When we consider that
the United States was founded largely by intellectuals – Jefferson,
Adams, Madison and others – it is ironic that we as a nation have rarely
celebrated the value of intellect, except when it can be shown to
produce financial gain. This is amply documented in American historian
Richard Hofstadter’s modern classic, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964.
Hofstadter
defined anti-intellectualism broadly to refer to an attitude of
“resentment and suspicion” toward the “critical, creative, and
contemplative side of mind.” He identified at least three distinct
expressions of this attitude, which we may call anti-rationalism,
anti-elitism, and unreflective instrumentalism . Nearly thirty years
after the book first appeared, I wrote an analytical essay examining its
major themes and their continued relevance to American life (Rigney
1991).
As we
now approach the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, it will
be worth our while to revisit Hofstadter and to ask whether his
diagnosis of our cultural condition is still pertinent today. This brief
essay is based on, and offers some further reflections on, my previous
article.
Anti-rationalism
Hofstadter
begins by analyzing anti-rationalism, which manifests itself as a
suspicion and hostility toward the value of critical thought and
reasoned discourse in general. This form of anti-intellectualism, which
tends to regard intellect as cold and passionless, has a long lineage
in our history. It is rooted particularly in the history of American
Protestantism since the Great Awakening of the early 17th century.
The Puritan ideal of
the minister as an intellectual leader, Hofstadter writes, “was steadily
weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a
popular crusader and exhorter.” This evangelical tradition lives on
today in the emotional appeal of charismatic and fundamentalist clergy,
who commonly challenge the more secular culture of critical discourse,
especially as it is practiced and propagated in modern universities.
Conservative religious
hostility toward modern science, and particularly toward the cosmology
of the big bang, organic evolution and climate science, is rooted in
this evangelical tradition. The religious right directs hostility
toward the humanities as well when they, like the sciences, seem to
relativize moral teachings, promote a secular worldview, and present a
godless vision of the universe and our place in it.
Underlying this religious anti-rationalism is the fear that critical
discourse will challenge traditional sources of authority and thus
undermine the foundations of absolute belief. Hofstadter acknowledges
that these fears are not entirely groundless. Critical thinking really
does threaten the unexamined traditions of the past. He writes that
“left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into
question.” Authoritarian regimes, whether religious or secular, know
this and suppress freedom of thought and speech accordingly. In the
domain of critical thinking, nothing is sacred – except perhaps
reasoned discourse itself.
Today the culture of reasoned discourse appears to be at a low ebb in
the United States. Wars of words between traditional conservatives and
more secular modernists fill the airwaves and the cables, polarizing
our national politics. The messages propagated at the extremes –
slogans, soundbites and simplistic talking points easily learned and
repeated by uncritical thinkers – belie the increasing and frightening
complexity of the realities they describe. Such messages are fueled by
what we might call complexiphobia in the public at large, the anxious yearning for simple answers in times that are anything but simple.
Anti-elitism
A second kind of anti-intellectualism identified by Hofstadter,
anti-elitism, manifests itself in the rise of populist political
movements which express mistrust and resentment toward the educated
elite and their presumed claims to superior knowledge and wisdom.
Public respect for the highly educated has waxed and waned through
American history.
Hofstadter notes that at the founding of the new republic, the leaders were the
intellectuals. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were drawn largely
from a propertied and learned class, a class of gentlemen. Soon after
the founding, however, this educated elite confronted opposition from a
grass-roots populist upsurge represented most notably by Andrew
Jackson, the rough and ready man of the people.
Later, during the
Progressive era, the nation gained a new respect for intellect, now
represented by an emerging stratum of scholar-experts capable of helping
to manage the growing complexities of an industrial order. The
country elected Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton
University, as its leader.
In the twentieth century we have seen political expressions of
anti-intellectualism on both the left and right. On the left, Hostadter
observes strains of anti-intellectualism in the blue-collar labor
movement, expressing feelings of anger and resentment toward an educated
elite drawn from the Ivy Leagues and other bastions of higher
learning. Blue-collar workers, whose educations were often earned in
what Eugene Debs called the “hard school of human experience,” looked
askance at booklearning. The perception that the educated elite “thinks
they’re better than we are” survives to this day in working-class
populist culture.
From the right, attacks on university faculties in the McCarthy era of
the 1950’s, and later George Wallace’s tirade against what he called
“pointy-headed intellectuals” in the 1960s, remind us that populism is
not easily cast in simple left-right terms. The contemporary Tea Party
movement has effectively mobilized many of the same resentments that
McCarthy and Wallace did, arousing hostility toward “ liberal elitists”
who “think they know what’s good for us.”
Interestingly, conservative ideologists today frequently make a
distinction between the cultural elite and the economic elite. In this
view, the former includes most liberal media and politicians, Hollywood
celebrities, and university professors, while the latter includes most
corporate rich and super-rich. Oddly, members of this financial elite
largely escape populist wrath unless they are seen to have benefited
outrageously from the recession that has left so many others without
jobs or homes. Populist anger toward liberal political elites in
particular, whether deserved or not, appears to have played a
significant role in the defeat of the Democratic Party in the recent
mid-term Congressional elections, widely viewed as a rebuff of the
policies of the Obama administration.
