Anti- Intellectualism in American Life

PS Is there something wrong with this quote thingy?

...But he does tell some interesting anecdotes and by selective use of quotations brings a degree of discredit on creationism by associating it with the most opportunistic charlatans who presumably could no longer sell snake oil.In fact it is possible,using other quotations,to associate creationism with the highest flights of sublimity the human mind has proved capable of.

I consider serious war to be virtually impossible now.There is an epochal difference between politicians sending millions to their death and they themselves being burned to a crisp within a few hours of the start gun.

I don't know Flaubert as do you - I have so far preferred Stendahl, Balzac and Maupassant. Have I missed something unique?

Have you read De L'Amour? .

"If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. ...

The two Antonines (for it is of them that we are now speaking) governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue. ... Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government. ...

Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. ...

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. … he embraced the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent."

He also describes "Intellectuals" as those who feel themselves to be very important people and who, consequently are outraged when the society they live in merely tolerates them.

Kristol held that "intellectuals" have been typically posed against the order of things.

...a book on anti-intellectualism in America can hardly be taken as though it were meant to be a balanced assessment of our culture, any more than a history of bankruptcies could be taken as a full history of our business life. Although I believe that anti-intellectualism is pervasive in our culture, I believe that it can rarely be called dominant... Again, this is not, as it perhaps should be, a comparative study: my concentration on anti-intellectualism in the United States is no more than the result of a special, and possibly parochial, interest in American society. I do not assume that anti-intellectualism does not exist elsewhere. I think that it is a problem of more than ordinary acuteness here, but I believe it has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations. I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism, though it has its own universality, may be considered a part of our English cultural inheritance, and that it is notably strong in Anglo-American experience. A few years ago Leonard Woolf remarked that "no people has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellectuals more than the British". Perhaps Mr. Woolf had not given sufficient thought to the claims of the Americans to supremacy in this respect (which is understandable, since the British have been tired for more than a centruy of American boasting); but that a British intellectual so long seasoned and wo well informed on the cultural life of his own country could have made such a remark may well give us pause. Although the situation of American intellectuals poses problems of a special urgency and poignancy, many of their woes are common experiences of intellectuals elsewhere, and there are some compensating circumstances in American life.

One reason anti-intellectualism has not even been clearly defined is that its very vagueness makes it more serviceable in controvery as an epithet. But, in any case, it does not yield very readily to definition. As an idea, it is not a single proposition but a complex of related propositions. As an attitude, it is not usually found in a pure form but in ambivalence - a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intellectuals is uncommon. And as a historical subject, if it can be called that, it is not a constant thread but a force fluctuating in strength from time to time and drawing its motive power from varying sources. In these pages I have not held myself to a rigorous or narrow definition, which would here be rather misplaced. I can see little advantage in a logically defensible but historically arbitrary act of definition, which would demand singling out one trait among a complex of traits. It is the complex itself I am interested in - the comlex of historical relations among a variety of attitudes and ideas that have many points of convergence. The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and those who are considered dto represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life. This admittedly general formulation is as close as I find it useful to venture towards defintion...In these pages I am centrally concerned with widespread social attitudes, with political behavior, and with middle-brow and low-brow responses...The attitudes that interest me most are those which would, to the extent that they become effective in our affairs, gravely inhibit or impoverish intellectual and cultural life.

The comtemporary businessman, who is disposed to think of himself as a man of practical achievement and a national benefactor, shouldering enormous responsibilities and suffering from the hostility of flighty men who have never met a paqyroll, finds it hard to take seriously the notion that he always gets his way. He sees himself enmeshed in the bureaucratic regulations of a welfare state that is certainly no creation of his; he feels he is checkmated by powerful unions and regarded suspiciously by a public constantly picqued by intellectuals. He may also be aware that in former days - in the time, say, of Andrew Carnegie - the great business leader, despite some hostility, was a culture-hero. In those days businessmen were promient national figures in their own right, sages to be consulted on almost every aspect of life. But since the times of Henry Ford - the last of his kind - this heroic image has gone into eclipse....At times the businessman may think of himself as having been stripped of his prestige by the intellectual and his allies, in a hostile environment created by intellectuals. If so, he overestimates the power of the intellectuals. In fact, the prestige of the businessman has been destroyed largely by his own achievements: it was he who created the giant corporation, an impersonal agency that overshadows his reputation as it disciplines his career; it was his own incessant propaganda about the American Way of Life and Free Ente4rprise that made these spongy abstractions into public generalities shich soak up and assimilate the reputations of the individual enterprisers...An uneasy symbiosis has actually developed between business and intellect. In the US, where government has done far less for the arts and learning than in Europe, culture has always been dependent upon private patronage; it has not been any less dependent in recent decades, when the criticism of business has been so dominant a concern of intellectuals.