American Ignorance

There was an interesting survey sponsored by Newsweek--you can look at it here. 81% of respondents at least knew that they didn't know who the Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court was. 28% knew that they didn't know who the Speaker of the House was. 40% knew that they didn't know who the first Republican president was. As Americans, our ignorance is astounding. We should be the most blissful nation on earth.

There were some trick questions in the poll. One question asked when did the Korean War officially end, and included in its multiple choices both '1953' and 'Did it ever end?' Both of those answers could be considered correct. The fact is that in 1953 an armistice was signed, which ended hostilities between the two nations and established a de-militarized zone (DMZ) between the two. This agreement is considered by some to be the official end of the Korean War, while others point to the fact that no formal peace treaty was ever signed, and wars are normally ended by peace treaties. Another asked how many countries have nuclear weapons, but did not offer seven or eight as a choice--the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan have all been verified as having nuclear weapons. North Korea claims to have nuclear weapons, however, there has been no detection of radioactive fallout from their tests, indicating that they may have only detonated a rather large conventional weapon. Israel will neither confirm nor deny their nuclear capabilities, but they certainly like for their neighbors to think that they have nuclear weapons. That would make nine the correct (or, at least, most correct) answer. Considerably more people answered five, presumably because only five nations have signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the first five on the above list).

I was surprised that 20% thought that Christianity was older than Judaism--one out of five are not aware that Jesus was born a Jew? At least that means a good chunk of our population don't blame the Jews for the death of Christ... 21% thought Islam was older than Judaism. Wow.

There were a good many things that I did not know: I did not know that Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population. I could not have told you what year the Internet stock-bubble burst. Did not know the current Dow-Jones average, or the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (I had heard some noise awhile back about Alan Greenspan retiring, but I didn't know that he actually had). I was unaware that childbirth kills one woman every minute somewhere in the world (I wonder how many women die from botched abortions?). I could not have named the winner of American Idol this year (and I am surprised and comforted by the fact that 77% of the respondents couldn't either).

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the breakdown of political affiliations: 35% identified themselves as Democratic, 34% as Independent, 25% as Republican, 3% as no party affiliation, and 3% didn't know (just at a guess, I would say many of the 3% who responded 'don't know' would have responded 'Republican' eight years ago). If that breakdown truly represents the national population, then our next president may be an Independent. Perhaps we should pay more attention to Ralph Nader than to John McCain...