"A Little Learning"

Reflections on America's half-educated elite

This morning I contemplated the following electoral map.

In other words, Kamala Harris won the cities of Boston, New York, greater Washington D.C., Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Trump won the rest of the country.

It’s notable to me that Blue States like New York and California suffered the most odious, draconian, and deleterious government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The George Floyd disaster happened in the ultra liberal bastion of Minneapolis on the watch of a black chief of police. Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have become synonymous with once beautiful cities now given to homeless squalor, open drug use, crime, and (paradoxically) sky high housing costs.

For the record, I went to college and graduate school in Boston and had a deep love for the city. I also lived in New York City for a while and thought it the most exciting place on earth. I’m perplexed about what the people of these cities saw in Kamala Harris apart from the salient fact that she is not Donald Trump. I suspect that their antipathy for the latter was the only thing they had to guide their decision.

It’s often remarked that “educated” people are more inclined to vote for Democrat candidates like Kamala Harris, but I believe this is a misconception. People who go to university and receive professional training generally obtain higher social status and incomes, and this fosters their belief that they are educated. This is especially true of medical doctors, who undergo far more training than almost every other professional.

However, it seems to me that a true education only begins when one graduates from college, and it never ends until one’s dying day. Common sense tends to decline with college education, but then returns as one continues on the path of experience and diligent learning.

People sometimes ask me why Drs. Peter McCullough and Paul Marik broke ranks with so many of their academic medical colleagues during the pandemic.

“Because they continued performing investigative scholarship while most of their colleagues sat on their hands and waited for guidance from Fauci’s NIAID,” I reply. In other words, most medical doctors in the United States acted more like clerics deferring to orthodoxy than true scholars.

Likewise, the urban centers that voted for Kamala Harris are populated by people who went to college but are not nearly as educated as they think they are. This is what Alexander Pope was referring to in his famous poem, “A Little Learning.” To quote the first four lines:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.