Anti- Intellectualism in American Life

You make two claims regarding Hofstadter's thesis or commentary which are not supported in the text, so far as I can find. In fact, they are both explicitly argued against by him. First, that Hofstadter believes anti-intellectualism is unique to American culture and, second, that he defines anti-intellectualism 'rather narrowly'.

Whatever one may say against Scalia, Wolfowitz, and Rice, they are certainly intellectuals -- and quite well-liked by those whom Hofstadter suspects of anti-intellectualism.

No one, for example, ever poured more scorn on the American professoriat than HL Mencken, and no one has portrayed other writers in fiction with more venom than Mary McCarthy; but we would not on this account dream of classing Mencken with William F. Buckley as an enemy of the professors nor Miss McCarthy with the late senator of the same name.

george

You do continue to ignore the tempered tone and tentative nature of his thesis. As he said, it wasn't a comparative study.

...

You mistake, in your nationalist sensitivity, an attempt to understand as some species of attack.

claim that these characteristics are necessarily central to the motivation of conservative forces in American political life,

I believe I have already done that in previous posts. However if you wish to see several specific examples, together with text that places these points at the heart of his arguments, please reread Hofstadter's introduction and the opening chapter of the book.

a presumption that 'Conservatives are bad/stupid: liberals (or progressives), good/intelligent.

We would surely agree that instances exist where anti-intellectualism can be found.

That's entirely over-simplistic and not a claim Hofstadter would (or does) make, nor I. It's clearly not true in the specific nor true in a generalized view.

If one were to arbitrarily take a hundred conservative-minded folks and an equal number of liberal-minded folks, and then test them against some set of criteria, surely the range of talents and abilities and propensities (or whatever one might be able to evaluate) would be so varied and diverse as to make the exercise meaningless except to show how much we are all alike.

But let's pose something like an opposite thesis...that liberals/progressives are flakey, unrealistic, cloud-riding dangerous impracticalists. Would you find such a thesis less disagreeable than the one you posit I and Hofstadter advance?

The thing is, I didn't really wish to get into this old battle of binary-oppositional viewpoints with you. Rather, I wished to look at an aspect of American society and history and mythology which, Hofstadter and I perceive, deeply informs America.

We would surely agree that instances exist where anti-intellectualism can be found. For example, places where existing ideologies or values are not allowed to be challenged - corners of the environmentalist camp, corners of the anti-environmentalist camp, fundamentalist faiths, the KKK, Stalanist Russia, anal Rotarians, etc. {/quote] I fully agree with this.

Quote:

And if we then survey these societies, we can extract some general tendencies of thought and behavior. One such tendency which logically must be present in such examples is a denigration of the intellect - that is, a denigration of the potential for individuals in that society to come up with better ideas than the ones pre-existing. And any instituton of education which forwards such a system of challenge to the pre-existing order of ideas will likewise gain the same sort of denigration.

I agree that critics are rarely welcomed by those who represent the object of their analysis. Revolutionary or even new ideas (and those who express them) are resisted by those with a vested interest in their alternatives - good or bad.. Self-styled "intellectuals" have done both good and great mischief in the history of human affairs. For the most part those who advocated rule by enlightened elites (whether of the left or the right) have generally brought great harm to humanity - particularly during the 290th century.

The decades long love affair of Western, left wing intellectuals with the myths of Soviet (and other) socialism, continued in the face of overwhelming facts indicating that poverty, death and oppression were its chief products is not a particularly encouraging story for those who value the supposed sagacity of the self-described intellectual class. With this in mind, several (not all) of Hofstadter's arguments and expressed beliefs look both dated and foolish today.

There is a difference between knowledge and understanding; between cleverness and wisdom; between the merely articulate and the wise. Wise understanding (and its alternative) can exist on both sides of the knowledge/articulate divide. I learned in the Navy that he stupid slugs only rarely cause problems in a complex operation - they tend to come from the high energy idiots. Similarly the non-thinking inarticulate rarely cause political or social trouble, while the glib, active fools in the grip of false ideas often do.

Quote:

And if we think about what factors are (again, necessarily, in the logical sense) part of the mental/social phenomena of the encouragement of new ideas, we find ourselves in the territory of the imaginative, the unusual, the different-thinking. And that is surely something like "love of the life of the mind and ideas."

