This, to put it directly, just isn’t so. One can point to certain instances where a politician doesn’t put their intellectual powers to full use in public, yet we always choose politicians who have those intellectual powers. Even in the W Bush Administration, neither the President himself nor the people who surrounded him were lacking in degrees from top universities. Congress, the Courts, and governorships are also dominated by people with advanced degrees. One can complain about the way these people speak and act on certain occasions, but that doesn’t change who they are. If the American people really “feared leaders who are educated”, the parties would respond by nominating politicians who aren’t educated. But they don’t.
An educated person is not necessarily an intellectual. Having an advanced degree does not make someone an intellectual. It does not make them articulate, it does not make them creative, all it means is that they were good at studying one thing and were capable of memorizing and understanding that one thing. We live in a society where the college system is basically a glorified trade school, and that is true at the highest levels as well as the lowest ones. You go there to get the degree to “open the doors.” At the Ivy Leage level it’s an elite club for making connections and getting to know the right people.
well, if we’re talking about intellectuals, I’m not certain intellectuals are good for anything other than thinking. I’d be hard pressed to think of true intellectuals having accomplishments outside of academics. The art of thinking and the art of doing tend to be different things. In the real world, people who do have to make decisions without all the available data. Intellectuals, when put in positions where they have to make decisions, tend to be indecisive and let windows of opportunity close.
These are obviously extreme generalizations, but I’m trying to get at why anti-intellectualism isn’t completely irrational. I have no patience for people who disregard firm science in favor of what makes them feel good about their worldview, but I do understand why the smartest guy isn’t necessarily going to be the best guy for a particular job. Especially in politics.
The whole “being wrong half the time” issue is sort of a hard one for people outside of academia to swallow. In practically every field, the fundamental theories that make them up change over time, sometimes quite frequently. While often the shifts in thinking are more nuanced, often times it is just a case of the old ideas just being plain wrong. By and large, academia doesn’t care and indeed might celebrate the disproof of a major theory as evidence of the soundness of the academic research process in general.
This is extremely difficult for most people to accept. Most people view “knowledge” in a more absolute sense, as something that shouldn’t really change. Most of the stuff you learn in school is basic enough that it doesn’t really change over a person’s life time, and there’s certainly not much discussion of the history of most of these fields beyond maybe a progression of discoveries. Institutions like religions and political parties tend to deny that their platforms ever change and act like pillars of “truth” in an absolute sense of the word.
Political discourse in this country (and probably most) is all about appeals to authority. There is simply no way a single person can become adequately informed about all the issues in a modern society and so to a large extent the fundamental question in politics is who are you going to believe. So, with the above in mind, is an average person going to side with the academic who freely admits to being wrong frequently, or with the idealogue who claims to have an absolute hold on the truth? I think most people are simply more comfortable believing someone who is claiming to be a sure thing.
I think there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom, and that in practice people can get much wiser. Inate intelligence probably does set constraints, but in practice most people choose to be less wise than they could be. Possibly because they know that there will always be lots of people cleverer than them, so why compete, possibly because it’s a path of less resistance.
Anyway, Americans will always be anti-intellectual, because Americans don’t compete in fields that the French always win.
True.
How much scientific support do you need? Organic food has more nutrients, fewer toxins and involves growing methods that are better for the planet. All supported by hard science. What else do you want to know about it?
More to the point of the OP, so you would argue that, say, the work of Michael Pollan is about anti-intellectualism? On what ground?
I’ll set aside your economic arguments so as to avoid the train of argument Argent Towers fears. 
Organic foods are definitely better for the planet, that’s not really in question. But when it comes to nutritional value or safety, there has been no difference demonstrated. And even though organic foods are better for the planet, we could never feed everyone using organic methods. We just have too many people on the planet.
Of course, putting super-bright people will accomplish more than putting a team of morons in charge. Can you provide any kind of evidence for this sweeping claim–which is tantamount to saying that everything in the world should be run by idiots, or by geniuses, because there’s no actual difference. Would you expect, say, Apple Computers to hire a team of morons in adherence to this principle? After all, morons probably cost less.
And, anyway, what’s beyond the capability of the species? Providing good governance? Appreciating it? Overcoming aversion to smart people?
Now there I’ll agree. We don’t necessarily need a country or a world run by geniuses, at least not all of the time, but we do always need competence. Competent people tend to be pretty smart.
But “intellectualism” is a different matter which only has bearing part of the time. Intellectuals tend to be found in think tanks or universities or sometimes in the media; in general they often aren’t in the business of fashioning policy and still less of implementing or overseeing it.
Re the OP: I think there’s real rightwing “anti-intellectualism” in the sense that these folks seem to treat certain complex but empirical facts about the world–like evolutionary science or climate change–as though they were matters of theory which appeal only to a liberal taste. They make something intellectual that really shouldn’t be.
