Anti-Intellectualism | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Intellectualism

en.wikipedia.org

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“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The Wikipedia definition is too narrow. It should include the more ambivalent form, which is where any intellectual approach to a problem/question is met with blank stares

I live in NZ now, and while the Wikipedia definition does not apply so much, there is nearly zero intellectualism in the entire country

At least the U.S. has pockets of deep and meaningful intellectualism

This is honestly the first time I’ve ever heard someone online put their own country down and give the US some credit. I’m so used to us being the butt of anger and jokes that this is kind of refreshing to read.

But overall I think most developed countries have similar demographics here. There are powerful and vocal anti intellectuals and then there are less vocal critical thinkers.

it's common to see americans blame each other

but with a referenced wiki? it's so intellectualism

it's so weird, it's like cursing somebody but with pointing the word in a dictionary

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'."

This is as applicable as ever in the current times, thanks for sharing.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-intellectualism in American Life". It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964, but it's striking how many of his observations are still pertinent - which is consistent with his identification of anti-intellectualism are as persistent theme in American history. Indeed, in his chapters on evangelicalism he discusses these ideas as they manifested among the Puritans. There are good accounts of the revivalists like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday (late 1800s - early 1900s).

Many prominent politicians were subjects of anti-intellectual attacks. If you're annoyed by modern political trash talk, consider this observation about Thomas Jefferson:

"It was charged that he kept a slave wench and sired mullatoes; that he had been a coward during the American Revolution; that he had started the French Revolution; that he had slandered Washington; that he was ambitious to become a dictator, another Bonaparte; that he was a visionary and a dreamer, an impractical doctrinaire; and, to make matters worse, a French doctrinaire."

Of Adlai Stevenson, he says:

"The quality in Stevenson that excited most frequent attack was not his intellect as such, but his wit."

" The association of intellectuality and style with effeminacy which I have remarked on in connection with the reformers of the Gilded Age reappeared in the 1952 campaign."

Some of the attacks on Stevenson in this vein that he quotes from the media of the time are just incredible.

He's a wonderful writer, too:

"But in world full of dangers, the danger that American society as a whole will overesteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that need hardly trouble us."

"... an unbridled passion for the total elimination of this or that evil can be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time."

I'm thinking of reading his "American Political Tradition" of "The Progressive Historians" when I finish this book. Highly recommended.

  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/

  "For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by [sic] and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong."

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