Considered in this way, do we then think of someone like Edison as an intellectual or a practical man? Clearly, he was one of those exceptional people who excel in both capacities. Whatever else was going on his head, imagination was occupying a large part of it, at the very least in that process before he set to testing what his imagination presented.

Nothing at all wrong with the love of ideas, even new and unusual, or even of the "piety and playfulness" that, in Hofstadter's expressed view so often accompany the activity of their practitioners. My reservations (when they occur) come only with the actions taken to apply those ideas which I believe will likely produce a bad result.

Quote:

So it is not a battle between the 'practical' and the 'intellect'. Good engineers, as you know, must be dual-capable in this manner, if they are to excel. You, personally, love poetry. Would you rather sit down for a glass of wine with spendius or a whiz-bang Ford mechanic who thinks books belong in the shithouse?

And why would that mechanic think this way? Why would he have so little use for the imaginative, for the "life of the mind"? What would be his likely response if you suggested he take a nightschool class in Shakepearean tragedy? Or in philosophy? How happy would he be in consideration of his tax dollars going to a school-system which engaged in such 'education'?

What would a school system look like if many of the people in his community shared his opinions? What would a nation look like?

I'm not so sure there is no battle. I've long since learned that, in managing an enterprise, one cannot safely let engineers decide when they are done. They will continue refining the design (and adding cost & complexity) until the very purpose of the project is lost.

Edison was a quick & crafty businessman who spun hundreds of inventions (and patents) from Maxwell's equations. He was the rare engineer who knew when he was done, and not particularly of an "intellectual' cast of mind as Hofstadter has described it.

In my life I've had an unusual level of experience in contact with mechanics, laborers, sailors and other varieties of the unlettered. I have learned not to underestimate them, and have seen many situations in which their understanding and insight exceeded that of those appointed over them. I have also found examples of deep appreciation for lyric beauty among some - perhaps not refined by education and training, but lyric and true nonetheless.

The unlettered immigrants who flooded to this country a century ago turned out to value education they themselves didn't have as their children grew. CUNY (or CCNY as it was once known) is a shining example of this. It is a separate subject, but I believe the decline in the quality of public education in this country has more to do with the monopolistic behavior of the educational establishment and the intellectual arrogance of "professional" educators who style themselves as intellectuals, than it does with the ignorance and resistance of the lumpen proletariat. (In a perverse way I agree with Hofstadter in this area.).

Quote:

You protest Hofstadter's concentration of his investigation on American society because you believe other societies likely to be little different. That may even be a correct estimate. But quite regardless of anywhere else, where such tendencies are so in American culture, they will have causes and consequences all of which are a matter of completely appropriate study.

Again, no problem with his descriptive efforts in this area. I believe he is largely accurate and balanced. The peculiarly American varieties of all this do indeed merit study, and they do have a place in the American political story. However, the lack of context and comparative investigation renders Hofstadter's conclusions flawed and misleading. He fails to distinguish between a few observable phenomena among many and the essential meaning of the processes he claims to have found. This is a very serious fault for an intellectual.A

But very clearly, as Hofstadter shows, the evangelical dynamic and anti-intellectualism DID indeed feed on each other (as they still do). That's an inextricable historical correlation.

Whether or not below each of those phenomena sit others (pioneer society with little intrinsic organizational structure and consequent zest/need for ad hoc solutions) doesn't invalidate the above, however.

georgeob1 wrote:

I believe I have already done that in previous posts. However if you wish to see several specific examples, together with text that places these points at the heart of his arguments, please reread Hofstadter's introduction and the opening chapter of the book.

I just did. Like the french canadian trapper explained, "I went back...to get my snowshoes...and dere dey were...gone!

I guess he is right in observing a correlation between increased religiosity and decreased reverence to intellectuals in America. What I disagree about is the causation he interprets into it. He believes evangelic religion and anti-intellectualism feed on each other. I believe they are both independently caused by the fact that America has been a very free society for very long.

I was disappointed that my observations about Sinclair Lewis ( Elmer Gantry, Babbitt, and the cowboy) did not take flight. I was quite pleased with myself over that.

For some reason, I keep listening to Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock interpretation of the "Star Sprangled Banner" again and again today. In just three minutes and fourty-three seconds, it says more about Vietnam-era America than every intellectual monography I've ever seen about it. I wish American radio stations started playing it more often again these days.