The preacher stopped at least, and there arose out the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quickly we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true, then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then reading it would imperil the soul.

–H.L. Mencken, The Hills of Zion

Some days I marvel at how lucky I was, to enter grade school when I did, just when the Soviet Union was scaring the hell out of the United States.   Looking back, it’s astonishing to me now, how utterly taken for granted it was, that all American kids needed, and by god were going to get if the feds had anything to do with it, a good education in the sciences.   The Soviets had launched Sputnik, which meant their missiles could hit any city in the U.S.   They were going to own a good chunk of planet Earth and outer space too if we didn’t get up to speed.   Suddenly having science in the classroom Mattered.     Things are a tad different now.

As soon as I saw it in my morning Google news page, I knew it would be spreading through the kook pews like wildfire by days end…

The Roots of White Anxiety

In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.

A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.

To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right…

That the Nazis couldn’t have killed all those Jews?   That if Britain had not waged war on Germany there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust? Oh…wait…

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

[Emphasis mine…]   Never mind that we’re actually not talking about White Anxiety here but Rural White Anxiety.   Never mind that not all American Christians are white, let alone rural.   Never mind that this…analysis…comes from Minding the Campus, which is a Manhattan Institute front group (Especially never mind that one of their published authors is Bell Curve author Charles Murray, who explains that black people have lower IQs not because poverty and racism limit their educational opportunities, but because they’re just…well…genetically inferior.   Please do never mind that!)

Here’s the problem:

…and this…

And this…

And…this…

…and…this…

And.   This.

If all you’re seeing there is a religious verses science struggle you are missing it.   This isn’t about religion verses science, this is about two utterly different and incomparable views of what constitutes knowledge.   In the Christianist, fundamentalist view, knowledge is something that is received.   In science, knowledge is something that is discovered.

The difference is profound.   One group of kids gets taught how to think, how to ask questions, how to evaluate, how to make independent judgments…and the other gets taught to be afraid of questioning authority and to always defend the tribe against outsiders.   And the worst kind of outsider is the one who stops blindly accepting everything they’ve been told by their tribe.   Edjucatin’ will do that to a kid.   What you aren’t getting, is the entire grade school life of rural white kids these days is now being carefully, meticulously geared toward preventing a higher education from ever taking root.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

It is not the “gatekeepers of elite education” keeping rural white kids from getting into their schools Douthat you drooling moron, it’s their fear and loathing of anything that doesn’t righteously affirm their fundamentalist, tribal culture.   It’s the knee jerk reflexive hostility to that very education that their world view is drilling, drilling, drilling into them, that’s keeping them out of America’s big universities.

And it’s nothing new.   It has been going on, and getting worse and worse, since Scopes.   I was lucky…so incredibly lucky…that I entered grade school for one brief shining moment when nobody was paying any attention to the howls from the kook pews.   (Thank you Khrushchev!)   A kid today from the rural bible belt part of America who wants, really wants, that higher education has had the cards stacked against them by their grade school experience.   They haven’t been taught how to think critically, because that might lead them to question the story of Noah’s Ark.   They haven’t been taught how to sift through a set of facts to find an answer, because the culture they grow up in not only instills in them a knee jerk hostility to any fact that contradicts eternal tribal truths, it also teaches them to hold onto ideas that are palpably, laughingly false against even the most staringly obvious facts, in defense of those truths.

And it’s getting worse.   Now their schools are on a roll to dumb down their curriculums even more.

Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

Tell me how a university is supposed to try and teach those kids…anything.   Those school boards are grimly determined to keep their kids from crossing over to the other side in the culture war…the side where the pursuit of knowledge isn’t just a good thing, but a great adventure…and in the process they’re locking them behind their own down home version of the iron curtain.   A university admissions officer is going to look at their school system and know right away that kid will never make it past their first year, possibly not even their first semester, and they simply won’t bother with them.   That’s not the university’s fault.   It’s one thing to make room for an urban minority kid whose disadvantage is money, and another to give that seat to a rural kid whose disadvantage is money and Intelligent Design.

And yes, it is very, very bad for this country to have it divided into well educated urban citizens verses people who have had any genuine desire to Learn pummeled out of them by a culture scared to death of anything resembling independence of thought.   I would argue that the “gatekeepers of elite education” really do need to do some serious educational outreach to the white rural population.   But do you understand the explosion of bitter hate and resentment that reaching out to those communities, trying, really trying hard, and with energy, to bring them science, world literature, logic and semantics, and all the humanities that they’ve been mocking for generations as “effete”…do you understand the nuclear explosion that would follow?   The howls of “elitist cultural aggression” would be defining.   And their republican enablers would take to the talk radio airwaves and cable TV junkyards with proof…proof mind you, that the elites were trying to brain wash their children…possibly to make them gay…ban the bible, impose a socialist new world order and sell their white women to the negros as reparations.

Try…just try…to bring the rural white population into higher education in greater numbers and they’ll just dig themselves even deeper, deeper into the gutter, to prevent their children from ever learning anything that might make them question that bedrock of bigotry, paranoia and resentment their culture sits and sulks on.   I can appreciate that urban minorities have their own host of problems preventing them from getting into the better Universities… poverty… crime… violence… a general breakdown of family and community.   But the problem isn’t that “the gatekeepers of elite education” are prejudiced against low income white people.   The problem is that a kid in a drug gang infested urban slum whose school is falling apart because their city has no money actually has a better chance of leaving grade school being able to think for themselves then a kid from bible belt America does.

He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget God…

[Edited and expanded a tad for clarity…]