“ The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.”
Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact - On Faith - The Washington Post
When people ask me why I don’t see myself ever moving back to America, usually I say something like I prefer the European lifestyle - living centrally in an apartment, not having to drive, having seasons, living in a place with a lively city center, bars that never close (no 2 am cutoff here!) and a slower drinking pace, a culture that’s not as focused on materialism and keeping-up-with the-Jonesitis, better news sources, affordable health care and university, and in general, more freedom. But actually, most of those things can be found in some American cities (though they’re all certainly much more expensive to live in), and when taken on their own might not justify my decision to stay here. It’s my goto answer, though, because the truth is much harder to explain over a beer.
The truth goes something like this: in all of the places I’ve lived in, all of the places I’ve travelled to (and statistically, that’s a lot), America is the only place where I’ve experienced such blatant anti-intellectualism (and this coming from someone who spent part of their childhood in communist Poland). Sure, Europe has its share of idiots, extremists and radical parties, but for the most part, the democratic process works here because most people want the best person for the job of leading the country. They might disagree on the specifics of how to do this, but leaders are not selected because of their lack of credentials. Ignorance is not a qualification, it is a problem to be addressed with education before one can pursue a significant office. There is no mainstream pride in ignorance like there is in much of American society.
As someone who loves learning, who is constantly striving to gain knowledge and decrease ignorance, I can’t imagine living in a society whose views are so antithetical to my own. Sadly, I don’t see this changing in my lifetime; if anything, it’s gotten worse in recent memory.
Anyway, Dawkins’ article is quite insightful and worth reading.
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EDIT: Right after posting this, I found two articles on this topic, also worth reading: Republicans Against Science and The increasingly antiscience Republican candidates (the latter by one of my favorite people on the Internets, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait).
