August
21, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “The Value of a Good
Education”
It's a universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate
education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas
truly profound education breeds humility.
The last year has been a sad
time for those of us who loved the fake news shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert on Comedy Central. Jon Stewart was both a political and comedic genius
who straight up attacked conservative politics and moral hypocrisy in America
and was often appraised as being the main news source of the 20 something
crowd. And, frankly, he often got better interviews and asked more incisive
questions than the corporate media that at least presented itself as being
serious journalism.
Stewart spun off the wildly
successful Colbert Report featuring the now late night talk show host Stephen
Colbert. On that show he assumed the character of a satirical take on
conservative Fox news host, Bill O’Reilly. His character was both wicked and
wickedly funny but the strangest part of his year’s long tenure on that show
came in 2006 when Colbert was invited to be the speaker at the Correspondence
dinner at the White House when George W. Bush was in office. Colbert accepted
the odd invitation and made the most of it, spending 20 minutes hammering the
president and his administration for their moral weakness and militaristic
ways.
It seemed that no one in the
Bush administration had realized that Colbert wasn’t actually a conservative
but that he was nightly eviscerating conservatives through satire.
I wasn’t the only one who
marveled that absolutely no one in the Bush administration seemed to realize
that they were basically inviting one of their sharpest critics to come into an
intimate dinner setting and humiliate them all on live national TV. It became
an academic topic of research to figure out why conservatives don’t understand
satire, or, for that matter, why there was never a conservative version of
either Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
The apparent opinion of
psychologists who looked at this issue is that conservatives and liberals simply
do not think in the same way and that only those who think interpretively
really get satire and those who tend to think literally just don’t. It is
tempting, well, heck, it is more than tempting, liberals generally seem to
assume that conservatives are as thick as a brick and they keep presenting us
with evidence to support the conclusion.
But this is apparently not just
an unkind and ungenerous take on the matter but, in fact, it really goes to the
different ways in which people think, both the gifted and the simple.
As a student of Biblical
studies, I have always found it to be remarkable that otherwise intelligent,
educated, professional people can still profess to believe very literally that
Noah built an ark that held two of every kind of animal, that Eve talked with a
real live talking snake, and Moses divided the Red Sea, and Jesus walked on
water.
Some of it is obviously early
childhood training. When I teach Western Religions at Drury, my adult
Ozark/Christian students do not believe for a moment that Mohammad rode a horse
one night up to heaven. That seems like silly mythology to them. They do,
however, believe that the virgin birth, the miracles of healing, feeding
multitudes, raising the dead, turning water into wine, walking on water, and
ascending into heaven are just matters of historical fact that could have been
captured on video if only Steve Jobs had invented iPhones in the first century.
There is no shortage of faculty
lunch meetings in which we all long for smarter students but when we are
honest, every one of us could recount a time in our early adult life when we
believed some of the silliest garbage in the world as being factually true.
What makes the difference, in the end, is the willingness to ask hard
questions, even of our most dearly held beliefs, to think critically, and to be
willing to change in light of new evidence.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn said it very elegantly:
It's a universal law-- intolerance is the first
sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant
impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
Mark Twain may have
expressed the same thing regarding religious people more pointedly when he
said, “It is not the parts of the Bible that they don’t understand that
concerns me. It is the parts they are absolutely certain of that scares me to
death.”
People who are
literalists, conservatives, enjoy a high level of confidence and absolute certainty
about things that they very simply do not understand.
And as is seen in
political satire, even when it is patiently explained to them, they still, very
often, just can’t get it.
This is exasperating
in personal relationships. I think that one of the worst things that Fox News
does to our nation is to give C and D students some reassurance that their
literalist and dogmatic world view is not only accurate but that it gives them
reason to refer to more reflective people in dismissive terms such as “libtard”
as if education and awareness were liabilities.
And, in fact, many
conservatives do believe that facts have a liberal slant. When I returned to my
job at a denominational Christian Church following my sabbatical fellowship at
Harvard, one right leaning lawyer in the church suggested that I immediately
also take off for a semester to study at our local Assemblies of God seminary
to “balance” the liberal influence of Harvard. There is an assumption among
many that academics is either liberal or conservative when in fact scholarship
is either good or bad, it is well reasoned or it is unsubstantiated, it is
accurate or inaccurate, it is, to tie it back to satire, either interpretive in
a critical thinking way, or it is literalist in an uncritical, receptive way.
All of this appealed
to me to talk about in this time of year when professors and teachers, along
with students are returning to their classrooms. Not all conservative thinkers,
either about religion or politics or economics, are unintelligent. In fact,
many are such disciplined scholars that they put the rest of us to shame. What
these analytical looks at the conservative’s inability to understand satire
have shown is that some very smart people are hard wired to be literalist in
their thinking. They don’t interpret, they absorb. Many scientists, physicians,
and others are brilliant in their ability to remember facts, to absorb huge
amounts of information but they become functionally retarded in the face of
paradox, irony or satire… in the same way that you would not ask a computer to
judge a poetry contest.
However, though this
is true for some people, for most of the people in the world who fall prey to
propaganda, religious or political manipulation, the real problem is a lack of
critical thinking training, a paucity of education. In that sense, the school
and the church, communities of faith and universities, are in much the same
business. The progressive church is entirely dependent upon schools and
colleges who produce critical thinking adults or we will not survive.
One of my favorite
prophets, the young woman, Malala Yousafzai, has said, “With a gun you can kill
a terrorist. With education you can kill terrorism.”
Of course, we know
her story. She was shot in the head by a Taliban extremist because she was
speaking out in favor of girls being allowed to receive an education in
Pakistan. But as soon as she began to recover from that nearly fatal attack,
her greatest desire was to go back to school. She knows that what will bring
her country out of the darkness of religious extremism, misogyny, poverty, and
violence is education…. Not education alone, but nothing else can work in the
absence of education.
Our war on terrorism
has failed because, while you can order a drone strike against a terrorist, you
cannot order a drone strike on an ideology.
The actual causes of
terrorism are complex and you cannot discount dimensions of economics,
unemployment, tribal and civil war, religious factions, the vestiges of
colonialism, and the loathing that all people have for foreign domination…but
still, there is no way out of our current tinder box of terrorism that does not
make education and critical thinking skills a priority.
Where many nations,
both in the first world and in the developing world, are realizing that if they
want to have a successful future, that they need to everything they can to
remove barriers from education, which includes both making our schools better
and making them more affordable.
Teachers need to be
compensated and treated like the necessary heroes that they are because no
matter what the cost of education may be, it is obvious that the cost of
ignorance is much greater.
