Just How Stupid Are We?

We are really really stupid, hopelessly dumb and, quite naturally, completely unwilling to admit it. At least that's what Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter, attempts to argue in his recent (2008) book. Heavy on invective and condemnation, light on material (183 8" x 4" pages with size 12 font) and productive suggestions, this was simultaneously one of the most convicting and infuriating books I have read in awhile. I borrowed this book from the library, assuming that I could always buy it if it turned out to be worthwhile- it wasn't.

A lot of people decide whether or not to purchase or read a book based on the back cover description and the table of contents. Shenkman's table of contents is somewhat provoking, including phrases such as "gross ignorance" and "our dumb politics" but to give you a better idea, I made up a few new chapter titles and included a brief description of their contents.

Chapter 1. The point of this book.

A brief summary of America's stupidity and the ways in which Shenkman justified spending who knows how many months researching and writing this book.

Chapter 2. Survey says...Americans are stupid.

How survey methodology can (and should) embarrass the American public

Chapter 5. Stupidity popularized
What happens when leaders start to really care about the public opinion

Chapter 6. Stupidity proliferated

So it turns out that politicians can use television to manipulate the American people. Who knew?

Earlier I used the word convicting, primarily because Chapter 2 presents a lot of questions/answers from election, history and government surveys that reveal a startling ignorance. But as one of my social psychology colleagues pointed out, there is a major flaw with this type of guilt trip. A little thing called misattribution. Warning: I am now going to take a brief detour into social psychology. Feel free to skip down to the next paragraph if you're less than interested. In 1977, Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz (1977) had students come into the lab in groups of three. They assigned one student to be a game show contestant, one student to be the quizmaster, and the third to be the observer. The quizmaster had to come up with 10 challenging (but not too challenging) trivia questions based on his or her own unique knowledge. They could ask anything they wanted. Then the contestant attempted to answer the questions (and generally failed). Afterwards, the observer rated both the quizmaster and the contestant on traits such as intelligence. The quiz master was rated as more intelligent than the contestant. But these roles were randomly assigned, so how was the contestant consistently viewed as less intelligent? The observers were forgetting the situation! The quizmaster had been able to cull questions from his or her own idiosyncratic knowledge. We can all make others appear stupid if we think up 10 questions based on our unique knowledge of coin collecting, zoology or baseball.

So what does all of this have to do with the book? To some extent, we may read this chapter and think, wow, Americans really are stupid if they don't know how many years a senator serves or that Congress can override a presidential veto. But it is easy to forget that these people are probably being asked these questions about geography, history and foreign policy while standing on a street corner on their way to work, or sitting in the living room, watching their kids and thinking about dinner, while trying to recall that civics course they took decades ago in middle school. I am not trying to defend those individuals who could not identify Martin Luther King Jr. (19%) or argue that we shouldn't be concerned that only 49% knew that it was America that dropped the nuclear bomb. The lack of rudimentary knowledge about the way our government works has ramifications, as Shenkman goes on to demonstrate, but I just wanted to provide a word of caution before you decide to start petitioning the school board.

Chapter 5 also offers some food for thought. Apparently politicians are worried about what people think. Opinion polls are starting to have an alarming influence on government decision-making. When a Wall Street Journal poll indicated in 2006 that the American people felt that rising gas prices was the country's #1 concern, Congress and the president decided that they had better get concerned about gas prices. As a result, some idiotic proposals got a lot of airtime, including the suggestion that taxpayers receive a $100 check. In Shenkman's words, "the point was to show the public that something was being done, not to implement wise policies (71)." When the government responds to opinion polls with policy, they assume that the opinions are based on careful decision-making and reason, and that, as Shenkman argues throughout, is a dangerous assumption.

Allow me to discuss just one more point in detail. Apparently the American people are passive consumers. I wasn't exactly surprised by this assertion, seeing that my exposure to international and political news and public policy debates occurs primarily through the Internet, the occasional nightly news program and conversations overheard on the bus. (This last source probably being the least reliable). Shenkman does an excellent job at creating an intriguing picture of the ways in which politicians use the visual media. From the impact that television had on viewer perceptions of the Kennedy-Nixon debates to the power of campaign ads. Tragically, our mindset has become "if we see it on television, it happened. If we do not see it on television, it did not happen (unless someone talks about the event in a particularly dramatic way on television, in which case the event will seem to have happened on television)." (113). Unfortunately such ideas are backed up by research. Psychologists have found that individuals who watch more T.V. underestimate the number of blue-collar workers, overestimate the number of doctors and lawyers, and vastly overestimate the amount of violent crime.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, there are some convicting and informative sections in this book, but is hard to grasp exactly what point Shenkman is attempting to make. If you arrive at the conclusion that Shenkman finds democracy a lost cause you would be incorrect but to some extend justified. He doesn't exactly express confidence in the way things are being run. He spends a lot of time blaming "the people" but his suggestions for change aren't exactly easy for "the people" to implement. He thinks that blogging and the Internet hold promise for those intelligent few who can harness their power to bring political campaigns to a higher level. He thinks that the system of education needs to make some big changes and start emphasizing civics courses, but he may be overlooking the fact that our public schools face some more pressing problems, such as teacher shortages and appalling drop-out rates given our classification as a developed nation.

