Bono was on Conan Obrien or some show and said “in American you see the guy with the big car and fancy house and say ‘someday, I’ll have that’. In Ireland they see the same guy and say ‘someday, I’m going to get that jerk!’”
Well, I went to a very good Southern university and would like to shake up the pool of where our presidential pool of candidates comes from. For all I dislike about McCain and Palin, I really love that he went to Annapolis and she went to U. of Idaho.
The National Lampoon was founded by three Harvard alumni. Their two most brilliant writers came from SUNY Rochester and University of Miami (Ohio). Think about it.
I think that it’s more of a concept of foreignness that drives it.
I mean, if you were raised in a family that didn’t particularly value education, and your expectations of your life were to be a roofer or a plumber, or to lay tile and drink beer and get rowdy/laid on the weekends, you probably wouldn’t have much in common with someone whose family valued education, and whose expectations involved at least a Master’s degree.
Add to the wildly different frame of reference, a certain perception that intellectuals are “know-it-alls” and eggheads, and out of touch with reality (as they themselves experience it), and you get a lot of distrust. Another perception is that the intellectuals live somewhere else and are kind of effete (think Woody Allen) that doesn’t play well in Southern, Western and Mid-Western blue-collar crowds that value a different set of gender roles.
Put more simply, just why would a dockworker in Houston trust or believe some nerdy, wimpy eggheaded New Yorker on something?
Sort of. NCOs (sergeants) are promoted through the enlisted ranks from private to corporal and so on. Officers start out as lieutenants (which outranks all sergeants, etc) and usually come from college ROTC programs or military academies like West Point. Effectively creating two classes or career tracks.
Historically, in many Europeans armies, officers were only selected from the upper classes.
A business world analogy would be Dunder Miflin in The Offfice where management and the white collar accountants and sales people in the corporate offices and the blue collar warehouse guys.
So basically, the mentality is that sergeants or line supervisors got to where they are because they worked themselves up from the bottom while the officers or management are where they are because they happened to be fortunate enough to be born to a family with the wealth and connections to send them to the necessary resume building schools.
I see this a lot in my curent employer.
One the one hand, you have people 20 years in a comfortable job who say "that’s the way it’s always been done’.
One the other hand, you have people who are like “that’s not the way the world works anymore and you need to change if the company is going to continue to exist.”
I think these attitudes translate to life in general. You may have the best idea to change the world. But ultimately, I’m comfortible with the way things are for me now so if I’m not a part of your new world vision, what should I care about it?
Name one of the most intellectual cultured countries in the late 1920’s-early 1930’s, even having had a big chuck of it blown to Hell in the 1910’s… Germany.
Also, you’re a hard working guy, got your job down solid, and they bring in the managament trainee to be your boss- straight out of college with a business degree, and knoooows everything & isn’t shy about making sure you know it.
I rest my case.
When you talk about elite and intellectual, who exactly are you refering to. While I am not middle american, I have yet to hear one person deride a nasa scientist for having degrees out the wazooo.
Could it be that we are talking about a sub genre of the beast.
declan
Do you have any specific examples of this?
This is hardly NYC’s fault. As an entity it has little to no control how Hollywood chooses to portray it.
I think it boils down to the city slicker vs the country bumpkin. It seems to be a part of American folklore–big city type comes to [del]Mayberry small town and tries to show up the just plain folk there, but them thar folk have been gettin’ the better of Mr Fancy Suit all along.
I can’t dredge up an exact title, but Twain is full of this theme as are any number of stories, plays, musicals etc (The Music Man comes to mind).
There has always been a distrust of intellectuals in America–we don’t pride ourselves on our thinkers and philosophers (name one), but on working.
I don’t think middle America resents intellectualism per se. I think Middle America resents an air of superiority. Bill Clinton is certainly well-educated and intelligent, but he has a common touch. By that I simply mean that he has a way of not behaving as if he feels he’s better than everybody else in the room.
I think Obama has this gift, too.
Kerry and Gore, not so much.
Oh I don’t know (in no particular order)…
Ben Franklin
James Madison
Thomas Jefferson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Albert Einstein
Ernest Hemingway
Milton Friedman
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Jared Diamond
Edward O. Wilson
To name a few…
Did you have a case there? Because I didn’t see it.
Look, I don’t need some NASA egghead telling me how to build this rocket. All I need is my ball-peen hammer, a couple of tons of titanium alloy for the casing, some atomized aluminum fuel, a little ammonium perchlorate for an oxidizer and a whole lot of elbow grease and I’m taking this bad boy to the moon!
You know, New York City does have a pretty busy waterway.
I think it comes down to people tend to trust what they know and the more simple they are the more they tend to resist anything different from them.
It’s like the retards* who scream that Obama is a “terrorist”. Do they really think that he supports terrorism or are they basically just parroting anything negative they hear because he’s different and they don’t trust him? McCain, on the otherhand is trustworthy because he’s this surly old codger who fought in Nam and they can relate to that.
