America, the Incurious

In early August, I did a podcast for Sidebar, in which I discussed a number of themes from Imperfect Union, my book about the significance of the intentional errors of omission at the Constitutional Convention. 

Sidebar is run by two law school deans, and I was flattered to be asked.  Two of their recent interviews were with CNN’s Elie Honig and Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.  My segment went well and, while I expected the better-known guests to get (a lot) more listeners, I hoped I would get a decent number as well.

Sidebar gets the overwhelming majority of its hits directly from the podcast, but they also post the episodes on YouTube, which gets only a small smattering, almost always less than 100, with no more than a half-dozen likes, including for luminaries like Honig and Chemerinsky.  For a few days, mine followed a similar pattern and then something odd began to happen.  During the first weekend after the segment went live, the YouTube numbers began to grow.  And grow.  And grow.

Soon I was approaching five hundred views with more than thirty likes.  And it didn’t stop.  Now, more than two months later, I’m approaching ten thousand hits, with more than 350 likes.  

Huh?  Me?

I have no idea, none, how this happened.  To say that this is a larger number than I’m used to is a vast understatement.  If I had sold half that many books, I’d have been ecstatic.  Still, it was beyond gratifying to get my ideas out to such a large audience, to allow that many people, especially students, to consider what I had to say. 

But with the hits and the likes came the comments, more than a hundred-fifty of them, and that turned out to be extremely illuminating…and, alas, more than a little depressing.

At the beginning, the comments were from listeners who either praised or criticized my point of view, the tone both civil and thoughtful.  There were questions as well, especially about Article III and the Supreme Court, to which I devoted two chapters of the book. 

Then, however, as the podcast went (by my standards) viral, the tone of the comments began to change.  Somehow, and again I have no idea how, the podcast made it into the right-wing, Fox News crowd.  Suddenly, I was a left-wing radical, a Marxist, and according to these self-styled experts, either a conniving stooge or a moron, sometimes both. 

I’ve seen similar threads on other people’s posts, but had never experienced the phenomenon personally.

I generally try to engage those with whom I disagree in the hope of starting a dialogue in which perhaps they can learn something from me and I can learn something from them.  In this case, many of these comments were not worth replying to and, for the most part, I did not.  I did, however, give in once or twice and reply to a couple of the more declarative insults, such as “You’re a twat,” with “Always great to hear from a fellow scholar. Please send me a list of your publications.”

To those, however, who bragged that they knew the Constitution, the process by which it was created, and the resulting jurisprudence better than I—always without evidence—I tried, without disparaging their views, to indicate why I thought they were wrong—always with evidence.

I soon realized it made no difference.  These critics, almost all men, had not the slightest interest in a two-way discussion or even considering a different point of view.  They refused, invective rising, to in any way alter their unshakeable certainty that the Constitution said precisely what they had convinced themselves it did.  They almost surely get both their news and their opinions from sources chosen only because of a common, reinforcing point of view.

There is nothing wrong with being skeptical of an opinion that is contrary to one’s own, but that is hardly the same thing as being totally close-minded, especially when willful deafness is coupled with the sneering certitude that contrary opinions are not even worth listening to because they are surely idiotic and those who hold them are evil.

These reactions reminded me of the pandemic when conservatives and antivaxxers insisted science and the experts could not be trusted because they either did not know what they were talking about or were part of some grand conspiracy to, what, poison an unsuspecting population?  Bill Maher, who is supposed to be highly intelligent, was at the forefront of this group.

Were the scientists always right?  Of course not.  They were dealing with the unknown, toiling, especially early on, totally in the dark.  But who would most reasonable people want making their health care decisions?  People who had a lifetime of training and an impressive track record of success…or a comedian?  Fauci and his ilk made some mistakes, some of them big ones, but who got us out of the pandemic with one million dead instead of ten, twenty, or even fifty million, as with the Spanish flu in 1918?  Not RFK, Jr. or Ron DeSantis.

America has, to a disquieting degree, devolved into a society where an uninformed amateur is considered the equal of or even superior to someone who has acquired knowledge rigorously from long experience and empirical evidence.  What is worse is that this blissful ignorance is coupled with a total lack of inquisitiveness and not a scintilla of interest in compromise or growth.

Politically, at least, we have lost our curiosity and replaced it with smugness.

But there is no way to dispel ignorance except with curiosity. Just as there is no way to heal a divided nation when a large segment of the population insists on perpetuating, even aggrandizing, that ignorance.