I’ve had the great fortune to have read two remarkable books about American history in a row. First was Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, which comes as a revelation; it’s been a very long time since a book has made so much of my mental picture of the world come into focus. Suddenly even little things like the low quality of American schools, and teachers’ low pay, fit into a bigger picture. And these things aren’t new: Americans have always hated their schools, and have always believed that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” All of this is rooted in some durable aspects of American culture, which may ultimately derive from the religious makeup of the Pilgrims. Put together in this way, modern American life seems a little less depressing: we may not be as screwed as it seems, because we’ve maybe always seemed this screwed. I will now read anything of Hofstadter’s that I can get my hands on, including The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Apparently the claim in the latter is that America has always been filled with conspiracy theories — be they Catholic, Mason, Jewish, Communist, or Rockefeller — and that this paranoid strain has been important throughout our history. I’m sure another large fraction of my brain will suddenly feel coherent after reading it.

(Incidentally, Hofstadter won the Pulitzer twice — once for The Age of Reform, in 1956, and once for Anti-Intellectualism, in 1964. Somehow he never won the Bancroft Prize, which puzzles me. Maybe I misunderstand what that prize is about.)

Next up was The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 by David Potter. It tries very hard to get the reader’s mind into the time period when it takes place, so that we can strip off a few layers of folklore that have piled atop the Civil War. For one thing, Lincoln long ago ceased being a president and became instead a god; getting just through this is hard enough for Potter. But he does it admirably, and in the meantime introduced me to many characters from American history about whom I knew little: Zachary Taylor, Stephen Douglas, James Buchanan, and William Seward, among others.

Seward had appeared in Why The North Won The Civil War, as perhaps the reason why the British and French didn’t get involved in the War on the side of the Confederacy; here, in The Impending Crisis, he comes through as a consummate politician, who by the time of Fort Sumter stood a good chance of controlling the presidency from his seat as Secretary of State. Seward and Douglas in particular are fascinating characters, whom I’ll have to read about in subsequent months. In retrospect we want to view Douglas as the bad guy, for defending slavery against Lincoln in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. But Potter again politely dismantles that bias, showing us that Douglas was merely a principled defender of popular sovereignty and, in the end, one of the most ardent and hardworking defenders of the Union against the forces of secession.

I’ve added a number of books to my to-read list after reading Hofstadter’s and Potter’s books:

• Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (2 vol.)
• Daniel Bell (ed.), The New American Right
• George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War
• Glyndon G. van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby
• Glyndon G. van Deusen, William Henry Seward
• Leonard D. White, “The Federalists”
• Leonard D. White, “The Jacksonians”
• Leonard D. White, “The Jeffersonians”
• Leonard D. White, “The Republican Era 1869-1901”
• Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food
• Paul P. van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service
• Robert W. Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas
• Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy
• W.G. McLoughlin, Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name

And I’ll also need to read something by Charles and Mary Beard; they were apparently hugely influential to at least one generation of American historians, and I see them cited everywhere.

You see my dilemma: I read two books, and I add 14 to my to-read list.

1. Queso Valdeon — a blue cheese from Spain — is really unbelievably good. Thanks to Jamie for recommending it to me. Whole Foods has pretty bad cheese overall, but one thing they do well is blue cheese. And also Parmesan. And actually their raw-milk cheeses are good, so maybe the problem is less Whole Foods and more pasteurized cheese.

2. I get the feeling that some large quantity of book, movie, and television consumption has more to do with distraction than with the consumption of interesting content. People need some way to relax their brains after a hard day at work, so they turn on the TV or pick up the latest potboiler, or watch a movie with a lot of explosions, and then they go on with the rest of their days. I suspect that this explains something like 75% of media purchases.

3. More generally, I feel like there’s something kind of insulting to the human race, and insulting to God if you’re religious, about a large part of what Americans buy. I hate to be this much of a drama queen about it, but every time I look at a McDonald’s nowadays, I think, “Mankind is on this end of a few billion years of evolution; we are in some sense the pinnacle of a tower that started with proteins swimming in a sea of ammonia. We are the only species that’s capable — so far as anyone knows — of reflecting on its own place in the universe. And here we are, eating at McDonald’s.” It just doesn’t seem consistent with our station as a species. We’re the most intelligent and refined creatures ever to roam the planet, capable of producing astonishing works of beauty and grace, and this is really the best we can do?