Although there may be corresponding anti-intellectualism on the left, I haven’t yet seen good examples of it offered in this thread. Left liberals demonstrably like economists–plenty of them!–and feminists who criticize evolutionary psychology have legitimate reasons for doing so (one may disagree with them but not, IMO, reduce them to anti-intellectuals).
Absolutely untrue. There are higher levels of anti-oxidants in organic vegetables. And, again, there are fewer toxins. The latter feature varies from food to food. Strawberries are sprayed with something like 40 different pesticides and they are full of that residue. Blueberries aren’t. So organic strawberries (or apples, or potatoes) are much more important to eat than organic bananas or blueberries or avocados.
Organic fruits and vegetables–and organic meats–also taste much better. And why do you think that is?
There is real debate going on–quite interesting debate about the potential for feeding the planet by organic methods. Have you read any of this stuff? I find it quite compelling. And the pesticide-ridden monoculture we have here in the US is not sustainable anyway. So it’s not as though one simply evaluates the argument for organics by assuming the status quo is optimal or perfect. It isn’t.
I think the answer is a lot simpler: Intellectuals have the reputation of being snooty people.
Most of the contact that ordinary folks get with intellectuals is when they see professors on television who have involved themselves in politics, or when they encounter college students who call people “ignorant” because they disagree. Both of these types of individuals give academia a horrible reputation. They’re both condescending and adopt an attitude of “I’m too smart to teach you and you’re too dumb to understand, so just listen to what I tell you.”
In fact, I’ve known a number of professors and other educators who were actually regular, down-to-earth people, but your average person doesn’t get much face-to-face contact with teachers. These same educators would also agree that the “listen to what I tell you and don’t disagree” approach is repugnant to the discipline of education, but it is unfortunately the more commonly used approach among politicized professors and radicalized college students–that is to say, the ones who actually get in front of the camera and become associated with the popular image of academia.
The “would I like to have a beer with them?” test is less about trying to make sure that a president is as dumb as you are than it is about asking, “Is this person nice? Would he/she talk down to me if we met?” A president who is willing to have a beer with you is not necessarily a dumb president, but is probably a president who doesn’t see himself or herself as “above” you. It’s less about anti-intellectualism than it is about anti-elitism.
One of the things someone who met George W. Bush told me about him was that he “made you feel like you were the only person in the room when he spoke to you.” He was (as we all know) terrible at speech-making but apparently amazing at interpersonal politics. He knew how to talk to you and make you feel like he really valued your opinion. The intelligence factor didn’t really come into play, either for or against him. To those who met him, he just seemed like a nice guy.
Should people vote for the nice guy? Well, obviously not if he’s otherwise incompetent. Most people, even those with less education, want a smart person to be president. But most people would also rather elect a slightly-less-smart person who is a genuinely warm, caring individual than a relatively smarter candidate who treats you like dirt.
Be honest: You’d probably prefer the candidate who, upon meeting you at a social event, asked you about your family and where you grew up, over a candidate who told you to bugger off unless you were planning on contributing to his campaign.
Sure, women are anti-intellectual! None of them will have sex with me!
Sometimes it’s the intellectuals who cut themselves off from the rest of us. Until relatively recently university history professors have had little interest in how history is taught in public schools (there are a few notable exceptions). Those involved in public history (archivist, museum curators, etc.) are the red headed step-children of the academic history world. Then there’s the general disdain that many college professors have for their community college counterparts. Some of this is changing but for a long time history professors in the U.S. pretty much only cared about what other professors had to say.
I really like the academic world but it can be very insular. If I publish a paper on influence of women’s clubs in the latter half of the 19th century in facilitating women’s involvement in politics I’m not going to be reaching a very broad audience. And, in all honesty, I’m writing for that audience and it might be difficult for a layperson to follow for a variety of reasons.
Odesio
Let’s look again at how Wes put it:
This suggests A-I occurs at much less radical points on the right than it does on the left. That jibes with the basic conservative and liberal attitudes toward dissent. And intellectualism breeds dissent.
The fact is that intellectuals do not want to tell people how to live and what to think, as Wes put it. Intellectuals usually see two sides to every argument and live on debate, as life in any academic department indicates. Intellectuals, right or left, believe in academic freedom. Sure they are wrong, and they get pig headed, and they argue and yell, but deep down they would never want anyone to shut up the opposition - where would the fun be in that.
Rigid ideological systems of the right and the left think they have all the answers, and so don’t appreciate dissent. Rigid religions are the same. Debate is fine in some seminaries and religious universities so long as you stay within certain boundaries. Rigid ideologies and religions would never catch on if lots of people are more comfortable being told what to believe - thus their distrust of intellectuals.
