By Steven Conn
Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 Sep 2004

It has been more than 30 years since some members of a certain generation defiantly admonished: "Don't trust anyone over 30." That advice, which became one of the catchphrases of the 1960s, captured at the level of a bumper sticker a rather more complicated, and important, phenomenon.

To utter that phrase was to pose a challenge to the forms of authority that governed American life. By the late '60s, parents, teachers, clergy, politicians were, within a particular cohort, all suspect. They were all over 30.

The breadth of that sentiment was - is - exaggerated, but it did foster a significant erosion of authority over the last generation: to our sources of intellectual authority.

The rejection of intellectual authority began in the '60s as an impulse from the American left. Now, however, it is strongest on the right. We now have a political discourse in which opinion is often substituted for fact, in which how one feels is more important than what one thinks.

Young radicals in the '60s rejected the authority of The Establishment. The Establishment might be defined as that loose collection of experts, academics and analysts whose studies, reports, hearings and symposia became the basis for much of our political debate from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Politicians disagreed over how best to act on the advice of The Establishment, but they rarely rejected the honesty or utility of it out of hand. As a result, The Establishment helped shape a remarkable consensus about economic policy, science policy, and military and foreign policy in the mid-20th century.

And, as it turned out, The Establishment - or at least important parts of it - lied about a whole host of things. It lied about the medical threat faced by military veterans exposed to nuclear testing. It lied about the environmental impact of certain chemicals. Most of all, it lied about the Vietnam War.

The Establishment was never infallible, to be sure, nor was it ever as neutral and disinterested as it often pretended to be. But in exposing the ways in which The Establishment deceived us, we tossed the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly no information is value-free, and it comes to us shaded by the predispositions of those who produce it. But that doesn't mean it can't be evaluated critically and usefully, if we take the time to think about it.

In dismissing our sources of intellectual authority immediately as "biased," we haven't replaced them with a better source of knowledge on which to base our policies. Instead, fools rush in.

What fills the void left when rational thinking departs is always a variety of superstition. I have had conversations with parents who won't immunize their children because they don't believe that the vaccines are safe, though they offer no real evidence to back up this essentially reckless decision. Numerous people - and politicians - say they do not believe in Darwinian biology, as if the foundation of all modern life sciences were an item on a daily menu and not an inextricable element of science itself.

Many Americans, I among them, feel a shocked disbelief when we read that many in the Islamic world continue to believe that the Sept. 11 attacks were staged by the Israelis or the Bush administration or both.

But are those who believe that really any different from the majority of Americans who, according to a recent poll, continue to believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks? In both cases, people cling to an idea despite overwhelming evidence that it is wrong because it satisfies some emotional, irrational yearning.

Democratic debate about any issue can happen only if people can agree on the terms of the debate. Without that as a premise, debate degenerates into shrill shouting, and rational decision-making devolves into intellectual dishonesty. In short, whatever their shortcomings, democracy demands sources of intellectual authority to provide the basis on which we make our choices.

Thomas Jefferson fretted that the republic could succeed only with an educated, well-informed electorate. But our problem isn't so much that we don't have the necessary information. In our "information age," we have instant access to almost any information we could possibly require. Rather, we are lazy about evaluating it. T.S. Eliot put the dilemma nicely when he wrote: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

That wisdom might come from what we could call a pragmatic process. American politics has worked best when it has worked pragmatically rather than ideologically. But to work pragmatically means measuring one's convictions about issues against the empirical tests of experience and experiment. Further, to work pragmatically means changing one's mind when the data of experience contradict the faith of ideology.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this perhaps better than any American president in the 20th century. The New Deal, he said repeatedly, was not a coherent agenda of programs, but rather a hodgepodge of experiments. When one didn't work, he tried another. He didn't aim for a hit every time up to the plate, he said, merely the highest batting average. And with that approach, he navigated the nation through its two greatest 20th-century crises backed by enormous public support.

The politics we have now works almost entirely in the reverse: Data, information, the disinterested consensus of experts are dismissed if they do not conform to the prefabricated mold of our particular ideological beliefs. The current administration seems particularly dismissive of the sources of intellectual authority we rely on to make our decisions, and a kind of anti- intellectualism has become the establishment.

As products of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the founders of this nation took as their article of faith that rational thinking was the only thing that would keep the American experiment viable. At a moment when we are as riven and entrenched as we are, that is worth thinking about.

Steven Conn is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University.

Campaign 2004