligence are understimulated in a classroom, so they jitterbug in school, are easily distracted, are often disruptive, so authorities diagnose attention deficit disorder, prescribe Ritalin and turn the leaders of tomorrow into zombies. All because one form of intelligence – in many situations a superior form of intelligence – is different than conventional intelligence.
If the best and the brightest really were the best and the brightest, this might make a sensible tradeoff, but they aren’t. Among their shortcomings are a lack of foresight, a short term focus on long term problems, an inability to “think outside the box” and a pretty poor record of thinking inside the box, too. More and more, America’s intellectual elite have come to resemble the ancien regime, about whom Talleyrand said “they forgot nothing and they learned nothing.”
After fifty years of letting the best and the brightest lead us into Vietnam, the dotcom crash, subprime mortgages and Obamacare, it is time that we scrapped this model of intellect and thought about constructing a less combustible alternative.
Maybe we can then be led by people with intellects at least as good as those of the average World War I general.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
