Wikidworld (#151) / The Savaging of the American Mind: Anti-Intellectualism, Anti-Modernism and the Conservative Assault on Ideas.
"Out here in the country, we don't see too many pointy-headed intellectual college professors who haven't worked a lick in their lives." - Charlie Daniels
In 1963, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter published Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. The book was a lengthy jeremiad flaying the deep roots of anti-intellectualism in American culture and politics. Hofstadter argued that an ingrained contempt for ideas and introspection, critical thought and inquiry, and literature and science had coarsened relationships and braked progress throughout much of American history.
Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.” In his telling, anti-intellectualism has accompanied a belief that intellectuals — those whose identities and professions depend upon dispositions, training, practices, and beliefs that require specifically inward habits of mind, a tendency to live inside one’s head — “are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive.”
EFFEMINATE INTELLECTUALS AND MANLY WORKERS
Often times, of course, this assault upon intellectuals and the life of the mind represented a shorthand caricature of elites, generally, framed more specifically in terms of what they, by definition, could never possess and would always lack: common sense. As Hofstadter characterized this belief, “The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."
This deficit was often expressed in terms of the contrast between the corrupt, effeminate values of cities where the educated elites lived and the natural, authentic values of those wresting their livelihoods from the rural expanses of the nation. For the country-western singer, