A Short Treatise on Dumbing Down

Anti-intellectual “dumbing down” is a practice popular among educators, cultural institutions, CBC News managers and the Harper government.

Educators dumb down by lowering university admission standards, or lowering academic requirements generally, to attract corporate funding, to lure more students and thereby gain competitive advantages over rival institutions.

An example of cultural institutions dumbing down is the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which in previous seasons found itself forced by economic circumstances to stage musicals at the expense of difficult plays, ancient or modern. In the current season, such criticism is not justified.

CBC TV News dumbs down by highlighting human interest stories and deliberately avoiding thought-provoking material that might question the value of existing institutions, thereby deliberately minimizing the difference between public and private broadcasting. Consciously or unconsciously, they do this either for the same reasons as those motivating the government’s practices or directly to please them. Such a motivation would, of course, grossly infringe the CBC’s mandate. The dumbing down transcends the News department and also applies to CBC TV’s entertainment policies, which avoid think-plays and down-beat stories, in contrast to BBC and Australian broadcasting policies. The desire to boost ratings is an excuse.

The Harper government has dumbed down by stripping the mandatory long-form census ostensibly for libertarian reasons to give concrete expression to Stephen Harper’s – and many other conservatives’ – deeply felt reluctance to interfere unduly with the private lives of citizens. This move is conceived to be one of many steps to change the climate of opinion in the direction of a Canada in consonance with Stephen Harper’s philosophy.

The government chose not to base its move on the same un-ideological grounds as those given by Germany and the Scandinavian countries, which intend to reduce their censuses because they say they have become superfluous.

Paul Sauvette, associate professor of political studies at Ottawa University, writing in the online publication The Mark on July 23, has analyzed the motivations behind the government’s move.

“[The decision] will resonate deeply with certain swathes of voters by communicating to them that this government shares their suspicion of stats and the pointy-headed, out-of-touch academics who analyze them….

“One of the core beliefs of many conservative intellectuals and activists is that decades of Liberal dominance in Ottawa has created an octopus-like configuration of arms-length organizations with mandates to mine statistical data (much of it collected by StatsCan) to discover inequalities and other structural patterns, and then to lobby the government and Canadian society to reduce these inequalities through social programs. This drives many conservatives up the wall for many reasons….

“For conservative activists and intellectuals who take the long view, what is most galling about this state of affairs is not just the possibility that the knowledge and analysis produced directly leads to increases in the size of the government. That is bad enough. But what is truly infuriating to them is the suspicion that these types of knowledge play a role in actively cultivating non-conservative values and a public philosophy that acknowledges a role for government in addressing and reducing certain structural inequalities of society. This, they believe, is a major impediment to the conservative hope of creating a culture and public philosophy in which inequality is viewed largely as a natural outcome of individual choices and where individuals, not governments, take it upon themselves to bootstrap their way up.

“Many argue that changing the census policy is simply an example of the government acting the bully – arbitrarily enforcing bad policy because they are too short-sighted and stubborn to appreciate the consequences of this policy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather than underestimating the importance and impact of this policy, the government understands precisely the central role this change has in their long-term goal of cultivating a very different political culture in Canada. In this sense, one is tempted to suggest that the current Canadian government is far more astutely post-modern in its practical navigation of the politics of knowledge than most of the lefty profs and social justice advocates who are routinely denounced as exemplars of the politicization of knowledge.

“Given a choice, Tom Flanagan and the decision-makers of the Conservative party would probably much prefer being cast as clueless bullies to being portrayed as sophisticated post-modernists. But in this case, the numbers don’t lie. This is a profoundly ideologically and philosophically motivated skirmish initiated by people who are highly attuned to the importance of the battle of ideas and the politics of knowledge. If you don’t understand this, you’ll likely continue to believe that the government’s decision to fight so hard to push this through is crazy. When in reality, they’re actually being crazy like a fox.”

Thanks are due to Tim Lash for suggesting this post.