Dumbing Down Dr. Condoleeza Rice

Several years ago I used to attend quite a few presentations at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace -- a Stanford University think tank -- by such famous and prominent conservative folks as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, George P. Shultz, Martin Anderson, and Condoleezza Rice. They were and some still are very active scholars there.

Dr. Rice, of course, was just confirmed as this country's Secretary of State. And what seems to be something worth contemplating is just how much smarter Dr. Rice appeared when she gave her presentations at those Hoover meetings than ever since she has joined the administration of George W. Bush. Especially during her recent confirmation hearings, this scholar, who could communicate complex ideas in excruciatingly accurate yet clear terms, sounded like she had been deliberately coached to appear to be a simpleton. I do not recall specifics now but it was remarkable how often she resorted to slogans, banalities, clichés and such while she was being questioned.

In her famous exchange with Senator Barbara Boxer, Dr. Rice spoke like a not very smart high school student who is being scolded by a principal instead of a serious specialist in this country's foreign policy affairs. And this suggests to me that there is now another trend in government that is rather disturbing.

It seems that administration officials have an increasingly cynical view of the citizenry. I don't know if it is an accurate view but there is little doubt in my mind that we are being addressed as if we all had minimal IQs. Why would this be the case?

One hypothesis worth considering is that democracy has run completely amuck and so everything that officials are expected to discuss and decide on now has to be given very wide public airing. The public is in on it all because they are doing everything for the public now, not just addressing a special range of tasks.

Now at first inspection this may appear to be wonderful. The government is responding to the demand that it disclose all of its deliberations with the citizenry. No secrecy, nothing hidden. Sounds good.

But there is another possibility. Today it looks like the government is so thoroughly involved in the lives of its citizens, there are so many issues that it meddles in, that it needs to sooth the nerves of everyone as it explains what it is doing and why. Government, in short, is not a specialized institution, concerned with certain specific tasks. It is, instead, quite literary becoming totalitarian -- in the sense that the total range of human affairs is now its concern.

In a democracy, when this state of affairs has been reached, nothing can be discussed in the specialized vocabulary appropriate to the subject at hand. Everything needs to be discussed in baby talk, since that is the only common language that everyone can be expected to understand.

It looks like Dr. Rice was being told by the spin doctors in the Bush administration to speak baby talk during her confirmation: "Do not use big words, do not use complex ideas, talk simple, dumb it down good. You are talking to everyone all at once."

In a system of government where officials have specific tasks -- such as law enforcement, dealing with foreign policy, exploring the way a constitution ought to be applied to novel circumstances -- there would, I believe, be no fear of using the often complex language in which those matters need to be discussed. Every specialty, after all, generates some complex terminology -- that's one reason people go to colleges and universities, so as to pick up that special language with which the difficult details of a field are to be thought about and discussed.

But when everyone's problems become the problems of government, government officials aren't allowed to use the special language of a given concern but are more and more tempted to talk so as to make themselves understood by just anyone. This, in turn, leads to the simplification of complicated matters. But that way lies the road to obscuring issues, resorting to language that lacks nuance and thus hides from us what really is transpiring in various government departments.

I am not sure I like Dr. Rice dumbed down.