Morris Berman on KQED Forum

Cultural Historian Morris Berman, who has just written a new book “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire.” was on KQED Forum yesterday talking about the downfall of the American empire.

One of his biggest arguments of why the American empire is coming to an end is because, evidently, Americans are idiots. He used the standard statistics about x% of Americans don’t know this, and x% of Americans can’t even locate [location] on a map. Despite these standard arguments, I still get the impression that Americans aren’t generally idiots. I think that we may be particularly strange, good or bad, in certain ways, but one thing we are not is stupid.

And a question that I always thought would be great to ask these people that make the American idiot argument is – “Well what of other countries? How do they stack up in these same surveys that have been asked of Americans?” Well, one caller asked just that question, in his own words of course:

Mr. Berman is wrong if he thinks Americans are ignorant and the rest of the world is informed. As someone who has lived in Europe, Mr. Berman should know that people in those countries are just as ignorant about the outside world and their countries as we are. These surveys are taken often, and the results are just as depressing as our own…

What was Mr. Berman’s response (to the above caller and other “detractors”)? Mr. Berman: “Read the book.”

Of course Michael Krasny, the host, wouldn’t let him stand with this response alone. He pressed for more, which Mr. Berman responded to as follows:

Oh, it’s so untrue, so untrue. The, the uh, surveys that have been taken, you know, I don’t know, of course this would be politically too sensitive, to do, that the UN or UNESCO would do a comparitive IQ study, but I’m, I’m guessing that Danes, uh, there was one study that indicated that Indians, as in Bombay, that Indians had a higher IQ than Americans by about five percentage points. I, I thought, “Don’t you mean twenty-five?” Umm, I would say the same of Danes or Swedes and so on. I remember, um, Patricia Williams did an uh, she’s an attorney that does a column in the Nation, and she was, uh, in the provinces in France talking to a 12-year-old boy in the nineties who knew, she said, more the in and out, ins and outs, of Clinton’s US foreign policy than the typical anchor person on TV in the United States – that you couldn’t have the same level of discussion. That’s been my experience of Europe as well. These people read, and if you read European newspapers, whether its The Guardian or Le Monde, and so on, what you see is that there’s a level of discussion that we can’t even come close to, that the New York Times turns into largely mythology, when you come down to it now, as opposed to something like, um, (couldn’t understand) in Europe, it’s a…(Berman cut off)

So, the best argument of the American people’s stupidity as compared to other countries is using the following evidence:
– Indians have a five percent higher IQ.
– Some 12-year old boy has a better understanding of Clinton’s foreign policy than the typical US news anchor.
– Newspapers from other countries have a higher level of discussion than US newspapers.

Wow. I mean, if he really had some solid things to say in response to that caller’s comments, he could have started to convince me that Americans are idiots. But when he resorted to a comparison of our mass medias when asked about the ignorance of the general population, it was obvious that his thesis is baseless.

Opinions like this, which I think are rampant in the liberal elite community, are what I think is wrong with the liberal movement.