When Partisanship Takes on Science on Global Warming: The Part before the Whole

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams concurred on the following preference—namely, a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent over the artificial sort of birth and wealth. Talent here is not merely skill, but also knowledge. Hence the two former U.S. presidents agreed that citizens ought to be given a broad basic education in free schools. The corollary is that as a citizenry lapses in virtue and knowledge, decadence will show up in public discourse and consequently public policy. If kept unchecked, the tendency is for the republic to fall.
Therefore, as governor of Virginia, Jefferson proposed a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge in 1779. His rationale was that because even “those entrusted with power” who seek to protect individual rights can become tyrants, popular education is necessary to render a republic secure. Jefferson’s hope was that by teaching “the people at large” examples of despots in history, the electorate would be more likely to recognize despots in their own time and throw the bastards out on their noses. As for those whom voters put in public offices, Jefferson believed that “laws will be wisely formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest.” Hence, “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights of their fellow citizens.” This is why, beginning at around 1900, law schools in the American states began to admit applicants to the undergraduate degree in law (LL.B. or J.D.) who had already earned an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts and sciences. It was not as though the undergraduate degree in law had been promoted to graduate status.
Having had largely self-governing, popularly-elected colonial legislatures for much of the seventeenth century, the nascent American republics would stand on the two pillars of virtue and talent (including knowledge) instilled in the self-governing peoples themselves as well as their elected and appointed public officials. It is said that the only constant is change, as in the extent to which an electorate is virtuous and generally knowledgeable, as well as in the related rise and fall of republics. One notable example is ancient Rome, which went from being a republic to a dictatorship under the purported exigencies of war. Lest the rise and fall of republics seems a bit too dramatic to be considered realistic, I offer the more modest thesis that a decline in virtue and knowledge among an electorate renders the public policy increasingly deficient in dealing with contemporary problems. The matter of climate change is a case in point.

According to a study at Yale in April 2013, Americans’ conviction that global warming was happening had dropped by seven percentage-points over the preceding six months to 63 percent. The unusually cold March—quite a reversal from the previous March—explains the drop, according to the poll’s authors. The cold may actually have resulted from a loosening in the artic jet-stream southward—like a rubber-band whose elasticity has been compromised—due to more open water in the arctic ocean and thus less temperature differential in the air. Even so, only 49% of Americans believed that human activities were contributing to global warming. In fact, only 42% of Americans believed at the time that most scientists had concluded that global warming is really happening. Thirty-three percent of Americans were convinced that “widespread disagreement” exists among scientists.
In actuality, a study showed of more than 4,000 articles touching on human-sourced climate change, 97% of the scientists having written the articles conclude that human-caused change was already happening. Less than 3% either rejected the notion or remained undecided. “There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” one of the study’s authors remarked. “It’s staggering given the evidence for consensus that less than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This is significant,” the author concludes, “because when people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they’re more likely to support policies that take action on it.” Going back to Jefferson and Adams, ignorance among the electorate in a republic can be sufficient to divert enough political will that legislation needed to fix a societal (or global) problem is sufficiently thwarted.
Perhaps some of the apparent ignorance on global warming in 2013 could actually have been partisan angst. If President Obama favored policies predicated on the assumption that human-sourced global warming was then already underway, just his support alone could have been enough for some Republicans to hold firm in their denial of even other-sourced global warming. In holding knowledge hostage to score cheap partisan points, citizens and their representatives do not demonstrate much respect for knowledge as well as virtue; the vice of partisanship subdues the good of the whole in preference for the good of a part.
If Jefferson and Adams were correct that a virtuous and knowledgeable citizenry is vital to the continuance of a republic, the extent of ignorance and partisan vice related to global warming in spite of the nearly unanimous scientific conclusion and the huge stakes involved may suggest that the American republics and the grand republic of the Union may be on borrowed time (and money). Moreover, that the ignorance and vice pertains to global warming enlarges the implications to include the continuance of the species. That is to say, a virtuous and educated species may be necessary for its very survival.

