Vive la France

In his book, Paris in the 50's, former Time magazine correspondent Stanley Karnow describes the status of an intellectual class,
"...venerated as authorities on everything from art, literature and music to politics, economics, religion and complex social issues. Their Olympian status mirrored the respect long shared by the French for the power of ideas and for the elite caste that shaped and spread them. Their books and essays...triggered squabbles that, judging from the endless reports in the newspapers, enthralled the public."
Contrast that with a recent column in Fortune magazine:
"...are some American parents actually hostile to education? In my travels I'm seeing evidence that the answer is yes. I was talking some time ago with a group of school superintendents from Maryland. The dominant mood was frustration--a sense that they weren't making the progress with our kids that they wanted. A few...surprised me by saying they had received complaints from parents who were angry because their kids were being made to learn algebra: 'What do they need algebra for? It's hard!' A middle-school vice principal...in Nebraska...reported the same thing: parents angry over kids having to learn algebra. Until recent years you wouldn't...complain to school administrators that your kids were getting too much education. Now parents evidently feel it's safe to do so."
Granted, the comparison is made across an ocean, a cultural divide, and half a century, but I wonder if we Americans will ever come to grips with a cancerous fault on our body politic--the mistrust and (increasingly) outright hostility to fact-based knowledge. Ours is a culture in which what is believed is gaining significant market share over what is known. Ours is a faith-based intelligence.
A very small but telling example is the case of Monica Goodling, an underling at the Justice Department who admitted this week in her Congressional testimony that she 'stepped over the line' in applying tests of political fidelity to the Republican party in judging the merits of what were, by law, supposed to be apolitical civil service appointments. Not included in her testimony, but reported earlier by one of her superiors, was her tearful, near hysterical private reaction upon discovering she would be called on the carpet: "All I ever wanted to do was serve this President!" As if that were a defense. In her mind, apparently honoring what you truly believe trumps what is legally mandated. And this person is a lawyer.
For at least a generation, we have heard the disapprobations: "elitist snobs", "pointy-headed liberals", or for that matter, just plain "liberals". These are people to be mistrusted; they are out of touch; they flaunt their intelligence--their facts. Their ideas are dangerous. Fear them. Fight them.
In truth, speaking of those Paris intellectuals of the 50's, a good case can be made that for all their learning and pretense, they were sometimes not just out of touch, but in fact, wrong. Many of them were so blinded by their fervor for the tenets of the Communist Manifesto that they refused to accept the savagery of Stalin--until they were forced to confront the facts. They were not omnipotent.
But that's not the point. The enduring vision is of a French society where intelligence was and is honored, challenged, debated and observed, all as a matter of course. Opinions matter--but facts do more. Thinking is an assumed part of existence.
Compare that to this place where America has come...where facts are denied...where allegiance to one dogma is the sole path to both power and salvation. In so doing, we can only ponder our nation in terms of the French during World War II.
Do we see ourselves in the role of their valiant patriots, who formed a Resistance to a cult-based occupier?
Or are we to become more like the occupier itself?

-diderot