4. It’s also disheartening to me that so much of modern culture is meant to be consumed and disposed of within a few hours. I don’t know the history, so this may not be a new creation, but I suspect it is. If we look at the sales curve on most books, we probably find that there’s an initial spike and then a very quick drop-off; most books, I suspect, are actually out of print within a decade, though I’d like to see numbers on this. Likewise most movies: a movie like Notting Hill, for instance, probably isn’t expected to live much past its DVD release. It’s just not expected that people will think about this stuff for very long. I want very much — in my own life — to avoid the impermanence of mass culture. For one thing, I think taking a longer view of culture — reading books that have been around for centuries, watching movies that have been considered the peak of their craft for decades — reveals just how little new material there is in modern mass culture. Most of it was done better long ago.

http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i15/15b00701.htm

The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism

By TODD GITLIN

The presidential campaign ended, effectively, in a tie, but it did speak clearly about the value accorded intellectuals and intellectuality in American culture. What it declared is, to say the least, inauspicious.

However the next four years play out in the White House, George W. Bush deserves a certain credit for resurrecting — though probably not intentionally — the subject of anti-intellectualism. Like Dan Quayle before him, but even more conspicuously (Bush’s gaffes provided horror-comic relief during a campaign marked by its narrowed themes and horse-race obsessions), the governor of Texas proved an inadvertent shill for the comedy routines that have become an increasingly visible showcase for the spectacle of national politics.

Gov. Malaprop accomplished that dubious objective by various means: semantic spatter, most memorably “subliminable” for “subliminal,” but also “subscribe” for “ascribe,” “retort” for “resort,” “hostile” for “hostage,” and so on; inversions and juxtapositions of singular verbs and plural nouns, as in “Our priorities is our faith” and “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream”; and an ineptitude so guileless (“Social Security is not a federal program”) as to embarrass the literal-minded who affect intellectual seriousness, for after a certain point it seems rude to call attention to the obvious, or “elitist” to notice something that viewers haven’t noticed.

Early in the campaign, Bush had famously dubbed the inhabitants of Greece “Grecians” and flubbed a talk-show host’s quiz about names of foreign leaders. There was so much ignorance on display as to raise the suspicion, on one hand, that Bush was dyslexic or, on the other, that this lazy-minded graduate of Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School was a chip off his father’s pork rinds, appealing self-consciously to his audience’s resentment of brains. Thanks to videotape and a media maw hungry for simple charges and sound bites, Duh-bya seemed to have stridden right out of central casting, a veritable personification of the politician as clown.

Yet none of the easy charges against Bush touched upon his more substantial incapacities: his lack of curiosity about the world (he has scarcely traveled outside the United States and Mexico City) and the ample evidence that he does not reason. During the debates, he was unresponsive to questions the answers to which he had not memorized. In public appearances, he spoke in sloganistic lists, not arcs. It would seem that, precisely because his thinking was disordered, the governor lost track of his points, so that items came out nonsensical, as in: “Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it.”

There has been much talk since the election to the effect that “two nations” were evenly matched in the contest: roughly speaking, the rural, inland, heavily male, and white Bushland versus the urban, coastal, heavily female, black, and immigrant Goreland. To be sure, suspicion of intellectuals and intellectuality was visible in both camps, but most plainly so in Bush’s. So it came to pass that half of the voting population was appalled that the other half judged this man of little discernible achievement, little knowledge of the world or curiosity about it, to be an acceptable president of the United States. His defenders were in the position of claiming that it didn’t matter whether the governor was smart or not, he could hire a smart staff, thereby certifying that intelligence was something for underlings.

In the minds of many of Bush’s supporters, the absence of thoughtfulness, the narrowness of scope, the presence of diminished capacity were all reduced to a question of “management style.” Gore, meanwhile, suffered bad reviews for his dismissive and overbearing style of intellectual combat. In the eyes of half the population, the vice president fell prey to a suspicion that he was not only preachy but also a sharpie. In the media’s campaign story line, the standard charge against Gore, shared by the Bush campaign and the comedians, was that, like the traditional confidence man, Gore — too smart for his own good — lied, while Bush was the amiable common man.

Thirty-seven years have passed since the appearance of the last substantial book to take seriously, in the words of its title, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Richard Hofstadter’s tour de force, appearing in 1963, is actually a product of the 1950′s. Like many intellectuals, Hofstadter was disturbed by the general disdain for “eggheads,” haunted by Joseph McCarthy’s thuggish assault on Dean Acheson and his Anglophilic ways, and dismayed by Eisenhower’s taste for Western novels and his tangled syntax (which was not yet understood to be, at least sometimes, not simply incompetent but deliberately evasive). Had not Eisenhower himself in 1954 (no doubt in words written for him by another hand) cited a definition of an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows”? (How much more congenial was Stevenson, who once cracked: “Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!”)

