Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [69]
Elitism
Regardless of where they began, modern advertising and politics have spread their way around the world. But there are certain other typically American ideas that have helped to facilitate the emergence of the age of truthiness. One such idea is the rejection of elitism. Consider the following two quotations from Stephen Colbert’s book, I Am America (And So Can You!):
[This book is] not just some collection of reasoned arguments supported by facts. That’s the coward’s way out. This book is Truth. My truth … like our Founding Fathers, I hold my Truths to be self-evident, which is why I did absolutely no research. I didn’t need to. The only research I needed was a long hard look in the mirror. (I Am America, pp. viii-ix)
… science is elitist … who gave some lab-coated pipette wielder permission to act like he knows more than I do about mitochondria, just because he spent twenty years of his life studying them in a laboratory? PhDs and 300-page dissertations don’t make his opinion any more valid. (I Am America, p. 194)
Americans are very suspicious of elites, often for very good reason. There is indeed something offensive and disturbing about the idea that some people should be considered better than others, or given more authority or credibility than others, merely on the basis of some arbitrary characteristic. Moreover, we have the idea, which fits naturally with the ideals of democracy, that thinking about serious matters is everyone’s business—an arena into which everyone is entitled to enter.
But Colbert’s satire exposes the downside of these ideas. While it is laudable to withhold deference to those who have not demonstrated any special excellence, the case is quite different with regard to those who have. Americans seem readily to acknowledge this point in some spheres of life. No one sneeringly dismisses champion athletes as “elitists.” But while appeals to authority are indeed a genuine affront to science (and not merely to Colbert’s feigned anti-elitist sensibilities), the reason is that, in science, what counts is evidence, not credentials.
So while Colbert’s persona is technically right in saying that the scientist’s PhD, three-hundred-page dissertation, and twenty years of research experience do not guarantee that his opinions on mitochondria are more cogent than are Colbert’s own, he goes dramatically wrong in thinking that the relative merits of the differing opinions can be decided without reference to evidence. Thus, anti-elitism, which in the context of scientific practice results in a refusal of the lazy method of deference to credentialed authority, is turned, in the hands of Colbert’s persona, into the lazy claim that one’s own opinions should be afforded equal status to opinions that have survived numerous vigorous attempts at refutation in the scientific laboratory.
Having the Right to Believe Doesn’t Mean that Your Belief is Right
Another truthiness-enhancing idea is the conflation of the fact that I have the right, in the legal-political sense, to hold a certain opinion with the very different claim that my opinion is therefore substantively right (in the sense of “accurate” or “correct”), or at least as right as any other opinion. As Colbert puts it, “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American!” (I Am America,