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# 2025-05-24 - Anti-Intellectualism In American Life | |
# by Richard Hofstadter | |
Someone recommended this book to me in 2020 and said it was relevant | |
to the current political climate in the US. I found the book dry and | |
boring at times, and fascinating at others. The most surprising part | |
for me was the discussion of masculinity. I did not realize that it | |
was an academic subject in the 1950's. This book mentions the rise | |
of a hyper-masculine ethos after the Civil War, for example: | |
> Jesus Christ could go like a six-cylinder engine, and if you think | |
> Jesus couldn't, you're dead wrong. | |
> | |
> Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, | |
> weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate | |
> ossified three-karat Christianity. | |
> | |
> I have no interest in a God who does not smite. | |
> | |
> --Billy Sunday | |
I found several other parts of this book surprising in the same way. | |
I remember an associate talking about how he hated hipsters in the | |
SFBA. I didn't realize that writers were using the term "hipster" | |
in the 1950's and making the same generalizations that we make today. | |
Evolution of the Hipster by Paste Magazine (2010) | |
> One of the qualities that has so readily subjected the beatniks to | |
> mockery in the mass media and the other literature of the squares | |
> is this distinctive uniformity--which the beatniks have carried to | |
> the point of having their own dress. They have created a new | |
> paradox: a conformity of alienation. | |
> ... | |
> The spokesmen of the beatnik, and the hipster, and the left have | |
> their own quarrels about the proper style of alienation and the | |
> limits of its expression; but they all share a common conviction | |
> that there is some proper style or stance or posture to be | |
> recommended which will somehow release the individuality and | |
> creativity of the artist, or sustain the capacities of the social | |
> critic and protect him from corruption. | |
Regarding the ironies of bigotry: | |
> Today's conspiracy theorists call migrants and refugees secret | |
> invaders when we are, in point of fact, the ones invading them. Not | |
> with engineers or strawberry-pickers but with bombs and military | |
> bases. Conspiracy theorists accuse their enemies of being secretly | |
> funded by billionaires when they're the ones on a payroll. Those who | |
> warn about secret invasions like to talk about how women are poorly | |
> treated under Islamic fundamentalism; coincidentally, these are the | |
> same people who also cry themselves to sleep over our feminist | |
> excesses (which, what are the odds, is also what the | |
> fundamentalists say they are protecting their societies from). | |
The Humanist magazine, Jul/Aug 2020 | |
The book also discusses the history of US education at length. | |
I have already read about the US education system being based on | |
Prussia's. What i didn't know was that the Prussian example was the | |
only free common-school system available at that time to use as a | |
model. | |
> The Americans were the first other people in modern history to | |
> follow the Prussian example in establishing free common-school | |
> systems. | |
The book discusses the outcomes of the US education system. I have | |
read many opinions about children needing to be in the outdoors, to | |
have personal attention, and many other things not present in the | |
US education (Black Elk, Tagore, etc). Here is an interesting quote | |
by E. O Wilson comparing public schooled children to cattle in a | |
feed lot. | |
> The dire comparison I make is between children brought up in a | |
> totally humanized, artifactual environment, urban or suburban, and | |
> cattle brought up in a feedlot. When you see cattle in a feedlot, | |
> they seem perfectly content, but they're not cattle. It's an | |
> exaggeration, of course, to compare those with children, but | |
> somehow children can be perfectly happy with computer screens and | |
> games and movies where they get to see not only African wildlife | |
> but, lo and behold, dinosaurs. But they're just not fully | |
> developing their psychic energy and their propensities to develop | |
> and seek on their own. | |
> | |
> --E. O. Wilson | |
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/conversation-eo-wilson/ | |
The book makes a distinction between intelligence and the intellect. | |
I have read many variations on this theme. Usually intelligence is | |
described as being merely clever like a fox, and intellectual | |
brilliance involves the creativity of an inventor. | |
By the way, i lost about half of my notes in Orgzly. I had way more | |
notes about the history of US education. I blame my data loss on | |
Android Go Edition. I suspect its limitations make it prone to | |
killing processes in a way that risks data loss. I will try remember | |
to commit new notes instead of leaving them open in Orgzly. | |
What follows are interesting quotes from the book. | |
# Chapter 1: Anti-intellectualism In Our Time | |
Primarily it was McCarthyism which, aroused the fear that the | |
critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, | |
intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy s constant | |
detonations he was after bigger game but intellectuals were in the | |
line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his | |
followers when they were hit. | |
Finally, in 1957, the launching of the Sputnik by the Soviets | |
precipitated one of those periodic surges of self-conscious national | |
reappraisal to which the American public is prone. 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. | |
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." | |
# Chapter 2: On The Unpopularity Of The Intellect | |
Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a | |
fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a | |
manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality--one of the | |
most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works | |
within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be | |
quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in | |
reaching them. Finally, it is of such universal use that it can daily | |
be seen at work and admired alike by simple or complex minds. | |
Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and | |
contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, | |
manipulate, re-order, adjust; intellect examines, ponders, wonders, | |
theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the | |
immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates | |
evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. | |
This distinction may seem excessively abstract, but it is frequently | |
illustrated in American culture. ... perhaps the most impressive | |
illustration arises from a comparison of the American regard for | |
inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest | |
inventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the | |
American public, and a legend has been built around him. One cannot, | |
I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the | |
same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as | |
directly influential on ordinary life as Edison's. But one might have | |
expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard | |
Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical | |
chemistry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among | |
the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe, | |
lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale, | |
where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American | |
universities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth | |
century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with | |
more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand | |
his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree. | |
Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being | |
exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most | |
intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. | |
... Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as | |
"idle curiosity" but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of | |
the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very | |
restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of | |
truth and its discontent with dogmas. | |
Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily | |
playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his | |
intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the | |
quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of | |
the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the | |
intellectual is one who turns answers into questions. | |
It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only | |
different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with | |
or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that | |
gives rise to first-rate work in all areas of humanistic expression | |
and in many fields of inquiry. | |
I have suggested that one of the first questions asked in America | |
about intellect and intellectuals concerns their practicality. One | |
reason why anti-intellectualism has changed in our time is that our | |
sense of the impracticality of intellect has been transformed. During | |
the nineteenth century, when business criteria dominated American | |
culture almost without challenge, and when most business and | |
professional men attained eminence without much formal education, | |
academic schooling was often said to be useless. It was assumed that | |
schooling existed not to cultivate certain distinctive qualities of | |
mind but to make personal advancement possible. | |
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which | |
elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take | |
a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other | |
modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and | |
frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and | |
conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various | |
times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, | |
Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international | |
bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of | |
this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in | |
our time found a place. | |
The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and | |
wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on | |
the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is | |
pitted against character, because it is widely believed that | |
intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into | |
the sly or the diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since | |
theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the "purely" | |
theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against | |
democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that | |
defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is | |
accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the | |
intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of | |
emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic | |
sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is | |
deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous? Of | |
course the fundamental fallacy in these fictional antagonisms is that | |
they are based not upon an effort to seek out the actual limits of | |
intellect in human life but rather upon a simplified divorce of | |
intellect from all the other human qualities with which it may be | |
combined. Neither in the development of the individual character nor | |
in the course of history are problems posed in such a simple or | |
abstract fashion. For the same reason it would be pointless to accept | |
the form in which the challenge is put and attempt to make a defense | |
of intellect as against emotion or character or practicality. | |
Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against | |
the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be | |
paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be | |
fully consummated. | |
In America primitivism has affected the thinking of many men too | |
educated and cultivated to run with the frontier revivalists but | |
sympathetic to their underlying distrust for civilized forms. It is | |
visible in Transcendentalism which sometimes set itself up as the | |
evangelicalism of the highbrows. | |
All this is hardly surprising: America was settled by men and women | |
who repudiated European civilization for its oppressiveness or | |
decadence, among other reasons... | |
# Chapter 3: The Evangelical Spirit | |
As the English religious reformers became convinced that the | |
Reformation had not gone far enough to meet the social or spiritual | |
demands of their followers, successive waves of Millennarians, | |
Anabaptists, Seekers, Ranters, and Quakers assailed the established | |
order and its clergy, preached a religion of the poor, argued for | |
intuition and inspiration as against learning and doctrine, elevated | |
lay preachers to leadership, and rejected the professional clergy as | |
"null and void and without authority." At the time of the Puritan | |
revolution, the preachers of the New Model Army were unsparing in | |
their anti-professional and anti-intellectual broadsides against the | |
clergy, the university teachers, and the lawyers. | |