In the end, I don't know how much will be gained if you read this book. Maybe you will decide to temporarily change your homepage from facebook logon to CNN. Or perhaps you'll be a little more annoyed and skeptical than usual when you see those campaign ads labeling the competition liars and thieves. But in the long run, this book is more discouraging than anything else. Shenkman makes the voters' deficiencies readily apparent, but the solutions are conspicuously absent.

My recommendation: save yourself the guilt trip. Read America (the book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction instead. (I'm only half joking.)

The World of Mexican Migrants

Who knew that with the arrival of summer my rate of blogging would go down rather than up? Allow me to begin remedying the situation...

A while back my husband had to write a speech for a class. The topic was "Should the local church provide financial assistance to illegal immigrants?" In conducting research on the topic he checked out a number of books from the library. As I looked through the titles I thought Judith Adler Hellman's book, The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place, looked especially interesting. Turns out the book didn't provide a lot of material for my husband's speech, but I decided to read it, and benefited enormously.

Hellman is a sociologist who has done fieldwork in Mexico since the 1960s and written several other books about the country and its people. The World of Mexican Migrants, published in 2008, is an ethnographic study of sending communities in Mexico and receiving communities in the United States. Hellman profiles a dozen different individuals and multiple communities to address the challenges and hopes of Mexican migrants. She weaves a series of lessons on history, economics and foreign policy into the narratives. As I read, I found myself overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues surrounding Mexican migration. While some of my lay theories turned out to be true, I was surprised by the sheer falsity of many of my assumptions, specifically with regards to the reasons for migration.

Out of all of the lives and events profiled in the book, one narrative has really stuck with me. Hellman profiled No More Deaths (NMD), "a coalition of individuals, faith communities, human rights advocates and grassroots organizers." Founded in 2004, NMD traverses the desert around Tucson, in the hottest parts of the summer, offering aid to anyone they find. Patrols of volunteers travel dry riverbeds looking for evidence of active trail use. They carry "migrant packs" containing socks, food and sports drinks and leave water under trees along the active trails. They sing as they hike, so that wary migrants can stay under cover (if they wish) until the NMD members pass. If they find migrants who are unable to travel further because of dehydration or severe blisters, they ad minster first aid. Tensions may seem inevitable, but NMD members stress that the Border Patrol is not the enemy and NMD's activities are completely transparent. Their goal is to battle a rapidly rising death toll. In 2005 the group made the news when two Samaritans were arrested as they drove several migrants to a hospital in Tucson. Their vehicle was marked with Samaritan signs but the Border Patrol arrested the Samaritans, charging them with transporting undocumented immigrants in furtherance of their illegal entry and conspiracy to transport an illegal immigrant. A year later the NMD, the court charges were dropped and the NMD had gained a voice and increased support.

Such activities inevitably raise questions like the one posed to my husband in his class speech. Legal questions-for which the average citizen seems to lack answers because the debates center on salient matters such as the infamous border fence rather than practical issues surrounding everyday interaction- are inextricably intertwined with ethical ones.

This book struck a chord with me, perhaps because of my proximity to Mexican migrants, so I've decided to break with convention on this blog and actually solicit thoughts and opinions with regards to the following:

1) Where I can readily obtain a readable account of United States law concerning migration, particularly as it concerns Mexican migrants and their interactions with U.S. citizens on a day-to-day basis, as potential employees, neighbors or recipients of charity?

2) What do you think- Should humanitarian aid ever be labeled a crime? What limits, if any, should be set on providing aid, in the forms of shelter, food, clothing, employment, etc., to those who have entered the country illegally?

With regards to the second point, let me assert that I am not looking for debate per se. I am looking instead to ascertain the range of opinion on the matter (and the nature of the justifications for said opinions).

Let me wrap things up quickly so you won't forget that I'm asking you to post a comment. For those who are interested in sociology broadly, or the issue of Mexican migration more specifically, I would recommend this book as an objective, yet personal, introductory look at the people, places, and policies involved.

For a different perspective on the issue, you may wish to check out:

Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster by Peter Brimelow.

Described as a "slashing anti-immigration manifesto" this book is a recently published best-seller that is sure to provoke heated debate. I haven't read it, but my husband read a significant portion for his speech. He informed me that the author is an immigrant (who has obtained legal status) and he is not "a blowhard" and he provides interesting statistics.