Read More Money Than Brains Online
Authors: Laura Penny
Free enterprise, in other words, has been an unmixed blessing only in America, and it is a minor blessing, compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought,
of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
11
The more-money-than-brains mindset confuses two things. It treats money as an end in itself and knowledge as a mere means to an end. When we treat money this way, we sanction the kind of excesses that crashed the stock markets and damaged the economy. We encourage students to mistake low cunning and greed for intellect and skill. When we treat knowledge as a mere means to an end, we create contraptions without regard for the consequences. A mob of yobs can burn your town down, but it takes brains – dangerous brains – to build technical triumphs such as nuclear bombs, electronic surveillance systems, derivatives, and the communications strategies that sell them to the public and the powers-that-be. When reason becomes instrumental, a tool, we also end up dismissing all kinds of knowledge that cannot be swiftly monetized for the benefit of the few.
Money is a means to various ends, a tool, and should be treated as such instead of serving as our ultimate good. Knowledge is a good, and when we give it the respect it deserves, it produces amazing things, including things with practical value. The market loves to hog the credit for inventions such as the computer, insisting that money did that, but this is just another way market fundamentalists advance
their monopoly on the real. Most new inventions are the fruit of protracted nerdiness, of intellectual curiosity, that the market then popularizes and profits from.
The money-minded are building a future that has no use for the past or the public sector, one that tells kids they are free to choose to be engineers or entrepreneurs, a world made of bridges, banks, and barbarians. Philosophy, theology, history, and the sciences have all tried to crown themselves the Queen of Knowledge, the discipline that comprehends and transcends all the others. But economics and its younger brother, the business school, insist that the market is the Boss of Knowledge. Their fiscal daemons decide which knowledge is important and which is merely imaginary.
This is hubris. For the ancient Greeks, hubris was overweening pride and insolence, an arrogance that led people to tempt fate or flout the law and destroy themselves in the process. Free marketeers who believe that they know how things really work, who insult and dismiss other ways of understanding the world, mistake their technical savvy for total mastery. Any student of history or the great books knows that this is a serious mistake, the kind of careless thinking that courts disaster.
The humanities discourage hubris and counsel humility. The humanities teach us that those new new things that our friends in the market and the media chase are not very new at all. Stockbrokers and free marketeers are just alchemists with shinier, more expensive tools, money magicians trying to find the stock market version of the Philosopher’s Stone that turns lead into gold.
The humanities are the best vaccine against intellectual infections such as hubris, dogmatism, and demagoguery. The humanities teach us to think in the long term, to consider the consequences of our actions instead of acting in the interest of expediency and convenience. The humanities teach us to be skeptical, to be critical and deliberative instead of reacting emotively, which leads us into frightened condemnation and frenzied cheerleading. Studying the humanities is a corrective insofar as it pulls us out of our presentism and forces us to confront something other than the narrow and the now.
The more-money-than-brains mindset tells us we should aspire to be useful. But who wants to be used? I’d rather be useless than used. Hardly any of the things that people use – their buildings and their bowls – survive the civilizations that create them. Our ancestors’ most enduring and valuable legacy lives in their books, their ideas, their art, their music. Stains on paper, puffs of sonorous air, and unruly brainchildren may not seem as real as your bank balance or the latest
GDP
figures, but they are.
When we claim that the humanities are insignificant, imaginary, or obsolete, the fiscal alchemists win. But their triumphs are short-lived. Wealth, like life, is brief. The liberal arts are long. A humanities education has incalculable value, because its worth is beyond calculation, not beneath it. The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.
CHAPTER ONE: DON’T NEED NO EDJUMACATION
1
. Carlin Romano, “Obama, Philosopher in Chief,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, June 16, 2009. Available online at
http://beta.chronicle.com/article/Obama-Philosopher-in-Chief/44524/
.
3
. Richard Hofstader,
Anti-intellectualism in American Life
(New York: Knopf, 1963).
4
.
Real Time with Bill Maher
,
HBO
, June 19, 2009.
5
. Perino made the admission on the
NPR
quiz show
Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me
on December 8, 2007.
7
. The op ed ran in the
New York Times
on September 24, 2008, p. A27. A longer version is available on her blog at
http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2008/09/how-positive-thinking-wrecked-the-economy.html
. An even longer version of this argument is available in her most recent book,
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
8
.