See this PSA on global warming: http://www.thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/global-warming-psa.html


Academic Sources:

Philip Costopoulos, “Jefferson, Adams, and the Natural Aristocracy,” First Things, May 1990.

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, “Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in April 2013,” Yale School of Forestry and Environomental Studies, 2013.

John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Mark Richardson, et al, “Quantifying the Consensus on Ahthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2013) (2), pp.

Press Source:

Tom Zeller, “Scientists Agree (Again): Climate Change Is Happening,” The Huffington Post, May 16, 2013.

Analysis of Inferences and Assumptions: A Homework Assignment for “We the People”

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both strongly believed that the continued viability of a republic depends on an educated and virtuous citizenry. Public education and even the practice of some of the professional schools (e.g., medicine and law) since at least the early twentieth century to require a degree in another school (e.g. Liberal Arts and Sciences) before being admitted to the undergraduate program (i.e., the M.D. and J.D. or LLB, respectively). This lateral move is unique to the U.S.; entering medical and law students in the E.U. need not already have a college degree. I submit that the Founding Fathers’ firm political belief in the importance of an educated electorate concerns the value of not only having a broad array of knowledge, but also reason being able to assess its own inferences, or assumptions; for inferences, or leaps of reason, go into political judgments. Ultimately, voters make judgements, whether concerning the worthiness of candidates on a ballot, their policies, or proposals on a referendum. To the extent that subjecting assumptions to the “stress test” of reasoning is not a salient part of secondary education, an electorate is likely to make sub-optimal judgements, resulting in suboptimal elected officials, public policies, and laws.

Government ultimately by “We the People” can be risky business, especially if any plank of a constitution can be changed by amendment. Were a super-majority of Americans intent on bringing back slavery, the constitutional-amendment process would enable the people through their elected representatives to repeal the 12^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages was repealed in 1933 after thirteen years. Clearly, the assumptions that had gone into the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment turned out to be faulty. Had the American electorate have subjected those assumptions to better critical-analysis  when that amendment was being debated in the first place, perhaps organized crime would not have prospered and grown as much as it did. My assumption here is in need of critical analysis, however, as I know very little about the history of Prohibition. Yet I just made the assumption nevertheless. I contend that such a making of assumptions—out of very, very imperfect information yet made nonetheless—is a huge problem that remains largely invisible in representative democracy as a form of government. My aim here is to improve it by making one of its fault-lines transparent, and thus potentially treatable.

Speaking recently with a construction worker—a man of about 30 years old—I was impressed with his knowledge of how to put windows on buildings. “If you use a finger to smooth out the caulking around a window, you are getting chemicals such as the oil on your finger on the caulk, and this could diminish the sealing ability.” I was stunned that something I would admittedly do without a thought would be in his eyes an elementary error. “Even some of the guys who do residential windows don’t know this,” he said. He worked on office buildings. He went on to complain that the company, with his union’s consent, takes as much out if his paycheck for health-insurance as from the paychecks of workers who have families insured. “It’s just me,” he lamented, “so I’m subsidizing my union brothers whose health insurance covers their wives and kids.” I agreed with him that the arrangement seemed unfair.

Then, unfortunately, he turned to politics. It was as though he was suddenly on drugs. “I’m for Hillary,” he asserted. “Bill Clinton was one of the best presidents, and if Hillary were president, the two of them would talk in bed about stuff. Bill would be president again. Hillary had influence when Bill was president.” I asked why Bill Clinton was such a good president, to which my interlocutor replied, “Unemployment was low, the economy was humming, and the [federal] government had a [budget] surplus.” Exhausted just from contemplating the guy’s leaps in reasoning alone, I did not comment.