Bull. While pre-built networks with people likely to be successful do help, top universities offer access to people at the forefront of their fields, and many more possibilities for exploration. I did all my graduate research on a subject I only learned about taking a graduate level class my senior year at MIT. I probably would never have been exposed to it at all at Podunk U. My daughter wormed her way into the class of a very famous professor at the University of Chicago, who was in the business school and hadn’t even talked to undergrads for years. That really pushed her along also, and I felt my tuition money was well spent. She also got to take a class in cuneiform for fun.
Plenty of people go to Ivy League schools and take no advantage of the opportunities, but the opportunities are there.
What do you think intelligence consists of? A lot of it is curiosity, the push to ask the next question. That is exactly what Bush didn’t have and why we are in so much trouble. When told about the threat of terrorists hijacking planes he didn’t take the next step. He never thought about the contradictions in what he was being told about Iraq. He never wondered about what Greenspan was doing. Bush and Gore might have had more or less the same SAT scores, but Gore is a lot more intellectually curious than Bush.
Of course intelligence isn’t everything. A good politician must be emotionally persuasive also, and be excellent socially, which not all geniuses are. (To put it mildly.) But that alone is a recipe for disaster, as we’ve seen.
It is a mistake to believe that intellectuals are inherently anticonformist. Within their fields this may be true, but they are just as prone to tribalism as anyone else, and this manifests in conformity to particular social doctrines. (Even within their fields there are tribal cliques - just look at the Climategate emails.) Thus outside their fields of study it is wrong to give weight to intellectuals as “driven by curiosity, not irrational tribal beliefs or self-interest.”
This issue becomes particularly important when intellectuals get political power, as when their ideas can be used as government policy. This leads to a bias towards central planning - there are few professors, particularly in political science, economics, and sociology, (the most policy-applicable areas of study) that don’t believe that the judicious application of their ideas through government policy will make society better.
So in some very important ways intellectuals can be very wrong, and it’s misleading to characterize them as disinterested paladins of truth confronting a dull conformist society. In many cases “intellectual - anti-intellectual” conflicts are nothing more meritorious than clashes between two morally equal interest groups.
Not to mention John Maynard Keynes.
In his book Intellectuals (discussed in this thread), conservative author Paul Johnson defined an “intellectual” as someone who “values ideas more than people,” or who has faith in the power of reason to beneficially reshape human society. In the book, he blasts as horrible human beings in their personal lives (while barely touching on the content of their ideas) Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Bertholdt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway – all (more or less) left-wing thinkers. Curiously, he has no chapters on RW thinkers in the same periods, such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk – all of whom, except perhaps for Burke, embodied all the vices of arrogance and selfishness and megalomania that Johnson attributes to LW intellectuals.
I find myself wondering if the modern conservative movement has internalized Johnson’s definition and subconsciously means that when they speak of “intellectuals”.
It’s nonsense, of course. An intellectual is simply a person who is passionately interested in knowledge and ideas for their own sake. The term does not imply any political ideology, nor political engagement of any kind; a person can be an intellectual and completely indifferent to political or social matters.
When Pol Pol purges intellectuals he did so because he feared they were not ‘pure’, ie they were tainted by western values.
From the wikipedia article it said there were basically 3 motives for anti-intellectualism. Populism, authoritarian politics and religion.
Pol Pol would arguably be all 3 (if you include his branch of extremist marxism as a religion, which you arguably could).
So the fundamental motives seem to be populism and authoritarianism (religion and authoritarianism are arguably the same thing because too much introspection will bring down either unjust religions or governments).
**William F Buckley: I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University
**
Things like that make no sense to me. I can understand populist sentiment and efforts to play on people’s sense of group cohesion (the liberal democrats, which I am a member of, use it all the time on economic issues). However how does populism reach the point where you don’t even care about competence? Sarah Palin is a good example of this. She claims to be a populist (running against the gotcha media, liberal elites, etc). Which is fine and good, but on top of that she is dangerously incompetent. Say what you want about Cheney, but he wasn’t an idiot. He is highly intelligent and knew how to get things done. And he did.
So I don’t get how A-I reaches a point where incompetence isn’t even a factor anymore. I remember debating someone who was fairly right wing and he said society would be better off if we got rid of all the atheists. So I said ‘ok, we will keep virtually all of the college professors, scientists and nobel prize winners and you can keep Ted Nugent’. He seemed ok with that trade off. I don’t get it.
I guess any time an ideology overcomes pragmatism it becomes a problem, no matter the leanings. People who are too ideologically pure to the point where it overcomes pragmatism end up harming themselves and everyone else from what I’ve seen.