Yesterday we saw an election of historic proportions! While I am elated by the results and look forward to finally moving into this new millennium with President Barack Obama, I am going to spend this blog talking about how how Barack Obama owes his success in great part to his intellectual curiosity. And how the lack of intellectual curiosity of many Republican politicians has come back to bite them in the behind.
Intellectual Curiosity is a phrase we have seen many times in this election season. George Bush clearly doesn’t have it. According to this Rolling Stone article, John McCain doesn’t have it. And from Sarah Palin’s disdain for higher education and affection for Joe Six Pack, we can safely infer that she doesn’t have it either.
Intellectual curiosity is about the desire to learn.
It sounds like a good thing. Except that this desire to learn has been used as a weapon by the right wing to discredit anyone who is well-educated. We hear all about the intellectual elite. Rather than crediting them with the hard-work they have performed to attain a higher-degree, they vilify them. Rather than seeing them as an American who has achieved the American dream, they are seen as an enemy to America.
As education has gone underfunded and ignored for decades by politicians on both sides, America has suffered. It has become cool to be stupid. Smart people are a drag. And they have ideas that may be a threat to our way of life. It has been better to be a politician who has no intellectual interests, who is not well travelled, who does not use big words. Rather than electing the best Americans into leadership roles, we have been choosing Americans who are average in capability or even below average.
The result… think about it.
The Republicans have been using divisive techniques to win elections for decades. As long as you choose candidates and issues that get your base riled up, your party will look good. You can control dissemination of the facts by repeating the same story over and over again. Stay on message at all costs. Ignore contradicting facts and repeat supporting facts. You will look like you are right.
The difficulty with this strategy is two-fold. First, after dividing the country, you must rule a divided country. This is extremely difficult, and has led to sub-optimal performance when it comes to administration.
The second problem is that they are most effective when they start believing the story that they are trying to sell. It works in the short term, and for short-sighted individuals, this smacks of being an effective technique. However, it fails in the long run. The critical point is that there is a reason we believe things. We believe things so that we can understand things. This allows us to make predictions about what will happen in hypothetical situations. If you believe a made-up story, your predictions will be worthless.
We see this all the time with the political pundits.
They are the astrologers of politics.
They make predictions every night on the news, and their jobs don’t seem to depend on how accurate they are. Instead, their jobs depend on viewership. The viewers, who have been taught to believe everything they hear from their favorite political personality, don’t critically evaluate the pundits. This results in a population of pundits who have no realistic model of the political landscape and thus make ridiculous predictions. We have seen many such predictions in this election.
Barack Obama succeeded in great part due to his intellectual curiosity. He understood that Americans were not only tired of the Bush administration’s way of handling problems, but also were tired of negative divisive politics and were ready to be treated like smart people again. He learned from the mistakes of his rivals and believed in his assessment of the political landscape. He was intellectually curious. He paid attention to what was going on, critically evaluated his beliefs, and depended on his conclusions.
Today we saw Republican candidates and pundits spouting off on how McCain’s loss was due to the economy, or because he did not attack Obama hard enough. They are still not learning. They are staying on message, ignoring the evidence, and not considering all the possibilities. This is the opposite of intellectual curiosity. It cant last. They will wear themselves out to the point where we the people will see their spouting as uninformative. They will fade away.
The political climate has changed significantly.
I think that much of this is due to the urbanization of America. People in cities have to be intellectually curious to a degree. They have to understand people who are not like them. They live in a dynamic rapidly changing environment, and wont adapt well to city life unless they can learn.
It hard to convince people of a made-up stay-on-message story when they are paying attention and thinking for themselves. This is where McCain failed. It wasn’t the economy, or taxes, or Bush. It was that McCain was not consistent in his own beliefs and it showed.
Meanwhile, Obama capitalized on the intellectual curiosity of Americans. He gave clear well-thought-out answers to the issues during the debates. He avoided the catch-phrases that are stereotypical of the stay-on-message belief systems. It was clear that he understood. The power of is methodology is not to be underestimated as it empowered him to beat all of his democratic opponents and John McCain.
The results of this election were due in great part to a triumph of intellectual curiosity: both Obama’s and Ours. But the better news is that Barack Obama’s intellectual curiosity will serve him well as the Leader of the Free World.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Intellectual Curiosity, Visionaries
This post was written by drknuth on November 5, 2008
