Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Scott Dickensheets: Intelligence has a place in our culture. Really. I mean it.

It was a question I hadn’t anticipated: “Do these rankings ever make you feel lowly as a human?”

That was a friend, one of the smartest people I know, after the website The Daily Beast this week ranked Las Vegas as the dumbest of the nation’s 55 major cities. Of all the local responses I expected — cynical agreement; a dismissive “whatever”; people jumping like stunned cats to defend the fiction that Las Vegas fosters its own kind of smarts — ruefully taking it to heart wasn’t among them. After all, the survey in question seems to be more of an attention-getting ploy (Look at us, The Daily Beast, shakin’ things up!) than any serious attempt to quantify civic brainpower.

But these can be tough times for people who value, or at least hope for, a broad intelligence.

As it happens, intelligence has been on my mind lately, and not just because Halloween and Election Day both make me think of zombies shuffling through the streets looking for brains.

On Monday, I wrote a column about what I see as the embrace of willful ignorance by many in the Tea Party. I wasn’t trying to say that Tea Partyers are stupid — not all of them, anyway. Rather, I was critical of the way they latch onto candidates who seem proudly ignorant of the way government actually functions, or who make dingbat assertions about church and state, about Sharia law in Michigan, about the idolatry of government.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this phenomenon. Political journalist James Fallows recently termed it “ignorant incurious certitude”: not knowing the truth about something, being unwilling to uncover the truth, yet being absolutely certain about your opinion of the truth. He called it “a modern curse.”

Response to my outing was mixed, plenty of it supportive, some of it politely disagreeing, some of it the usual irritable bowel syndrome that comes with the territory:

“Us ignorant people are gonna win this one,” a caller growled, after making a predictable vulgarity of my name (hit me at the e-mail address below if you want to know what it was).

“You elites … you’re gonna get your ass whipped, and Jesus, it’s gonna feel good.”

Trying to correct my grasp of church-state separation, another caller argued that Lincoln’s use of the words “consecrate” and “hallow” in the Gettysburg Address opened the door for the teaching of religion in schools. (When I disagreed he sneered, “You must be a humanist.”)

Even Thomas Mitchell, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s editor and main Kool-Aid distributor, took to his blog to bust me up for calling people stupid because I disagreed with their politics.

So, to answer my friend: No, the ranking didn’t depress me that much. I don’t need The Daily Beast to bring me down. I was there.

My criteria for intelligence isn’t as specific as The Daily Beast’s — it considered percentage of college degrees, number of libraries and universities, number of nonfiction books purchased (did it weed out sales of “The Secret”?) — but it’s arguably a more useful hedge against ignorant incurious certitude.

It doesn’t mean you have to agree with me, Tom, but I do appreciate the gross misreading. No, what I’d like to see, and more vitally, what our civic culture needs, is the capacity for self-doubt, for enlightened reflection, for a willingness to decide that however attractive it is to, say, distort the Gettysburg Address for political purposes, it’s not a wise problem-solving strategy. (Also, it’s wrong.)

After my column came out, a reader sent me the wording of his favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

That’s what I meant.

Then again, I am a humanist.

Sunday is Nevada Day — schools are closed today in observance — and rarely has the fact that it coincides with Halloween seemed more scarily apt. Backlit by the election two days later, it provides an opportunity to ponder the meaning of this state and where it’s headed.

Please think responsibly.

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