Natterings Of Ignorance As Common Received Knowledge - or Movies As Education

For anyone who wants to read more about the real trial that they mistakenly think they know about from the movie and made for TV iterations of Inherit the Wind or the only somewhat less fictionalized accounts of the trial or Clarence Darrow,  here is a website dedicated to the topic from a British student of it which someone pointed me to Saturday.  Unfortunately many of the links to other sites are no longer operational but many still are.  I was especially interested on his take on the legal career of Clarence Darrow and how the facts of it are more likely than not a refutation of the various legends about him.  He was not a great thinker and a student of science and reason - as the accounts of his debate with Chesterton and a real reading of the record of his questioning of William Jennings Bryan and a reading of his 12 hour long plea against executing Leopold and Loeb indicate.   That the various authors who did that easiest and cheapest of feats, duping people, especially, it would seem, talking college educated people into believing that a movie was an easy route into accurate historical knowledge, couldn't rely on accurately presenting him to get the effect desired could stand as an important lesson in why making that assumption about "bio pics" and "historical" drama is really, really stupid.  That the self-designated thinkers among us are so often duped by their habits and laziness, falling for the cheapest of show biz and PR persuasion techniques should lead to skepticism about that huge industrial effort in credentialing. 

I present the links above not because you should take what is said at face value but as a motivation to either test the claims made or to at least persuade you that what we were sold in such movies and TV shows and, less importantly, for any political or moral effect, plays and novels, stands a high chance of being a lie.

In my going on two decades of online brawling with such people I've come to see that the quality of thought among even many of those with the most impressive degrees, some of them from the most supposedly impressive universities in the English speaking world has more to do with the rote learning and incorporation of claims than it does the testing of ideas through skeptical consideration or the or even the most banal level of intellectual activity in fact checking, exactly the things that RMJ called out on the issue in the comments Saturday.  I have found that little to nothing of the common received "knowledge" of popular or even much of elite atheism and scientism and modernism and the loosely bound aggregate of social signifiers held to make someone a member in good standing of the kewl kids stands up better to that than many of the beliefs of their rival cliques, the designated dopes. 

No one can know everything, it was supposed to be the case that such people as couldn't know everything but who were to be considered educated learned how to think critically about the things they didn't know - in so far as that is possible.*  But it turns out that education in critical thinking skills only goes so far, if it goes at all.  The credentialing of people with degrees is no guarantee of that.   The idea that modern, up to date, media savviness was going to be a replacement for doing that is a flop.  What it has done is provide people with a means of extending the worst aspects of high school into old age, adolescence into senescence. 

Politically, they've earned American liberalism the hostility that snobbery is bound to generate while undermining and hollowing out the moral foundation that liberalism must rest on.   And that's something that goes back into the 19th if not 18th century, it is one of the most self defeating aspects of alleged enlightenment, alleged modernism.  As I've tested the common received wisdom of both I've found it is generally not as labeled and sold as.   It's got more in common with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon than they'd ever want to believe possible.   What I'm finding is that it's hardly productive of a durable liberalism that can avoid adopting self-defeating attitudes of the stupidest kind, such as enabling lies and greed. 

Plays, movies, TV movies, popular novels, those are about as bad a replacement for critical thinking about the record of reality as they could be expected to be.  In the Trump phenomenon, in the cabloidization of journalism, in the rise of American Nazism, we're seeing what happens when entertainment is relied upon to educate a population.   Hollywood might just turn out to be our Nuremberg, and I'm not talking about the post-war trials,  I'm talking about the stuff recorded and edited on film by Riefenstahl.  Only the real thing, not the lies she sold through movies.

*  It's entirely loony, how people with no knowledge of a topic or even the technical knowledge or training in an area, science, for example, are expected to have a meaningful opinion about it.  But what's more remarkable is when you're expected to hold a certain opinion and to defend it even when its refutation is easily found and depends on something such as the mere act of reading with comprehension to refute its falseness.  That's hardly an erroneous habit that is banished from the allegedly educated population, especially now when so much of the time of it is taken up with entertainment media and things like cable TV  polemics.