Probing for historical roots of a mood that was sweeping (if somewhat exaggerated by intellectuals), Hofstadter found that “our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity.” He cited, among others, the Puritan John Cotton, who wrote in 1642, “The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee”; and Baynard R. Hall, who wrote in 1843 of frontier Indiana: “We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness.”

Yet, according to the historian Lawrence W. Levine, the illiterate Rocky Mountain scout Jim Bridger could recite long passages from Shakespeare, which he learned by hiring someone to read the plays to him. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville found on his trip through America in 1831-32. Here lay a supremely American paradox: The same Americans who valued the literacy of commoners were suspicious of experts and tricksters.

In his unsurpassed survey, Hofstadter described three pillars of anti-intellectualism — evangelical religion, practical-minded business, and the populist political style. Religion was suspicious of modern relativism, business of regulatory expertise, populism of claims that specialized knowledge had its privileges. Those pillars stand. But, as Hofstadter recognized, something was changing in American life, and that was the uneasy apotheosis of technical intellect.

The rise of big science during World War II, and its normalization during the cold war, along with the Sputnik panic of 1957, made “brains” more reputable among respectable citizens who had their own ideas about the force of common sense but had to acknowledge that expertise delivered material goods. Then as now, the “brains” that became admirable were brains kept in their place. To the extent that brains were admirable, it was because they were instrumental — they prevented polio, invented computers, launched satellites.

By the 1990′s, the geek was an acceptable good guy, the nerd an entrepreneurial hero. That sense of the supreme position of useful intellect is preserved in the current phrase, “It’s not rocket science” — implying that real rocket science is the grandest field of intellectual dreams.

Hofstadter did most of his research before Kennedy came to the White House, and he understood that Kennedy’s brief ascendancy did not change the fundamentals. Kennedy was not especially serious about the life of the mind, but he was elegant, witty, and, by all accounts, enjoyed the occasional presence of intellectuals. John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were adornments. Never mind that Kennedy’s reading tilted heavily toward Ian Fleming, who in the James Bond books supplied the president with a man of action’s idea of the debonair, the sort of fellow whose European accent can be mistaken for mental accomplishment.

Even into the Johnson administration, the White House ceremonially invited intellectuals and high artists to visit, culminating in the public-relations disaster of a White House festival of the arts, in 1965, that was boycotted by some writers and artists while others circulated an antiwar petition at the event.

The force of Hofstadter’s insight into persistent anti-intellectualism despite the rising legitimacy of technical experts would be clear five years after he published his book. George Wallace ran well in several Democratic Party primaries, and eventually, too, as a third-party candidate, while campaigning against “pointy-headed bureaucrats” — precisely the classic identification of intellect with arbitrary power that Hofstadter had identified as the populist hallmark.

There was a left-wing version of this presupposition, too. A populist strain in the 60′s student movement, identifying with the oppressed sharecroppers of the Mississippi Delta and the dispossessed miners of Appalachia, bent the principle “Let the people decide” into a suspicion of all those who were ostensibly knowledgeable. Under pressure of the Vietnam War, the steel-rimmed technocrat Robert S. McNamara came to personify the steel-trap mind untethered by insight, and countercultural currents came to disdain reason as a mask for imperial arrogance.

In his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, Ronald Reagan deployed a classic anti-intellectual theme — portraying students as riotous decadents. Real education was essentially a matter of training, and breaches of discipline resulted in nihilism and softness on communism. The Nixon-Agnew team proceeded to mobilize resentment against “nattering na-bobs of negativism,” successfully mobilizing a “silent majority” against a verbose minority. That was to flower into a major neoconservative theme thereafter.

As candidate and president, the smooth-spoken if intellectually challenged Reagan succeeded in availing himself of an indulgent press and an adoring constituency that, at the least, did not mind his incapacity. He did not suffer from his evident contempt for professorial types, his half-educated ignorance of history and reliance on crackpot sources, his embrace of the notion that trees cause pollution. That he was opposed by sophisticated types only inflated his aura.

By the 1990′s, “elitism” had become an all-purpose epithet, used by neoconservatives against the “new class” (consisting of all political intellectuals with the exception of themselves), but also by hard multiculturalists against “the neo-Enlightenment project,” by relativists in general against objectivists in general. Populist resentment flourished even as (and, perhaps in part, because) populist egalitarianism of an economic stripe was dwindling.