The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer
,
CNN
, September 17, 2008.
CHAPTER TWO: AT THE ARSE END OF THE LATE, GREAT ENLIGHTENMENT
1
. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in
Philosophical Writings
, ed. Ernst Behler (London: Continuum Press, 1993).
2
. Glenn Beck,
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out of Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine
(New York: Threshold Press, 2009).
3
. Debora Mackenzie, “End of the Enlightenment,”
New Scientist
, October 8, 2005, p. 39.
4
. George Monbiot, “The End of the Enlightenment,”
The Guardian
, December 18, 2001. Available on his blog at
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/12/18/the-end-of-the-enlightenment/
. Garry Wills, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,”
New York Times
, November 4, 2004, p. A25. Available online at
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DA173CF937A35752C1A9629C8B63
.
5
. Victor Davis Hanson, “Losing the Enlightenment,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 29, 2006. Available online at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009312
.
6
. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment
, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
7
. Thomas Paine,
The Age of Reason
, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 2004).
8
. Southern Baptist Convention, “Baptist Faith and Message,” adopted at the 2000 convention and available online at
http://www.sbc.net/BFM/bfm2000.asp
.
10
. “Alberta Passes Law Allowing Parents to Pull Students Out of Class,”
CBC
, June 2, 2009. Available online at
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/06/02/alberta-human-rights-school-gay-education-law.html
.
11
. Quoted by Associated Free Press reporting from Dover, Pennsylvania, March 27, 2005.
12
. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Civil Government,” in
The Portable Enlightenment Reader
, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995).
13
. Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” ibid.
14
. Voltaire, “On Commerce” (Letter Ten), in
Letters on England
, trans. Leonard Tancock
(
New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
15
. Voltaire,”On the Presbyterians” (Letter Six), ibid.
16
. David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in
Selected Writings
, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
17
. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: This may be true in theory but it does not apply in practice,” in
Political Writings
, ed. H. S. Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
18
. Jerry W. Knudson,
Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
19
. Denis Diderot,
The Encyclopedia: Selections
, ed. Stephen J. Gendizer (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
20
. Patton Oswalt,
Werewolves and Lollipops
(SubPop Records, 2007).
21
. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe, August 16, 1789, in
The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
22
. Bernard Weinraub, “Bush and Governors Set Education Goals,”
New York Times
, September 29, 1989, p. A10.
CHAPTER THREE: IS OUR SCHOOLS SUCKING?
1
. John Adams, “A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law,” in
The Portable John Adams
, ed. John Patrick Diggins (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
2
. Lowell M. Rose and Alec Gallup, “39th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Towards Public Schools
,”
in
Phi Delta Kappan
, September 2007, p. 33.
3
. Canadian Education Association,
Public Education in Canada: Facts, Trends and Attitudes 2007
. Available online at
www.cea-ace.ca
.
4
. The
CBC
survey results are available at
http://www.cbc.ca/news/passorfail/
.
5
. The Center for Educational Reform tracks charter school numbers at
http://www.edreform.com/Fast_Facts/K12_Facts/
.
6
. Results of Stanford’s study on charter schools are available online at
http://credo.stanford.edu/
.
7
. John Fitzgerald for Minnesota 2020, “Checking in on Charter Schools: An Examination of Charter School Finances.” Available online at
http://www.mn2020.org/index.asp
.
8
. Alvin P. Sanoff, “What Professors and Teachers Think: A Perception Gap over Students’ Preparation,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 10, 2006, p. B9.
10
. Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg, “The Administrative Costs of No Child Left Behind,” Heritage Foundation, April 7, 2007. Available online at
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed040907b.cfm
.
11
. Kevin Carey, “The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act,” Education Sector, November 13, 2007.
Available online at
http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=582446
.
12
. Claudia Wallis, “No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?”
Time
, June 8, 2008. Available online at
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812758,00.html
.
13
. “President Bush Discusses No Child Left Behind, Woodbridge Elementary and Middle School, Washington, D.C., October 5, 2006.” Transcript available online at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061005-6.html
.
14
. Will Woodward, “Teachers’ Union Threatens Boycott of
SATS
,”
The Guardian
, April 2, 2002. Available online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/apr/01/politics.schools
.