Kennedy spoke and wrote frequently -- and had done so long before he became president -- of the need for American society to abandon its parochial twentieth-century image of an inevitable division between thought and action and return to an eighteenth-century model in which learning and a philosophical bent were thought to enhance political leadership.
It remains to be seen, as the current presidential campaign unfolds, whether Americans are willing to consider what the flight from reason has cost us as a people and whether any candidate has the will or the courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue affecting everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace.
To cite just one example, Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as "controversial" rather than as settled mainstream science. The continuing strength of religious fundamentalism in America (again, unique in the developed world) is generally cited as the sole reason for the bizarre persistence of anti-evolutionism. But that simple answer does not address the larger question of why so many nonfundamentalist Americans are willing to dismiss scientiflc consensus. The real and more complex explanation may lie not in America's brand of faith but in the public's ignorance about science in general as well as evolution in particular. More than two thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation over the past two decades, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of ten Americans do not understand radiation and what it can do to the body. One in five adults is convinced that the sun revolves around the earth. Such responses point to a stunning failure of American public schooling at the elementary and secondary levels, and it is easy to understand why a public with such a shaky grasp of the most rudimentary scientific facts would be unable or unwilling to comprehend the theory of evolution.
One in five adults is convinced that the sun revolves around the earth. Good grief. There's an old saying, "some people's children." Look what we've done to our children.
The Age of American Unreason. Paperback coming in February.
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