Are Americans hostile to intellectuals, or vice versa?
by Paul Hollander
01/19/2009, Volume 014, Issue 17
The Weekly Standard - link
The Age of American Unreason
by Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 384 pp., $26
American anti-intellectualism is a venerable and much lamented phenomenon, as well as a paradox, considering the American respect for education and the resources devoted to it. Anti-intellectualism also seems incongruous with American accomplishments in science and technology.
However, one may separate the veneration of education from the popular suspicion of intellectuals. These suspicions have coexisted for a long time with the respect for education and the determination to make its blessings widely available. This is the key question raised in this timely volume discussing
why the United States has proved more susceptible than other economically advanced nations to the toxic combination of forces that are the enemies of intellect, learning and reason. .??.??. What accounts for the powerful American attraction to values that seem so at odds not only with intellectual modernism and science but with the old Enlightenment rationalism that made such a vital contribution to the founding of our nation?
Susan Jacoby seeks the answer by placing these cultural-intellectual trends in a historical context, with special reference to the part played by religion, the ideas of the Enlightenment and social Darwinism, but not the ideals of equality.
The suspicion of intellectuals is inseparable from American egalitarianism. They have been widely perceived as a group that looks down on ordinary mortals who don’t have their educational credentials and vocabulary. Intellectuals have also been criticized for being removed from the rest of society by their arrogance and elitism, preoccupied with abstruse ideas couched in impenetrable jargon and of little use to regular people. Lack of common sense, impracticality, and a foolish idealism complete these negative stereotypes.
It has often been suggested that anti-intellectual sentiments follow from the nature of a commercial society that does not appreciate reflection, or the pursuit of higher ideals which don’t yield tangible benefit or profit. In more recent times, Jacoby suggests, anti-intellectualism also fed on the conflation of intellectuals with the radical left, and she finds it difficult to understand why this identification persists well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But pro-Soviet or pro-communist leanings do not exhaust the range of attitudes intellectuals display as tokens of alienation which invite popular misgivings.
Jacoby argues that anti-intellectualism–including anti-rationalism, disdain for science, and popular ignorance–has catastrophically increased during recent decades. This trend finds prominent expression in the decline of educational standards, the increasing dominance of popular culture (especially “the shift from print to video culture”), and even in political discourse. Her indictment of what has come to pass for higher education is clear and unequivocal:
Anyone who takes more than a cursory look at the vast array of college curriculum offerings on popular culture, from “fat studies” to in-depth examination of television sitcoms, knows how far standards have been lowered. .??.??. How can it be that American culture has so debased itself that institutions calling themselves universities, and academic bodies calling themselves English departments actually give course credits for writing “fear journals”? .??.??. It is now possible at many institutions of so-called higher learning for a student to receive a degree in psychology without having taken a mid-level biology course; for an African-American studies major to graduate without reading the basic texts of the “white” Enlightenment; for a business major to graduate without having studied any literature after her freshman year.??.??.??. All of these college graduates, should they choose to become teachers at any level .??.??. will pass on their narrowness and ignorance to the next generation.
Jacoby admits to a “somewhat jaundiced view of the sixties youth culture” and recognizes that the rejection of “the idea of aesthetic hierarchy is unquestionably one of the most powerful cultural legacies of the sixties.” Yet she resists a full recognition of the political roots of these attitudes in radical leftist egalitarianism, and the fashionable irrationality of the period.
Instead she focuses on, and holds responsible, the fundamentalist religious forces (and their neoconservative allies) on the one hand, and popular culture and, especially, television on the other. While her critique of popular culture is sound, she does not make clear what is cause or effect: Are so many Americans indifferent to and ignorant of high culture because of their voracious consumption of mind-numbing popular culture, or do they embrace the latter because they are anti-intellectual, incurious, and badly educated?
Jacoby’s major conclusion is that “the most enduring and important anti-intellectual forces of [the 1960s] were apolitical. .??.??. The fusion of video, the culture of celebrity and the marketing of youth is the real anti-intellectual legacy of the 60s.” But her insistence that popular culture is basically apolitical is questionable. Closer inspection reveals that it has absorbed many of the politically correct pieties of the 1960s even if its prime function is entertainment.