The counterculture had introduced suspicion of professionalized rationality — swelling the reputation of “alternative” medicine and elevating herbs and homeo-pathic, chiropractic, and osteopathic treatments to alternatives to plodding old Western therapies. Hofstadter had made much of the distinction between critical intellectuals (suspected, sometimes justifiably, of being ideologues) and expert intellectuals (“on tap, not on top,” in the terms of the early atomic scientists), but thanks to the postmodern mood of the intervening decades, many experts had come to be tarred with the same brush as ideologues. College students were heard to complain that certain professors were excessive in their vocabularies. Even in the classroom, “boring” became an epithet of choice.

A central force boosting anti-intellectualism since Hofstadter published his book has been the bulking up of popular culture and, in particular, the rise of a new form of faux cerebration: punditry. Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect — the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions — has the look of retardation.

Again, there is a continuity to the earlier nation. Long before Hollywood or MTV, Tocqueville observed that Americans were drawn to novelty, turnover, and sensation. How much more so in a world of cascading, all-pervasive images, where two-thirds of children grow up with 24/7 access to television in their bedrooms, where video and computer games flourish, where mobile phones guarantee access when and where one chooses, where the right to be instantly entertained and in-touch seems to preoccupy more of the citizenry than the right to vote and to have their votes properly counted.

There is a seeming paradox that Hofstadter did not anticipate, but would have appreciated. In the torrent of popular culture, there emerges more talk about public affairs than ever before — virtually nonstop talk about political concerns, debate on burning questions available at all hours of the day and night. But the talk that fills the channels amounts mainly to signals, gestures, and stances — not reasoning.

Television reporting and punditry are the tributes that entertainment pays to the democratic ideal of discourse. The political talk does not, in the main, evaluate or research: It “covers.” When CNN’s Washington bureau chief can say casually, “The Texas governor hammered home some of his major themes, including Social Security,” this is shorthand, but not only shorthand — it is a surrogate for reasoning. Positions are signaled — candidates “position themselves” — rather than defended; no defending is demanded of them. A topic is a “theme” is a “position” is an “issue” is news.

All the more so does punditry diffuse a debased version of intellectual life, cornering intellect in the name of chat, operating by a sort of Gresham’s law of discourse. Punditry is concerned with reviewing performances, rating “presidentiality,” itemizing themes, relaying and interpreting spin, not thoughtfully assessing politicians’ claims, evaluating their evidence, judging their reasoning. To assess the quality of what politicians say would require intellectual work for which the pundits do not demonstrate competency. Pundits are hired, rather, for the facility and pungency of their presentations and the ferocity and acceptability of their opinions.

The most bookish of pundits, George Will, was hired for the Anglophilic elegance of his sneers, not for logical mastery or historical depth. The punditocracy, as Eric Alterman calls it, does not assess either reason or reasons. Its job is simply to declare which issues are discussable, which positions presentable. It makes up for its intellectual deficits by supplying precooked opinion. The point is not to clarify: It is never to be at a loss for words. Surely the English infusion into American journalism — the premium on corrosive wit, the fusion of intellectual name-dropping with tabloid meanness — belongs to this trend: the show of intellect without the demanding work.

When Hofstadter wrote, the dominant intellectuals were either experts or ideologues. The most influential pundit was Walter Lippmann. But the crucial public development since Hofstadter’s time is the rise of the pseudo-intellectual, thanks to the premium on smirking and glibness, which, in much of the popular mind, passes for intellect. The pundit is a smart person in both senses — intelligent and a smarty-pants — and his knowingness about how the game is played is a substitute for knowledge about what would improve society. Punditry is to intellectual life as fast food is to fine cuisine.

After Gore, self-cast as wonk-expert and therefore prey to precisely the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter identified, challenged Bush to state his position on the Dingell-Norwood patients-rights’ bill during the third debate, and Bush avoided the question, the pseudo-brains of ABC’s This Week, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, made much mirth by mocking the names. They did not think it their obligation to clarify what Gore was talking about. Deadly, that would have been. Chock full of attitude, deploying the cheap gags and knowingness that mark them as qualified for their jobs, those maestros of the Beltway paraded their superiority to knowledge while (as Michael Kinsley pointed out) refraining from showing that they knew more than the public.