I could have added that Bill Clinton had signed off on legislation repealing the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act forbidding commercial banks to do investment-bank work and vice versa. The risk taken on by many of the largest banks in the U.S. would play a significant role in freezing up of the commercial paper (i.e., overnight inter-bank lending) market in September 2008. Additionally, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, played a significant role in lobbying Congress to keep financial derivative securities, such as the bonds that are based on risky home-mortgages, unregulated. With Larry Summers, also in the Clinton Administration, and Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed, Rubin lobbied members of Congress to ignore the pleas of Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to give her agency oversight of the off-exchange markets for derivatives.[1] She resigned in 1999, just after Congress passed legislation prohibiting the CFTC from regulating derivatives.[2] As a result, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chair Ben Bernanke had no idea how many subprime-mortgage-based bonds existed when so many of them defaulted in 2008. In that financial crisis, the U.S. Government was flying purblind, as if the Titanic in the North Atlantic at night.

Viable assessments of Bill Clinton’s presidency would have to include the above, whereas the impact of his administration on unemployment and GNP-growth is more questionable. That the dot.com bubble collapsed in 2000 may suggest that any impact Clinton may have had on the U.S. economy was not necessarily good in the long-run. Even so, my interlocutor simply assumed that Bill Clinton was largely responsible for the economic boom.

Even to assume that Clinton should get the credit for the federal government’s budget surpluses ignores the vital role that the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, played. Furthermore, to the extent that a president does not have an appreciable impact on the U.S. economy as a whole, any surplus due to increased tax revenues from the economic boom could also not be credited to Bill Clinton. In fact, that he decided to spend half of the surpluses rather than use all of the extra money to reduce the government’s accumulated debt—perhaps under the assumption that the boom would continue for decades—can be said to be problematic, or at least short-sighted.

In terms of Bill and Hillary’s relationship, I must confess complete and utter ignorance. In the movie Dave, the fictional U.S. president and his wife hate each other and thus perpetuate the illusion that they are sleeping in the same bed. The assumption itself of any knowledge of the Clinton’s relationship, and more specifically even who would “be president” were Hillary elected in 2016, is a red flag. In other words, that the construction worker presumed so much on a matter so private, and so very distant, told me just how carried away people can get in making assumptions and yet be wholly unaware of how deeply problematic the sheer making of the assumptions is. In other words, I saw no evidence of an internal feed-back corrective in the man’s mind, such that he might beg off his declaratory asseverations. 

Moreover, I realized that his faulty chain of inferences would play a key role in the construction worker’s eventual vote for U.S. President in 2016. I contend that he is by no means alone. In fact, bad assumptions may play a very significant role the American—and indeed any—electorate’s votes.

Consider, for example, how many Americans have declared that Barak Obama is a Muslim. The very ideational act of presuming to know the faith of a person so distant is itself a red-flag. If the assumption played a role in how some of the electorate voted in 2008 and 2012, and if the assumption is wrong, then the phenomenon of unchecked assumptions really does play a significant role in how an electorate—the popular sovereign—does as the “We the People” of a representative democracy. In other words, popular sovereignty itself, to which governmental sovereignty (i.e., governments) is, theoretically at least, an agent, has a rather basic downside, or vulnerability.

If I am correct, then public education in any representative democracy should include assumptional analysis, wherein students are taught how to assess their assumptions and any “supporting” inferences. As a result, the future electors should be able to get a better grip on how far they go in making inferences based on no or scant information. I contend that representative democracy would be a much better form of government were the human, all too human, assumptional “brain sickness” made transparent and treated.

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[1] Peter S. Goodman, “The Reckoning: Taking a Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy,” The New York Times, October 9, 2008.

[2] Michael Hirsh, Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2010).

California’s Elongated Drought: Warming to a Changing Status-Quo

With the winter of 2014-2015 failing to deliver much of a snowpack to California, Californians entered a fourth year of drought. The measurement on March 3^rd of the snowpack was the water equivalent of five inches, or 19% of the average for that date.[1] The drought’s extension ran counter to the conventional wisdom that droughts last three years in California. Such “wisdom” is problematic not only for its specific content in this case, but also because of the underlying presumption of epistemological infallibility. Ok, I’ll unpack this bit of creative verbosity. Without being aware of it, we tend to assume that we can’t be wrong about things we have not studied. In fact, we even dismiss the knowledge of those who are learned in a given subject in favor of our own belief that we can’t be wrong about what we suppose we know. This tendency of the human brain gets our species in a lot of trouble, yet we as a species are nearly blind to underlying drought.

Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said at the time, “Last year people thought we were in a regular three-year drought cycle and it would rain next year.”[2] Even though people were aware of global warming, they presumed that what they thought they knew of the drought cycle was still applicable. Underlying this assumption is the more basic one that tomorrow will be like today and yesterday.

Problematically, the three-year drought-cycle presumption may have made California’s water-situation even worse. With the rain in December 2014, Californians generally may have taken longer showers and left their bathroom facets on while brushing their teeth under the mistaken assumption that drought must be ending. The following month was dry, so people watered normally dormant landscapes.

Even in trying to explain the elongated drought, people were getting it wrong in concluding that the cause was changing precipitation patterns. Global warming, evinced in California’s record average temperature in the winter of 2014-2014 of 45.6 degrees (F), is the actual cause. “The normal cyclical conditions in California are different now from what they used to be, and that’s not because the long-term annual precipitation changed,” Noah Diffenbaugh at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment explains. “What is really different is there has been a long-term warming in California . . . (a)nd we know from looking at the historical record that low precipitation years are much more likely to result in drought conditions if they occur with high temperatures.”[3]  Yet in spite of such evidence and that of the Earth’s atmosphere as warming above and beyond normal cycles, enough people cling to their antiquated knowledge as if they cannot be wrong that I suspect that a human tendency is involved.

“It’s a three year drought,” someone in Sacramento says. The sheer declarative tone has the ring of hubris because the person has not read anything on the drought. The assumption of knowing nonetheless is precisely where the problem lies, if I am correct in my theory here. The human mind may put too much stock in its own machinery and its output. Another Californian says in San Diego, “Southern California is suffering from a shift in the precipitation pattern.” Let’s say he has not read this; it is his conclusion, or one of his friends has told him. Even without reading anything on the science of climate change even in a newspaper like The New York Times, the San Diegan may dismiss Diffenbaugh’s statement out of hand. It is the sheer dismissiveness that strikes me as arrogant, even strange. The Californian may even say (as I have heard before), “I don’t need to read the science; I know it is in dispute.” Well, actually it is not, but such a person—such a mind—would not know it because it is closed off—a closed system—and yet it is utterly unaware of what it itself has done to itself. Like the light from the most distant star, the news of the deed has not reached the doer yet—the doer who presumes to know beyond what any actual learning can bestow legitimacy.

Abstractly, I hypothesize (i.e., propose) that the human brain contains a vulnerability in bringing to experience—structuring it rather than from it (i.e., a priori rather than a posteriori)—the presumption of knowing more than is actually known and furthermore not being capable of being wrong even about such “knowledge.” It is as if a person were to go to some neighboring houses and without entering any of them proceeding nonetheless to speak in a tone of definitiveness to the occupants about what they should clean up inside. The mere tone would ooze out arrogance and presumption, and yet the speaker could be oblivious to what he is projecting from his or her own mind onto experience and thus the world—structuring it as he perceives it.

Philosophers may recall Kant’s claim that the mind provides its own structure on space and time themselves—and not from experience. Such synthetic, a priori ideas as we bring to our perception of space and time are like the epistemological assumptions that we carry around with us all the time. In both cases, we have no clue that we are bringing these ideas to the dance because we have them constantly with us. Noticing them would be like fish noticing the water in which they spend their entire lives. That which is a constant for us can easily be invisible rather than transparent to us, and thus escape our notice. Yet as Kant points out, we can notice, through reasoning.