Reminds me of some conservative commentator (William F. Buckley?) who said that he’d rather have Congress composed of the first 400 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.
But anyway, I do think there is some hostility among the white middle class people referred to in the OP (I’ll call them ‘Middle America’) towards the sort of intellectual elite you find in, for example, the Harvard faculty. I will call them “Harvard Intellectuals”
Why? Well I think that there’s a bit of a conflict of interest between Middle America and Harvard Intellectuals.
For one thing, the Harvard Intellectuals tend to be anti-white. For example Susan Sontag is known to have said something like “The white race is the cancer of human history.” This viewpoint often informs the pro-multicultural, pro-multinational policies they espouse (or are perceived to espouse). I suspect that people in Middle America feel that such policies are detrimental to their immediate interests.
By contrast, the Harvard Intellectuals get an opportunity to demonstrate their moral and cultural superiority with little detriment to their immediate interests.
To put it bluntly, I think that Middle America frequently perceives Harvard Intellectuals as limousine liberals and chardonnay socialists.
Do you have any idea how smart you have to be to get into Harvard Law, let alone finish near the top of your class? Pretty much by definition he is the top 5% of the top 5% of everyone who went to law school in his year. Those are pretty good intellectual credentials if you ask me.
That’s one. What about the rest?
Listen to them speak and you will know what “gentlemens c’” are. Yale does not flunk out the rich and powerful legacies. They get in when they do not deserve to, and pass through while they party . When Bush speaks you know pretty quickly what he is.
The usual liberal / conservative culture clash, I would say. views towards firearms, christianity, gay marriage, the death penalty etc.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. You’ve claimed that the Harvard Intellectuals are or tend to be anti-white, and provided one who’s made a statement to that effect. That’s not sufficient to conclude that the rest of the group has similar sentiments. Do you have other evidence?
While i think you launched a really important and interesting discussion here, i think your focus on “middle America,” and your rather broad and eclectic definition of anti-intellectualism are giving you problems.
If “middle America” is indeed hostile to intellectuals and intellectualism, it is not alone, and it’s certainly not unique in American history. In 1963, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.
In this book, Hofstadter finds strong strains of anti-intellectualism throughout American history, and he finds it among a wide variety of people and among a wide variety of movements. From the evangelical religion of the 18th and 19th centuries, through to the education system itself (especially early 20th century Progressive education), and in myriad other places, Hofstadter discusses a tendency to privilege the experiential and the practical and the pragmatic over the intellectual in American history.
Obviously an intellectual himself, Hofstadter is very critical of this anti-intellectualism in much of his book, although he also notes that it has often been marshaled in the service of admirable anti-rationalistic, anti-elitist, and democratic causes.
Of course, for Hofstadter as for us today, anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism sometimes run at odds with one another. There have been plenty of anti-intellectual Americans who were also, in many ways, part of the elite, especially when measured in socio-economic terms. It’s interesting that you raise the example of business in the OP, because a place where Hofstadter found a lot of anti-intellectualism in the twentieth century was among businessmen, and he points out that business leaders in the middle of the twentieth century were constantly deriding academics and intellectuals and even economists, and would frequently make an appeal to their own practical experience as more valuable and useful.
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time studying the thoughts of post-WWII American businessmen, i can attest to the accuracy of Hofstadter’s description. If you read business magazines from the period, or go through the papers of organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers from the 1940s and 1950s, you will find countless criticisms of intellectuals, with businessmen often dismissing the intellectual as someone with no practical experience, someone who “has never had to meet a monthly payroll.”
Not much has changed today, it seems to me. We still frequently find business leaders and multi-millionaire conservative politicians like Mitt Romney tossing around terms like “academic elite,” all the time ignoring their own elite status in American society.
Of course, it could be that people like Romney throw around these sorts of epithets because they resonate with voters. And it’s here that we arrive at your question about middle America, i guess. I think there is a large swath of ordinary Americans who feel some hostility to intellectualism, and i don’t think it’s confined to the people you have described as “middle America,” even though it might be somewhat more common among that group.
But i think we need to be careful about defining what that anti-intellectualism actually is. I’m not sure that i would call an unwillingness to go to a sushi restaurant in New York (or whatever) a symptom of anti-intellectualism. It might reflect a certain parochialism or lack of cultural curiosity, and these things might often go hand-in-hand with anti-intellectualism, but i’m not sure that they’re the same thing. Also, even among those who are not actively and vocally anti-intellectual, i’d wager that the percentage of Americans (or any political and cultural stripe) who actively seek out true intellectual engagement with important social, political, and economic issues is quite small indeed.
Would anti-white quotes from 3 prominent intellectuals convince you? 5? Nothing less than a full blown scientific study? I suppose it’s a bit like media bias: Difficult to measure; easy to dispute; but still visible.