Surely television is a boon to anti-intellectualism, with its encouragement of emotional chords and comfort, but the degradations of public life that afflict us are not primarily visual achievements. It is language and sound, most of all, that warp the public discourse. That is true not only in the presentation of politics but of science, education, and many another subject. The sound-bite discourse cultivated by television pumps up the imperative “Cut to the chase,” reinforcing the fetish of “the bottom line.”

It is not that the sound-bite culture was imposed upon what was previously unrelievedly brilliant politics. From “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” to “I like Ike,” American history is soaked in sound-bite prefigurations. Warren G. Harding may not have been much better than George W. Bush. But the more striking transformation in American commentary takes us in 50 years from Walter Lippmann, a man of tremendous historical and philosophical sophistication, to Tim Russert, an intelligent man who specializes in “Gotcha!” questions and gives Rush Limbaugh respectful interviews, defending that choice on the ground that, after all, Limbaugh “speaks to 20-million people.” Thus does knowingness make its peace with populism.

In the Bushes, pËre et fils, we see another turn in the history of the American aversion to intellect. Hofstadter rightly noted the 19th-century aristocratic disdain for practical intellectuals, the business types and experts whose rising power displaced their own. The Roosevelt cousins, different in many respects, both honored the life of the mind: Theodore as writer, Franklin as a collector of advisers. Old money respected brains.

But the Bushes are men of social credentials who went to the right schools and passed through them without any detectable mark. They represent aristocracy with a populist gloss, borrowing what they can from the evangelical revival, siding with business and its distaste for time-wasting mind work, holding intellectual talent in contempt from both above and below. Pleasant enough for the pundits, they have been able to count on a surplus of populist ressentiment. That Bush fils, country-club Republican, could gain stature (and keep a straight face) in his presidential campaign for proposing an “education presidency” and denouncing an “education recession” tells us something about the closing of the American mind that Allan Bloom did not dream of.

Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University, and the author of The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams. He is completing his next book, Infinite Glimmer: On a World Saturated With Images.

http://chronicle.com

Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B7

I’m reading Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism In American Life right now. My first thing to note about it is that “Intellectualism” will hereby be abbreviated “i10ism” in keeping with i18n and l10n. Actually, maybe I’ll just call the whole book AIIAL. Yes. Yes I will. It’s my own goddamned blog, goddamnit.

Anyway, it’s great. Hofstadter tries to track down where anti-i10ism in American life comes from, and finds that its roots lie at least in the perennial conflict between religious scholarship and religious enthusiasm (sense 3). Here he is quoting Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England:

Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise Learning. To this it is owing, that so many speak slightly of our Schools and Colleges; discovering a Good-Will, were it in their Power, to rase them to their Foundations. To the same Cause it may be ascrib’d, that such Swarms of Exhorters have appear’d in the Land, and been admir’d and run after, though many of them could scarce speak common Sense  . . .  and to the same Cause still it must be attributed that so many Ministers preach, not only without Book, but without Study; and justify their doing so, lest, by previous Preparation, they should stint the Spirit.

To the exponent of a religion of the book, for whom a correct reading of the Bible was a vital concern, this was the ultimate heresy: that one who was possessed of the Spirit could, without study and without learning, interpret the word of God effectively enough to be an agent of the salvation of others. And here we have the nub of the difference between the awakeners and the spokesmen of establishments: whether it was more important to get a historically correct and rational understanding of the Book — and hence of the word of God — or to work up a proper emotion, a proper sense of inner conviction and relation to God.

As Hofstadter summarizes it in his introduction:

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?

In a society where being a successful businessman is more or less the pinnacle of achievement, it makes some sense that intellectuals would be scorned. And at least since Adlai Stevenson, they have not been especially good at winning elections.

Hofstadter has thus far reserved his acid for Senator Joseph McCarthy:

What I believe is important, however, to anyone who hopes to understand the impulse behind American anti-intellectualism is that this grievance against intellectuals as ideologues goes far beyond any reproaches based on actual Communism or fellow-traveling  . . .  The truth is that the right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up. The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage (for which the police agencies presumably are adequate) or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.  . . .  [McCarthy’s] bullying was welcomed because it satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

Had the Great Inquisition been directed only against Communists, it would have tried to be more precise and discriminating in its search for them: in fact, its leading practitioners seemed to care little for the difference between a Communist and a unicorn.

When Hofstadter decides to turn a phrase, it turns on a dime. But even his workaday sentences are brisk, come to comforting closes, and pull you along to the next ones effortlessly. Better yet, I get the sense that this book is going to help me understand why liberals keep losing elections. And maybe put American history into some perspective will make the Bush administration seem less horrifying.