The Meme that United the World

By | February 23, 2008
19 Comments

Why would a nine-year-old Gallup poll suddenly emerge on Digg Science earlier this week as if it were news? This happens on Digg sometimes — it has happened on this site, too, I must confess — where a news story is found to be so compelling and so in line with the kinds of things that a particular blogger (or Digger) wants to write about that the enthusiastic blogger (or Digger) goes at it without noticing the date. It then takes an astute commenter to point out the vintage of the news item in question.

The nine-year-old Gallup poll reveals that nearly 20% of Americans believe (or at least believed back then) that the Sun revolves around the Earth. So what makes the story so compelling is that it falls in line with a meme that is (almost) universally loved, to wit:

Americans are stupid.

Now you’ll see a lot of variations on this, particularly from our brethren across the pond who are quick to point out that Americans are ignorant fundamentalists, racist louts, provincial rednecks, etc. But the underlying theme of stupidity is always there. However, what makes the “Americans are stupid” meme so effective is that it’s beloved not just by Europeans (and to a lesser extent Asians, Africans, and others) but by many if not most Americans!

In fact, I daresay that the Digger who got all enthusiastic upon finding this piece is most likely an American, and certainly many of the frothy commenters who could barely restrain their glee upon reading this news are also Americans. Now these folks might not necessarily agree with the blanket statement that “Americans are stupid.” They might prefer “Americans are stupid compared to Europeans,” or better yet, “Red-State Americans are stupid,” or something like that. But again, the underlying premise remains.

Nor would I suggest that buying into this meme is strictly a blue-state or left-of-center affair. Conservatives need this meme to argue for school choice, or — if they are of a more paleo variety — just to argue that the world (especially these here United States) is going to hell in a handbasket.

I have pointed out before that the press and popular media love this meme. It’s always good for a provocative headline or a special three-part series during sweeps week. Jay Leno has practically made a sub-career out of exploiting it. And there can be no question that the advertising industry buys into it wholesale — essentially willing it to be true.

  • http://www.mprize.org da55id

    Interesting post. I think you could replace the “Americans are Stupid” meme with “Blondes are Stupid” and end up with the same reason for the meme stickiness.

    *Jealousy*

    I believe the current research demonstrates the real blondes have higher IQs as a population than other hair colors.

    So, people copy those of whom they are jealous and then they bad mouth them on top of it.

  • Paleo

    The Ego needs to be different.

    Pick any topic – education, country, sect, race, etc. The human species has a mind that is sick from the ego. If they are not different then the ego dies and we all become one.

    Awake to a new earth.

    Paleo

  • http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com Joseph Hertzlinger

    The results of this survey sound unlikely enough that I’d like to wait until it’s been replicated before believing it.

  • Pat Berry

    “Our first reaction was that 70% of people must not know what nanotechnology is . . .”

    I don’t think anyone knows what “nanotechnology” is. The term has been so widely and egregiously misused that it has ceased to mean anything specific.

  • MikeTheLibrarian

    Or the concept most Americans understand about Nanotech is the grey goo scenario and they don’t find it morally acceptable to risk that until we have a way to shut the things off. We don’t know, because they didn’t ask (or at least tell us) the real question: why? If you got a study that said 70% of the French were morally opposed to oranges, you’d want to know why.

    Incidentally, since that “science” writer doesn’t bother to give us the title or the authors of that study its hard to go look it up ourselves. I want to know what the questions were, how they were asked, and what EXACTLY the answers given were before I come to a conclusion. That’s science, Mr. Worthen.

  • Yahonza

    “The sun revolves around the earth” isn’t necessarily wrong either. Relative to the earth, the sun does indeed follow a path revolving around the earth. Relative to the sun, the earth revolves around the sun. Relative to an imaginary fixed point in space, the sun is following a trajectory and the earth sort of weaving around it.

    For most earthbound purposes, taking the sun as revolving around the earth is actually a better answer.

  • matoko kusanagi

    phil, %religious in pop by country has a negative correlate with median IQ…except in america.
    i wonder if the hidden variable might be nutrition…..or i suppose it could be partly brain drain, from 3rd world countries to america.
    even as we are universaly despised we are still the destination of choice.