Probing a person on knowledge we know lies beyond his or her reach, we can see the problematic assumptions in the absurdity to which he or she will go to defend the purported knowledge. Like arrogance on stilts during an increasingly common flood from a storm surge in Miami, the presumption should be under water rather than held above as if it were Moses incarnate coming down the mountain with a new tablet. Unfortunately, the mind’s internal defense-mechanisms can block the reception of even such obvious feedback, so it is probably pretty rare for the mind to “see” the “water” in which it has always resided. If I am correct, the mind itself—hence not out of experience—structures knowledge in terms of presumptuousness. That is to say, the problematic assumptions are not in the knowledge; rather, they come from the human mind and are projected onto the purported knowledge such that learning or becoming informed are assumed to be optional rather than requisite. The mind itself presumes itself so entitled even though the assumption is untenable. The fallacious thinking should be under water (naturally oblivious to it) rather than looking down from stilts as if not only legitimate at water-level, but also an authority above.

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[1] Adam Nagourney, “Alarm Rises For a State Withered By Drought,” The New York Times, March 18, 2015.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

A Lawyer Comes Up Short on Obama on the U.S. Supreme Court

As president, Thomas Jefferson campaigned against the U.S. Supreme Court in the pivotal 1800 election after the court let the Alien and Sedition Acts stand. The law criminalized criticizing government officials of the U.S. Government. Lincoln announced during his 1860 campaign that he would not enforce the court’s Dred Scott decision upholding slavery in U.S. territories. In saying that invalidating the Affordable Healthcare Act would represent an unprecedented act of judicial activism, Obama was not going nearly that far. In other words, he was not saying he would ignore the decision. Nor did Obama announce anything like Roosevelt’s unsuccessful court-packing scheme.

Even so, a lawyer who teaches law at Samford University in Alabama opined, “It’s virtually unprecedented for a president to criticize the institutional powers of the Supreme Court. I don’t know of any other instance where a president has publically questioned the legitimacy of judicial review.”[1] Apparently the lawyer had not heard of Lincoln’s announcement or Roosevelt’s court-packing.

This example of commentary by the lawyer illustrates why law schools hiring lawyers to teach law classes is fundamentally different than hiring legal scholars to be law professors. A lawyer can become an expert on the technical nuances of a statute or judicial opinion, as well as how to argue such points in a court of law. This is not the same as having scholarly expertise on jurisprudence, which includes constitutional philosophy and history. The difference can be expressed as that which exists between examining individual trees and grasping the contours of the forest. Ironically, as a graduate student in law progresses in the LLM and JSD degrees, the seminars become more specific in coverage (the dissertation of the doctoral candidate in a JSD program being incredibly specific), the level of abstraction increases so a wider perspective is proffered though the narrowing disciplinary focus.

Were law school deans in the U.S. republics to hire scholars as professors rather than lawyers as instructors, the students would benefit immensely from the standpoint of learning the knowledge of law, rather than simply how to practice it.

1. Richard Wolf, “Other Presidents Took on High Court before Obama,” USA Today, April 6, 2012. 

Arrogance on Stilts during a Flood or an Educated American Electorate?

According to Newsweek, when the magazine asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test in early 2011, 29 percent "couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators."[1] The magazine's analysis treats all of the questions as equally important. However, I contend that the lack of knowledge on matters such as governmental checks and balances is more problematic than whether a citizen knows the name of his or her U.S. Senator. 

To take another pair, only 20 percent could name the U.S. President during World War I, while roughly the same percentage could name one of the enumerated powers of the federal government. The second lapse is more serious, for if the electorates do not know the constitutional limits placed on the power of the U.S. Government, the founders' assumption that elections would correct for any encroachment can no longer be relied on in the absense of other checks on the federal government. Given the continued growth in the power of the federal government relative to the state governments during the twentieth century, it could be that the voters are the last remaining wall in the way of complete political consolidation. However, if only one fifth of American citizens know what the federal constitution enumerates for the U.S. Government, how can a majority determine whether that government has overstepped its constitutional authority? Lest we leave this matter up to the U.S. Supreme Court, we might want to be reminded of the institutional/governmental conflict of interest in a branch of one of the governments in federalism contest being the umpire. Ordinarily, one could point to the constitutional amendment process superseding the high court's decisions, but this process involves representatives elected by the citizens, and most of us haven't bothered to study our own federal constitution.