# Chapter 5: The Revolt Against Modernity | |
The two new notes which are evident in a most striking form in Billy | |
Sunday's rhetoric, the note of toughness and the note of ridicule and | |
denunciation, may be taken as the signal manifestations of a new kind | |
of popular mind. One can trace in Sunday the emergence of what I | |
would call the one-hundred percent mentality: a mind totally | |
committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and | |
determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This | |
type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist | |
religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy | |
overlay of fundamentalist morality. The one-hundred percenter, who | |
will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and | |
no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of | |
toughness and masculinity. One observer remarked of Sunday that no | |
man of the time, "not even Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so | |
much on his personal, militant masculinity." Jesus was a scrapper, | |
and his disciple Sunday would destroy the notion that a Christian | |
must be "a sort of dishrag proposition, a wishy-washy sissified sort | |
of galoot that lets everybody make a doormat out of him." ...he | |
summed up his temper when he confessed: "I have no interest in a God | |
who does not smite." | |
He brooked no suggestion that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing, | |
impregnable, and tough. He turned his gift for invective as | |
unsparingly on the higher criticism and on evolution as on everything | |
else that displeased him. "Thousands of college graduates are going | |
as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I d | |
give $999,999 to the church and $1 to education. ... When the word of | |
God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go | |
to hell!" | |
In 1926 Hiram W. Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, | |
wrote... "The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is | |
emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a | |
weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from | |
ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based | |
have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason | |
has had a place in the human brain. ... They are the foundations of | |
our American civilization, even more than our great historic | |
documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the | |
denatured intellectuals cannot." | |
The Georgia assemblyman who said: "Read the Bible. It teaches you how | |
to act. Read the hymn-book. It contains the finest poetry ever | |
written. Read the almanac. It shows you how to figure out what the | |
weather will be. There isn't another book that it is necessary for | |
anyone to read, and therefore I am opposed to all libraries." may | |
seem too obscure to be worth notice; but one can hardly say the same | |
of a former Secretary of State and three-time candidate for the | |
presidency who could proclaim, as Bryan did in a speech before | |
Seventh-Day Adventists in 1924: "All the ills from which America | |
suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be | |
better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the | |
first three verses of Genesis." | |
Both quotations are in Maynard Shipley: The War on Modern Science | |
(New York, 1927), pp. 330, 254-5, Such remarks are in the main | |
tradition of evangelicalism, but they reflect its increasing | |
shrillness in this period. | |
Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate | |
at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of | |
maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own | |
way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It | |
accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands | |
human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing | |
process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the | |
ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another | |
variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. | |
It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is | |
essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time | |
circumspect and humane. | |
The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is | |
essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for | |
conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it | |
scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can | |
tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it | |
believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support | |
measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and | |
socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism, which, as | |
everyone knows, is atheism. ... It is not concerned with the | |
realities of power with the fact, say, that the Soviets have the bomb | |
but with the spiritual battle with the Communist, preferably the | |
domestic Communist, whose reality does not consist in what he does, | |
or even in the fact that he exists, but who represents, rather, an | |
archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling match. | |
# Chapter 6: The Decline of the Gentleman | |
When the United States began its national existence, the relationship | |
between intellect and power was not a problem. The leaders were the | |
intellectuals. Advanced though the nation was in the development of | |
democracy, the control of its affairs still rested largely in a | |
patrician elite: and within this elite men of intellect moved freely | |
and spoke with enviable authority. Since it was an unspecialized and | |
versatile age, the intellectual as expert was a negligible force; but | |
the intellectual as ruling-class gentleman was a leader in every | |
segment of society at the bar, in the professions, in business, and | |
in political affairs. The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, | |
men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who | |
used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the | |
exigent problems of their time. | |
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by | |
intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the | |
intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a | |
servant, or a scapegoat. | |
# Chapter 7: The Fate of the Reformer | |
The central idea of the reformers the idea--which they all agreed | |
upon and which excited their deepest concern was the improvement of | |
the civil service, without which they believed no other reform could | |
be successfully carried out. The ideal of civil-service reform | |
brought into direct opposition the credo of the professional | |
politicians, who put then--faith in party organisation and party | |
