Is viewing sexually explicit material harmful to reasonably sane adults? Are gays somehow "damaged goods," either mentally or "spiritually?" Did all life currently on earth evolve from simpler life forms? Is the earth getting warmer?
If you answered, "I don't know," or even, "The jury's still out on that one," to any of the above questions, you're a victim of the counter-intellectuals, who are possibly the greatest danger facing not only the human race, but the entire planet.
The reason nobody's picked up on this concept of the counter-intellectual before is that it's too monstrous for the reasonably intelligent, sane human being to comprehend — the mind just refuses to grasp it. Plenty of writers have nibbled around the edges of the concept, but nobody has yet confronted the fact that there is a growing though diverse group of individuals in American society (and probably in the rest of the world as well) who have devoted themselves, perhaps unwittingly, to the destruction of reason and science — the methods by which sane people make sense of the world around us — by attempting to supplanting those disciplines with irrational, unprovable belief systems.
What distinguishes the counter-intellectual from the simple liar is that the liar distorts the facts or provides false assertions in place of facts, whereas the counter-intellectual attempts to undermine the method by which we acquire knowledge, thereby allowing bogus "facts" to be presented and argued as if they reflected the world as accurately as facts obtained through experimentation.
Let's take the easy one first: How "enchanted" do you have to be to doublethink that God made the universe in six days sometime in mid-4004 B.C. (according to 15th century Bishop James Ussher, anyway), made man from the dust of the earth and yet also placed fossils of dinosaurs, Neanderthals and other precursors of modern animals in layers of rock, radioisotope-dated to be millions of years old, starting — and this should be the biggest clue — with the oldest in the lowest layers?
But apparently, creationists and "intelligent design" promoters have never asked themselves why a being they claim is the most powerful in the universe would, in the process of forming the earth, bury these sequential fossils, knowing (since the being is omniscient) that humans would one day dig them up? And yet, these people have the gall to insist that this incredible fantasy be taught in biology classes right alongside the science (not "theory") of evolution!
Now let's try the hard one: Global warming. No scientist who's studied the issue disputes that the earth's surface is warmer today than it was 100 years ago. The only question anyone's asking is, "Why?" "Experts" hired by those opposing the U.N.'s Kyoto Treaty, which 55 percent of the world's biggest carbon gas emitters have ratified, claim the warming is simply a natural trend, one of many such fluctuations in temperature over the centuries. That may be true — but how dumb do a president of the United States, Congress and its "experts" have to be not to recognize that 6.5 billion people burning fossil fuels and creating greenhouse gases just might be contributing to that rise in temperature — and that that might not be a Good Thing? It's more than a cost/benefit ratio thing, people!
And finally, there's sex: The last time the government actually trusted science to provide an answer to whether porn was bad for you was in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson empanelled the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The commission heard from dozens of researchers, took about two years to do its work, and concluded that federal legislation "should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain or view explicit sexual materials." Of course, by 1970, America had a new president, who, despite his nickname "Tricky Dick," said of the commission's report, "So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life."
Sure enough, Clinton era sanity aside, there has been no relaxation — and if one includes the growth of religious pro-censorship groups throughout the ’90s, there's been no relaxation, period. Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese headed the 1985 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, only two of whose members had any scientific credentials, which heard from few legitimate researchers and plenty of "expert" ideologues before reaching its pre-ordained conclusion. More recently, four more handpicked "experts" testified before a Senate subcommittee that porn creates "erototoxins," endorphin-like pleasure substances in the brain, bypassing rational thought.
But understand, the problem isn't that there's no scientific basis for Dr. Judith Reisman's "erototoxins;" the problem is that a subcommittee of the world's most powerful political body accepted her so-called "expert testimony" without so much as an, "Are you sure?"
Let's be clear: Reisman, who has no training in medicine or as a biologist, may actually believe in "erototoxins" in the same way she believes in God, but it's that "Dr." in front of her name that allows the nonsense she spouts to be given credence by, among others, mainstream media — and that's why the sexual state of America is as fucked up as it is.
Reisman is one of the more easily identified nutcase counter-intellectuals, since her "true believer" persona comes out every time she speaks. Others can only be spotted by actually doing the research on whatever issue is in question — something the mainstream media is increasing loath to do, opting instead to print "let's you and him fight" stand-offs rather than serve their readers by presenting evidence that one side or the other is lying and/or full of shit. That, after all, would take work — and once in a while, they actually do it, such as a recent New York Times article that actually looked into the science behind President Bush's claim that, "Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman," and found it to be horseshit.
Now if only they'd do the same with the claimed "harms" of porn!
