Susan Jacoby in her new book (2008), “The Age of American Unreason,” asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”
I believe The Bahamas too has been infected with this mutant strain, though I must hasten to add that both countries have seemingly been afflicted with some version of this disease for at least a while. The New England Puritan writer John Cotton sadly wrote in 1642 "[t]he more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee." While in The Bahamas, Dennis Dames, who led students from C C Sweeting School to parliament to protest over delapidated conditions at the school on February 3, 1983, said “[t]here are times when it seems we don´t want an informed society. Most people are anti-education, anti-intellectualism... Politicians don´t want people criticising them. But this means there is no true democracy." (Taken from a piece by John Marquis, The Tribune, Monday, November 22, 2004)
Ms Jacoby blames television, video games and the internet at least partly for the resurgence of American anti-intellectualism over the past 20 years, arguing that they have distracted from two activities crucial to intellectual life: reading and conversation. Ironically enough, there is not a deep pool of Bahamian scholarship from which I can begin to extract well researched arguments about the roots of Bahamian anti-intellectualism.
There is an article by Nicolette Bethel,
"On History", which argues that "[t]he success of Majority Rule in the 1960s created a kind of intellectual myopia that led us to reject everything that oppressed us before in our embracing of our newfound freedom." There are probably a number of other important pieces that touch on other aspects of our intellectual atrophy as well, but as of now I am not aware of them.
There is indeed much work to be done in the way of public discourse and even basic conversation in The Bahamas. Yes I know education reform is a big part of it, as well as the strengthening of the College of The Bahamas and all that; but, I am particularly intrigued however with the power of art in this regard.
To bring back Ms Bethel, her article
"On Art and Truth" argues that "the development of the arts helps keep a society honest. This is because the arts provide avenues for communication." With this in mind, I recall my most recent film going experience, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona", and find in Woody Allen's communication a challenge to think beyond the sorts of puritanical anti-intellectualism we have on our side of the world today toward more open-minded forms of expression.
I hope those afflicted in both countries take up that challenge.