Harvard historian James Kloppenberg, in his new book Reading Obama (2011: xv.; see also Cohen 2010), contends
that Barak Obama is one of only a few intellectuals to have held the
office of President in American history. (Kloppenberg names Jefferson,
Madison, John and John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln as the others, with
Wilson and the Roosevelts also honorably mentioned.)
Perhaps indicative of
our national tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the
philosopher-president is a rare breed in our history. No doubt many
presidents have been intelligent, but few have been intellectual in
Kloppenberg’s view. The fact that Obama has muted his intellect in
public when he talks to “the folks” in campaign appearances, displaying
instead the common touch as he seeks to connect with his audiences at a
personal level, suggests that populist anti-elitism is still alive and
well in American politics.
Unreflective Instrumentalism
Hofstadter identifies a third kind of anti-intellectualism, which I have elsewhere called unreflective instrumentalism,
or the devaluation of forms of thought that do not promise relatively
immediate payoffs. In American culture, “payoffs” typically means
money. Instrumentalists want to know the cash value of an idea. This
attitude derives most directly, Hofstadter argues, from our predominant
economic system, capitalism. Instrumentalism is not inimical to reason per se, but only to reason which does not serve some “practical” end, such as making money.
But this attitude is
usually held without much reflection. It insists on practicality, but
it never inquires very deeply into the meanings of the word
“practical.” Is a song or a painting practical? Only if it makes
money. Are pure mathematics and science practical? Only if they result
in the solution of “real world” problems – another phrase that is
almost always invoked unreflectively. Is philosophy a real-world
activity? One might argue, if arguments mattered to the
anti-intellectual, that philosophy is in fact the most practical thing
we possess – the basic operating system upon which all of our important
decisions about reality are based.
Hofstadter observes that how we value intellect is profoundly reflected
in our views of education. Some years ago the educator Alexander Astin
(1987) conducted the first annual national survey of the attitudes of
first-year college students. Astin found that over several decades,
undergraduates have trended steadily away from viewing the college years
as a time to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Increasingly and
overwhelmingly they, and probably their parents as well, now view
higher education more instrumentally, as a means of pursuing material
success.
This attitude is
understandable enough in light of the hyperinflationary costs of higher
education and the burden of debt that saddles most college students
after graduation. Moreover, the current job market for recent graduates
is fiercely competitive, and the liberal arts are continually having to
defend their value, as they should. But to be a truly well-educated
person is to be concerned, as the saying goes, not just with how to make
a living, but with how to make a life. Narrow vocationalism is a
liability if it constricts the development of the whole person. As I
have written elsewhere (Rigney 1991: 447), neither bread nor philosophy
is valuable as an end in itself, but both are valuable for what they
contribute to human well-being. The perennial task of intellect is to
reflect critically upon what ends, both material and ideal, are worth
pursuing.
We find
unreflective tendencies in American culture not only in purely
vocational conceptions of education, but also in the messages
communicated via the mass media (both old and new) and popular
entertainment, which are sometimes quite literally mindless. We often
hear that we live in an “information age,” but this is also an age of
misinformation and even disinformation. If we are really living in the
information age, then why are we so poorly informed? Never before have
the sources of our messages – cable news, Wikipedia and the web,
Twitter, Facebook, i-things generally – been so diverse and needed such
subtle and discerning intellectual skills to evaluate and interpret.
Never have we had such sophisticated communication technologies as we
have today. Yet have the quality of our messages, both incoming and
outgoing, advanced with them? What if we had the most advanced
communication devices ever, but had little worth communicating through
them?
Anti-intellectualism, then , is no simple thing. It takes multiple
forms and derives from multiple sources in the dominant institutions of
our culture. Anti-rationalism has its roots largely in traditional
religious institutions that seek to preserve elements of a simpler,
pre-modern view of the world amid burgeoning complexity. Anti-elitism
finds its roots in populist political movements that live on today in
the resentments of the less advantaged. Instrumentalism grows out of
the material values and economic motivations of capitalism. Each of
these forms of anti-intellectualism has its own distinctive character
and provenance; each poses its own distinctive threat toward educational
policy and practice; and each persists and even thrives in contemporary
American life.
REFERENCES:
Astin, Alexander. 1987. “The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall, 1986.” Los Angeles: Council on Education and UCLA.
Cohen, Patricia. 2010. “In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy is Unearthed.” New York Times, October 28: C1.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kloppenberg, James T. 2011. Reading Obama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rigney, Daniel. 1991, “Three Kinds of Anti-intellectualism.” Sociological Inquiry 61 (4): 434-51.
Daniel
Rigney is professor emeritus of sociology at St. Mary’s University in
San Antonio and is currently a Complimentary Visiting Scholar in the
humanities at Rice University in Houston. He can be contacted at
drigney3@gmail.com.
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