rewards and the practice of rotation in office, and the ideals of the | |
reformers, who wanted competence, efficiency, and economy in the | |
public service, open competition for jobs on the basis of merit, and | |
security of tenure. The reformers looked to various models for their | |
proposals to the American military services, to bureaucratic systems | |
in Prussia or even China; but principally this English-oriented | |
intellectual class looked for inspiration to England, where | |
civil-service reorganization had been under way since the publication | |
of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854. The English civil-service | |
reformers had designed their proposals in full awareness of the | |
organic relation of the civil service to the class structure and to | |
the educational system. They had planned a civil service which, as | |
Gladstone observed, would give the gentlemanly classes "command over | |
all the higher posts" and allot to members of the lower classes the | |
positions that could be filled by persons with more practical and | |
less expensive training. | |
The politicians and bosses found their answer in crying down the | |
superior education and culture of their critics as political | |
liabilities, and in questioning their adequacy for the difficult and | |
dirty work of day-to-day politics. As the politicians put it, they, | |
the bosses and party workers, had to function in the bitter world of | |
reality in which the common people also had to live and earn their | |
living. This was not the sphere of morals and ideals, of education | |
and culture: it was the hard, masculine sphere of business and | |
politics. The reformers, they said, claimed to be unselfish; but if | |
this was true at all, it was true only because they were alien | |
commentators upon an area of life in which they did not have to work | |
and for which in fact they were unfit. In the hard-driving, | |
competitive, ruthless, materialistic world of the Gilded Age, to be | |
unselfish suggested not purity but a lack of self, a lack of capacity | |
for grappling with reality, a lack of assertion, of masculinity. | |
# Chapter 9: Business And Intellect | |
For at least three quarters of a century business has been | |
stigmatized by most American intellectuals as the classic enemy of | |
intellect; businessmen themselves have so long accepted this role | |
that by now their enmity seems to be a fact of nature. No doubt there | |
is a certain measure of inherent dissonance between business | |
enterprise and intellectual enterprise: being dedicated to different | |
sets of values, they are bound to conflict; and intellect is always | |
potentially threatening to any institutional apparatus or to fixed | |
centers of power. But this enmity, being qualified by a certain | |
mutual dependence, need not take the form of constant open warfare. | |
The fear of mind and the disdain for culture, so quickly evident | |
wherever the prior claims of practicality are urged in the literature | |
of business, are ubiquitous themes. They rest upon two pervasive | |
American attitudes toward civilization and personal religion first, a | |
widely shared contempt for the past; and second, an ethos of | |
self-help and personal advancement in which even religious faith | |
becomes merely an agency of practicality. | |
# Chapter 10: Self Help And Spiritual Technology | |
As the mercantile ideal declined, it was replaced by the ideal of the | |
self-made man, an ideal which reflected the experiences and | |
aspirations of countless village boys who had become, if not | |
millionaires, at least substantial men of business. Modern students | |
of social mobility have made it incontestably clear that the | |
legendary American rags-to-riches story, despite the spectacular | |
instances that adorn our business annals, was more important as a | |
myth and a symbol than as a statistical actuality. The topmost | |
positions in American industry, even in the most hectic days of | |
nineteenth-century expansion, were held for the most part by men who | |
had begun life with decided advantages. But there were enough | |
self-made men, and their rise was dramatic and appealing enough, to | |
give substance to the myth. | |
The idea of the self-made man was not new. It was a historical out | |
growth of Puritan preachings and of the Protestant doctrine of the | |
calling. Benjamin Franklin had preached it, but it is significant | |
that his own later life was not lived in accordance with his | |
catchpenny maxims. | |
Irvin G Wyllie, in his illuminating study, The Self-Made Man in | |
America, points out that the literature of self-help was not a | |
literature of business methods or techniques; it did not deal with | |
production, accounting, engineering, advertising, or investments; it | |
dealt with the development of character, and nowhere were its | |
Protestant origins more manifest. | |
> for I am mediocre. But . . . business and life are built upon | |
> successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies not through | |
> the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the | |
> most out of ordinary folks. | |
> | |
> Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men by Anonymous | |
> American Magazine, Feb 1924 | |
> Volume 97, Page 170 | |
Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men by Anonymous | |
# Chapter 12: The School and the Teacher | |
The Americans were the first other people in modern history to follow | |
the Prussian example in establishing free common-school systems. | |
Among their earliest statutes were land ordinances setting aside a | |
portion of the public domain to support school systems. Their rapidly | |
proliferating schoolhouses and libraries testified to their concern | |
for the diffusion of knowledge, and their lyceums and Chautauquas | |
showed that this concern, far from ending with the school years, | |
extended to the education of adults. | |
That something has always been seriously missing in our educational | |
performance, despite the high promise of our rhetoric, has been | |
evident to the educators who have taken our hopes most seriously. | |
That American teachers are not well rewarded or esteemed is almost | |
universally recognized in contemporary comment. | |
The unenviable situation of the teacher can be traced back to the | |
earliest days of our history. The educational enthusiasm of the | |
American people was never keen enough to dispose them to support | |
their teachers very well. | |
author: Hofstadter, Richard, 1916-1970 | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life | |
LOC: E169.1 .H74 | |
tags: book,history,non-fiction,political | |
title: Anti-Intellectualism In American Life | |
# Tags | |
book | |
history | |
non-fiction | |
political |