As another example of some ignorance being more harmful than others, Newsweek reports that "(a) 2010 World Public Opinion survey found that Americans want to tackle deficits by cutting foreign aid from what they believe is the current level (27 percent of the budget) to a more prudent 13 percent. The real number is under 1 percent."[2] This ignorance could well mean the demise of the United States, for a $14 or $15 trillion debt held by the federal government alone (Illinois, California, Nevada and Florida having sizable sovereign debts of their own) may well be unsustainable. It is conceivable that American electorates will elect representatives who will placate them by cutting waste to "make a dent" in the deficit (which is the annual increase in the debt), as if that would deal with the problem. 

In general terms, the American founding fathers believed that for a republic to endure, its citizens must be virtuous and knowledgeable concerning the republic and the issues of the day. Public education was thus viewed as having a civic as well a vocational and academic function.  Hence, American college students typically get an undergraduate degree in the Liberal Arts or Sciences before moving laterally over to a law or medical school for its undergraduate (i.e., first) degree (i.e., the J.D. and M.D.).  The E.U.'s states do not require such a broad education at the college level, though their pre-college education is said to be more rigorous than in the American states.  In fact, even in making this comparison, even educated Americans suffer from ignorance, as we tend to mistake political categories, such as in likening the U.S. to one of the E.U.'s states rather than to the E.U.  Anyone want to guess how many American citizens know of the E.U. at all? I would put the figure at 5 percent, but this could be overly optimistic.  To see the category mistake in action among the "best and brightest" in this land of isolationism, consider the following argument presented in Newsweek.

"Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U.S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to 'share power with a lot of subnational governments,' notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker . . . In contrast, we’re saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). 'Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote,' says Michael Schudson . . . 'You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.'"[3] While at Yale, I took a seminar on the politics of American education in the political science department. I don't know if Hacker was on the faculty then, but his ignorance in comparing the U.S. and E.U. is startling. I suspect that he is simply stuck in an old paradigm traditionally used in trans-Atlantic comparitive politics. I contend that the E.U. is just as complex politically as are the U.S. For example, in terms of education alone, just as the American states must deal with local school boards, so too must the European states.  Furthermore, just as the American states must deal with federal regulation, so too must the European states. Indeed, the E.U.'s executive branch, the European Commission, has been actively involved in education policy in standardizing the various degrees offered by various state universities. While it is true that some of the E.U.'s states have regional governments that are also involved in education policy, whereas the American states only have counties and localities, the differential amount of complexity is not significant as compared with the basic union-state-locality structure that characterizes both the E.U. and U.S.  Newsweek reports that European citizens tend to do significantly better than Americans on citizen questions; the reason is not because the U.S. is somehow more complex.  Rather, I would point to the relatively lax schooling in the U.S. and the attitude of American parents (and students) toward academics, self-discipline and homework. Anti-intellectualism thrives amid such disvalues.

In the end, the American plight is one of values, and this transcends love of money and even knowledge. The ignorance reported by Newsweek is kein Zufall (no accident), and it will continue unless knowledge stands up not only to power and money, but also to conceit and the ignorance itself to break the cycle of "I can't be wrong."  Ignorance presuming itself as impossibly wrong!  This is the tragedy of the American dream--of modernity as having "made it."  Of course, we have no need of the classics; they have nothing to teach us!  We are the highpoint of human civilization, standing here among our sophisticated technology in the twenty-first century. We are like the Arian Christians who said more than a millennium ago that they could save themselves, as though they were gods on earth. Augustine sought to hammer humility into them by (overstating) the depravity of the fall in creation and mankind. The question for us is perhaps how a crack in arrogance can be found such that ignorance may finally be made uncomfortable in its own presence. Modernity is too comfortable with itself--too convenient wallowing in its own ignorance, which too many American citizens portray as knowledge. A bad smell!  Sadly, we have grown so accustomed to it that we can no longer smell it, so we presume it no longer exists. We presume.

1. Andrew Romano, "How Ignorant Are Americans?" Newsweek, March 3, 2011.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.