So many books from the past are getting a second read because of their resonance with our situation today. “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis or “1984” by George Orwell are classic examples. This month we bring you another in the canon of political philosophy, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” by Richard Hofstadter. It won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction among many other awards, but ironically it was decrying the devaluing of intellectualism just as America was at the apex of its love affair with science and engineering. One shudders to imagine what Hofstadter would say if he could see the venomous tripe passing for intellectual debate today, but you don’t have to wait for his critique of yesterday… just dig in!
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
By Richard Hofstadter
Excerpt from “Richard Hofstadter and America’s New Wave of Anti-Intellectualism”, by David Masciotra on Daily Beast, Mar 2014
“Twenty-first century philistines, suffering from a lack of imagination and curiosity, have seized upon understandable economic anxieties since the financial crash of 2008, to shepherd an increasingly large flock of American sheep into the livestock freight carrier Pulitzer prize winning historian, Richard Hofstadter, called “anti-intellectualism.”
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life—one of Hofstadter’s best, among many great books – was a pile of dynamite in 1963, when it was first published and blew a sizable hole in the house of America’s self-comforting delusions of intellectual superiority. In 2014, one can only hope that some of its initial blast still reverberates, as media commentators, university administrators, and even the President, have exposed themselves as adherents to what Hofstadter indicted as the “lowest common denominator criterion” of thought and “technician conformity” of lifestyle. Suspicion, and often outright hatred, of ideas is making American culture as riveting as oatmeal. By reading Hofstadter, one learns that the resurgence of a new anti-intellectualism isn’t new, at all. In fact, Hofstadter identified the particularly poisonous strain of the virus that now infects the American mind and kills the imagination.
Hofstadter wrote Anti-Intellectualism in American Life after observing, with dismay and disgust, how the Republican Party, much of the media, and many Americans insulted and mocked Adlai Stevenson as an “egghead” throughout the 1950s when the former Governor of Illinois, ran for President. The result is a book of “personal passion”, to use its author’s words, that traces the ugliness of anti-intellectualism throughout American history. From the populist stupidity of glorifying the everyman, while denouncing the expert, to the superstition of religion, and the excessive egalitarianism of the left, the country founded by men of Enlightenment, is often dim.
Anti-intellectualism, according to Hofstadter, is a “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.” He was very clear in his insistence that Americans are not dumb. There is great intelligence in Americans, just as there is great professionalism. The problem is that professional intelligence is mechanical and functional – utilitarian. It is about the completion of an assignment, and the execution of a formula. Due to it having the operative mode of a machine, the preferred way of exercising the mind, for many Americans, takes on what Hofstadter labeled “mediocre sameness.” There are only so many ways to do a job, and since many Americans learn at a very young age, that their entire lives are about the job they will one day have, they begin to think with the variety of appliance assembly methods in an instructional manual…”
