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Read Anti-Intellectualism in America by Richard* Hofstadter; it's as true and relevant today, as it was back then. The decline, if any, probably has to do with
by kmfrk 16y ago
Read Anti-Intellectualism in America by Richard* Hofstadter; it's as true and relevant today, as it was back then.
The decline, if any, probably has to do with the fact that there wasn't a Cold War where scientists could participate directly against a tangible threat and common purpose:
“The Sputnik was more than a shock to American national vanity: it brought an immense amount of attention to bear on the consequences of anti-intellectualism in the school system and in American life at large. Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival. After assuming for some years that its main concern with teachers was to examine them for disloyalty, the nation now began to worry about their low salaries. Scientists, who had been saying for years that the growing obsession with security was demoralizing to research, suddenly found receptive listeners. Cries of protest against the slackness of American education, hitherto raised only by a small number of educational critics, were now taken up by television, mass magazines, businessmen, scientists, politicians, admirals, and university presidents, and soon swelled into a national chorus of self-reproach. Of course, all this did not immediately cause the vigilante mind to disappear, nor did it disperse anti-intellectualism as a force in American life; even in the sphere most immediately affected, that of education, the ruling passion of the public seemed to be for producing more Sputniks, not for developing more intellect, and some of the new rhetoric about education almost suggested that gifted children were to be regarded as resources in the cold war. But the atmosphere did change notably. In 1952, only intellectuals seemed much disturbed by the specter of anti-intellectualism; by 1958, the idea that this might be an important and even a dangerous national failing was persuasive to must thinking people.”
- irickt 16y agoCorrection: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
- kmfrk 16y agoThanks. Those pesky, prolific Hofstadters.
- jerf 16y agoPart of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of "education" to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren't true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they've been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. "Scientists" collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone's political beliefs... and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it's nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about. I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of "anti-intellectualism" that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on "Americans" is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It's not a one-sided problem. If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes, and return to great, foundational humility that even the press could not overplay into hubris. And they need to drop their blinders whereby they excuse away the damage that intellectuals have done while ignoring these ancient precepts and only crediting themselves their successes, because it cuts themselves off from the very object lessons that could help them return to this time-tested approach to science, which they still flatter themselves that they follow. If you fail to fix the intellectuals first, then all your effort to fix "Americans" is going to fail; you'll bend your efforts towards getting them to look at intellectuals seriously, but they'll end up coming to the same conclusions they already have about the value of intellectuals and you'll have wasted your shot. I'm not holding my breath.