Her other major proposition is that the ascendancy of the religious right is part of a broader trend: “The anti-rationalism of the later twentieth century tapped into a broader fear of modernism, and hatred of secularism that extend beyond the religious realm.” This is an important point, but the fear of modernity is not limited to the religious right. Inexplicably, Jacoby barely touches on the hostility to modernity that has animated the activists and protestors of the 1960s and the counterculture it has spawned.
This counterculture, both in its political and cultural manifestations, was not merely opposed to the Vietnam war, racism, and sexism; its rejection of American society and culture was much broader and deeper. Even its opposition to capitalism was intertwined with a visceral rejection of modernity. These critics of American society rejected what they considered dehumanizing scientific rationality, the idea of objective truth, modern social organizations, impersonality, rigorous formal education, urban and industrial life, even specialization. They dreamed of simple communal life in pristine rural settings untainted by technology, hierarchy, role differentiation, and division of labor.
The radical protestors and activists of the 1960s entertained utopian aspirations and conceived of themselves as the new noble savages. They were also drawn to what they perceived as the contemporary incarnations of the noble savage: the peasants of the Third World, seemingly untouched by modernity.
Anti-intellectualism found major expression in the educational reforms inspired by the radical egalitarianism of the ’60s. Contrary to Jacoby’s assertions, the cultural and political values of the period did converge, although it is also true that, subsequently, the counterculture (or aspects thereof) became commercialized. Standards dropped not only because students have been treated as privileged customers, but also because of the direct impact of the values and beliefs of the ’60s.
Radical egalitarianism demanded not only equal opportunity but equal results; “elitism” became a bad word. Grades were abolished, or grade inflation became its functional equivalent; teachers came to be more rigorously evaluated than students; “tracking” in high school was rejected as inegalitarian and harmful to minorities. Requirements were abandoned or reduced, and students were urged to devise their own curricula. They, too, were seen as potential noble savages, bursting with unrealized potential, to be liberated from requirements, institutional structures, academic specialization, and the authority of teachers. The Weathermen broke into high schools yelling “Jailbreak!” urging students to escape their suffocating, regimented environment.
For the radicals of the ’60s and their descendants, any form of differentiation or discrimination became suspect. Distinguishing between high culture and mass culture was reactionary, and many academic and nonacademic intellectuals championed mass culture to show that their heart was in the right place.
Jacoby occasionally admits that the attacks on rationality also came from the left, but pays little attention to it. While the irrationality of the right has had many manifestations (e.g., campaigns against the teaching of evolution), overall it had little impact on what is being taught in the great majority of colleges and universities, on the movies made in Hollywood, on plays performed in theaters, on the content and message of best-selling novels, and on what is displayed in museums. The number of conservative faculty members in departments of humanities and social sciences remains minuscule. And if student demonstrations declined over the past three decades, it is because faculties and administrators anticipated or readily met the demands of those who would demonstrate.
Jacoby dismisses the impact of the ’60s radicals on the ground that their numbers were small, overlooking that organized and determined minorities can wield great influence and power, especially when their demands are backed up by disruption or the threat of violence, as was the case during the 1960s and ’70s. Black Studies, in particular, were often the direct result of such intimidation (and of white-liberal guilt) rather than a desire to “ghettoize” ethnic and women’s studies, as Jacoby believes.
Another contributor to the decline of educational standards not discussed here is affirmative action. Driven by a laudable desire to right the wrongs of the past, educational institutions lowered or diluted standards of both student admission and faculty hiring. Less qualified students had to be provided with less demanding curriculum and less stringent evaluation.
A most questionable assertion is that “of the most potent myths associated with the 60s, the most wrongheaded is .??.??. to equate and conflate the decade’s youth culture with its left-wing counterculture.”
While the youth culture has some apolitical roots and attributes–including a longstanding cultural veneration of the young and youthfulness–it has been deeply influenced by the values, preferred forms of recreation, and entertainment of the political counterculture of the ’60s. Yet it is also true that youth culture, including some of its political aspects, has been co-opted by the market. If Che Guevara T-shirts sell, American businesses will gladly supply them. But buying and wearing them is not without political meaning. It is true that many things once considered subversive have become “mainstream,” but that doesn’t mean that “mainstreaming” had no political and cultural consequences.
Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written or edited a dozen books.