  • GoodOleBoy

    What I see in my fellow Americans that always gets my goat is an ignorance of our country’s history and the principles on which it was founded. This has little to do with stupidity except with regard to having an understanding about how life should be lived.

    Comments from peoples of other nations and continents reflect their ignorance and unexamined preference for their collectivism. They probably will never understand what makes us different. Whenever this issue comes up I remember the passages from De Toqueville where he goes at some length to describe how he saw such a difference in the concept of honor among the elite between Europe and America. In Europe, it was not honorable for an aristocrat to ‘work’ whereas in America it made no difference what wealth one had attained (we had no aristocrats) it would still be dishonorable to shirk honest work.

    Now we obviously have quite a mix of people in the United States, but we still have a core that knows where we came from and considers that heritage worthy.

  • Cpl Punishment

    @ MikeTheLibrarian:

    Relative motion and apparent motion are not the same. The claim that the sun revolves around the earth is objectively false and is a case of apparent motion. Relative motion implies a consistent inertial frame.

  • Cosmo

    I spend a good deal of time abroad, and I’m struck by the paradox of the standard critiques of America — often presented by the same person in the same conversation.

    That is, we are uncultured buffoons who — by luck or chicanery, I guess — became a malign collosus bestriding the planet.

    Go figure.

  • legion

    Elite educated Europeans are leaving Europe in droves for less cultured, more buffoonish lands such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. And the US too. Why? Why indeed.

  • clazy

    I suspect this has also become current because there’s a new book out called The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. She had an essay in maybe the NYT or the Washington Post a couple weeks ago that summarized her thesis, which says that not only are Americans stupid, they’re proud of it. A review copy fell into my hands a month ago, but after 15 minutes with it I put it aside, disappointed. Her own smugness, stridency and leftism were tiresome.

    Check out this article in The Times, in which she describes the origin of the book–supposedly she heard two guys discussing 9/11: “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said. The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?” “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
    She decides to write the book.

    Maybe those guys were genuinely stupid; but I have to wonder if Jacoby is simply too arrogant to hear one guy teasing another for saying something obvious, and the other trying to recover his dignity by adding to the absurdity; or one guy trying to crack a joke and lighten things up, and the other guy going along with it. You wouldn’t expect a smug elitest to approach the guys and actually find out what they believe, and apparently that is consistent with what occurred.

  • JDH

    Good, honest post. Now I would suggest an attack on the other irritating meme “We are much fairer and wiser than past generations”

  • MikeTheLibrarian

    @Cpl Punishment

    That’s… true, but what does it have to do with the price of oranges in France?

  • comatus

    The Corporal and the Librarian are having an interesting argument. We go around the sun: how do you know that? Can you, yourself, prove it? We ‘know’ it because we ‘learned’ it in ‘science’ class. It’s revealed knowledge. Most people in Europe and Asia (and them other places I learnt about in ‘geography’ class) aren’t scientific thinkers, just apt prattlers. Americans (particularly, I’m told Missourians) once had the reputation of being both skeptical and being able to reason from observation. Nowadays, we, like everyone else, tend to adopt a position and then go shopping for someone else’s ‘science’ to back it up. I put this down to the ascendancy of the biggest ‘science’ of all: Political Science.

  • Don

    One interesting aspect to the survey is that the percentage of people in different countries who get the earth/sun question wrong is roughly the same. The difference is in the number who ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t answer’. Maybe the correct meme is ‘Americans are arrogant’, since we are sure we know the answer and will not admit to not knowing. :)

  • JFarreast

    I am a blond American and I know what nanotechnology is. It is what makes Glenn Reynolds trousers stain resistant.

    I also teach English in China and will use this article my Culture class this term if you don’t mind.

    Thanks.

  • MikeTheLibrarian

    TheLibrarian is not having that argument. Yahonza is having that argument. TheLibrarian accepts that we travel around the sun in a slightly wonky elliptical orbit.

  • Harvey

    If you haven’t had a look at Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, please do so, and love all the humans. I don’t have any confidence in intelligence measuring test. Has anyone seen that quick recall monkey in the news? I am impressed, but I noticed those long fingers give him (or her?) an advantage.