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simply demand an exam review sheet or consult Google or Wikipedia? But there’s something else at work here too. I remember prodding one particularly inert group of undergraduate dial tones thus: “I get the sense that you guys aren’t really interested in what people two hundred years ago thought.” They shrugged. No, not really, was the classroom consensus. What the hell did it have to do with them?
    We see a similar shrugging in public life. In a 2009 appearance on HBO ‘s
Real Time with Bill Maher
, Republican Meghan McCain declared, “I wouldn’t know; I wasn’t born yet,” 4 when Democratic strategist Paul Begala mentioned the way Reagan had blamed many of his problems on Carter. Another prominent Republican blonde, former White House press secretary Dana Perino, displayed the same whatevs attitude in 2007. In a press conference she dodged a question comparing Bush’s policy to Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Later, on an NPR quiz show, Perino admitted, “I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about … the Cuban missile crisis … It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.” 5
    How could she know? Perino is a pup. She was born in 1972, a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. It’s not like she was there.
    This Young Earth thinking – I am Year Zero! – obliterates history. Meghan McCain and my bored students are essentially Whig historians who do not know what the term
Whig
history
means. They think that they live in the best of all possible worlds and act as though all previous generations were just eejits, fumbling and bumbling their way towards the world we live in now, where everyone knows better. Consequently, they are free to ignore the past. This is sad, and scary, because it means they are like goldfish in a bowl, totally trapped in their own cultural moment, unable to consider it critically or compare it to anything.

6. Nerds are negative nellies: pessimists and player-haters .
     
    The only kind of thinking that sells really well is positive thinking. Unfortunately, this is not thinking at all. For example,
The Secret
book and DVD both did gangbusters. Those who market
The Secret
and hawk its law of attraction maintain that “it is the culmination of many centuries of great thinkers, scientists, artists and philosophers.” 6 But I’m quite confident that both Jesus and Leonardo da Vinci had a more challenging and complicated world view than “wishing extra-hard makes it so,” which is what the gurus of
The Secret
teach their terminally credulous followers.
    In a similar vein, many of the most successful megachurches of recent years retail prosperity gospels, reassuring you that Jesus wants you to be rich, that you are all (to filch a phrase from the troublingly toothy Joel Osteen) “God’s masterpiece.” Never mind that Christ’s instructions to would-be followers are quite explicit, right there in the Bible in red type: yard sale, drain the accounts, give it all away, and get back to me when I know you really mean it. Some of the most popular strains of contemporary Christianity have more to say aboutgetting than giving, casting the Lord as a celestial career coach and concierge and the priest or minister as a – gross portmanteau alert – pastorpreneur.
    In a 2008
New York Times
op ed, writer Barbara Ehrenreich linked the popularity of New Agey and Christianish positive thinking to the mortgage meltdown. She wrote:
    The idea is [that] … thinking things, “visualizing” them – ardently and with concentration – actually makes them happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits, the reasoning goes, if only you truly believe that you can. 7
     
    All that complicated fiscal math was a towering cathedral of logic tottering on a squidgy foundation of feelings. John Maynard Keynes used the term
animal spirits
to describe