Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times wrote the following thought-provoking excerpt in his March 30 op-ed piece.  You can find the original here:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/opinion/30kristof.html

Then there’s this embarrassing fact about the United States in the 21st century: Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each.

A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey.

President Bush is also the only Western leader I know of who doesn’t believe in evolution, saying “the jury is still out.” No word on whether he believes in little green men.

Only one American in 10 understands radiation, and only one in three has an idea of what DNA does. One in five does know that the Sun orbits the Earth ...oh, oops.

“America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,” Susan Jacoby argues in a new book, “The Age of American Unreason.” She blames a culture of “infotainment,” sound bites, fundamentalist religion and ideological rigidity for impairing thoughtful debate about national policies.

Even insults have degenerated along with other discourse, Ms. Jacoby laments. She contrasts Dick Cheney’s obscene instruction to Senator Patrick Leahy with a more elegant evisceration by House Speaker Thomas Reed in the 1890s: “With a few more brains he could be a half-wit.”

Her broader point is that we as a nation will have difficulty making crucial decisions if we don’t have an intellectual climate that fosters an informed and reasoned debate. How can we decide on embryonic stem cells if we don’t understand biology? How can we judge whether to invade Iraq if we don’t know a Sunni from a Shiite?

Our competitiveness as a nation in coming decades will be determined not only by our financial accounts but also by our intellectual accounts. In that respect, we’re at a disadvantage, particularly vis-à-vis East Asia with its focus on education.

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).

Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the public on a complex issue — as Al Gore did about climate change — then that candidate is derided as arrogant and out of touch.

The dumbing-down of discourse has been particularly striking since the 1970s. Think of the devolution of the emblematic conservative voice from William Buckley to Bill O’Reilly. It’s enough to make one doubt Darwin.

There’s no simple solution, but the complex and incomplete solution is a greater emphasis on education at every level. And maybe, just maybe, this cycle has run its course, for the last seven years perhaps have discredited the anti-intellectualism movement. President Bush, after all, is the movement’s epitome — and its fruit.

Now I've written before that the internet is a double-edged sword, and I'd like to revisit that statement.  Never before have a group of people -- the netizens of the world -- had at their fingertips so much factual information.  Conversely, never before have these people been more exposed to such astronomical quantities of idle speculation, unintentional misinformation, or outright lies. 

In short, the quantity of information available to each us of us has increased exponentially in recent years, in large part due to the explosion of content on the internet.  The overall quality of this information has inversely gone down. 

In countries where the consolidation of the mainstream media (MSM) has not destroyed the content integrity of their televised and print news, the people have been well prepared to roam the Wild West landscape of the internet.  In the United States, we have not been so fortunate.

Do not look to the unregulated jungle of the MSM to sustain us with fact-checked informational nutrition; it has become infotainment, where the info- aspect of the reportage has largely become an unimportant and fungible afterthought. 

The job of fact-checking our news and vetting our sources now falls upon ourselves.  Without the discriminatory tools at our disposal to sieve through the terabytes of content placed in front of our eyes by a even simple Google search, we will forever be in doubt of our "truths," and build our tenants upon a foundation of ignorance. 

These discriminatory tools, used to separate the wheat from the chaff, are:  education, skepticism, logic, thoughtfulness, inquisitiveness, and detective work.  The more you have or employ or each, the better formed your opinions will be, and the more seriously they will be received.

To paraphrase and amalgamate Scott Ritter and John Dean, we have to become hunter-gatherers, foraging for our quality news in the vasts jungles of the World Wide Web.  Unfortunately, with the demise of the news in MSM and the proliferation of propaganda on the internet, real journalism online is an elusive quarry.  Chameleon news-lookalikes, either from the special interest groups or JoeBlow's blogspot, abound.  It has become so hard to seek out our facts, that nowadays many of us have just given up the hunt.  That hasn't stopped us from becoming more opinionated than ever. 

This brings me to my second point. Nicolas Kristof highlights the perils of living in a world of democratized opinion, where each man's opinion is considered equal to the next.  Naturally we all love democracies and applying democratic principles whenever and where ever possible.  Every man's vote should count as much as the next.  But opinions are inherently different animals.  As the adage goes, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. 

It goes without saying that the opinion of a veterinarian matters more than the opinion of a garage mechanic when it comes to the care of a dog with heartworm.  Likewise, I prefer to get my speculations on the inner workings of a black hole from a physicist or cosmologist, rather than a physician. 

Political opinion is something we may all engage in -- by it's very nature dealing with the concerns of people in organized society -- with varying degrees of success.  But when political opinion is ventured from a position of ignorance, don't be surprised to be dismissed by others who have put forth more effort to speak from an informed position.  Mistaking intellectualism as arrogance and decrying "big words" as elitism does little to remedy the fact that if you bring little to the table, you often don't get a seat.