The politics of knowledge

I'm at home today watching my daughter and spent part of the morning listening to Diane Rehm's show on NPR, where she basically let caller after caller let their voice be heard on the current economic and political situation. To be honest, it was actually quite therapeutic to hear so many people be disgusted with the Congressional gridlock. There were people on both sides of the aisle who had quite a few fantastic things to say, including many of the right-wingers saying how nobody can be upset with the Tea Partiers who basically ran a platform, and stuck with it all the way through. I'll give them marks for at least taking a stand, I suppose.

Then there was the gentleman who called in and started making a sophomoric and long-winded case for supply-side economics. He went on a 5-minute tear about how the only way to boost the economy was to massively cut spending to corporations and the absurdly rich. There was a moment when he proudly proclaimed that you can look at "any graph" and it would show you that when taxes are cut, the GDP goes up. The reciprocal, he claimed, was also true. Diane cut him off and asked him where he was getting his information and all he could muster was to repeat the claim "any graph."

I want to make it very clear (if it isn't already) that I am not an economist and have no degree in economics, yet I feel fairly confident in saying that history has borne out that supply-side economic theory (i.e. tax cuts = higher GDP) just doesn't hold up. Yet, many lock-step right-wingers hold onto it because they believe that in abandoning it, they abandon something of the nostalgic ideology of their political party. This, despite the failure of supply-side economic theory being explicitly spelled out in Bruce Bartlett's 2007 book “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bruce Bartlett, in case you're wondering, was an architect of supply-side economics under Reagan. Here's a good article that sort of sums it up why he believes it has failed.

The heart of the matter, it seems to me, is that we are guided by a lot of mythology, and we really don't take the time to investigate these things and think for ourselves. (I think, for example, most evangelical Christians would be shocked to find out that the rapture was invented in the 19th century by a British guy named John Nelson Darby.)

In any case, we just take spoon-fed information from people we trust and start spewing it out with no critical filter. (Ironically, as an epistemologist, I would argue we kind of have to operate this way – knowledge is an economy which is also built on trust.) But that’s beside the point. It’s not a problem that people disagree. It is a problem that people make grand claims with absolutely nothing to back it up other than their emotional allegiance to a political ideology – be that on the right or left. At the very least, you should be able to articulate the criterion of falsifiability for any argument you are making (i.e. in a nutshell, you should be able to articulate what counter-evidence would cause you to change your position).

The reason we give every citizen the gift of a free, high-school education in this country is so that we can think for ourselves. (The discussion for how we increasingly don’t offer this to the poor and marginalized is for a later post). The fact that remains that we’ve kind of forgotten the point that education is something we must struggle after, not simply a certification. Instead, most of us are too busy watching American Idol, or Two and Half Men, or whatever other garbage we pay to be delivered to our living room in HD.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Hilter to warm the cockles of your heart:

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out” (“Main Kampf,” Vol 1, Chapter 6).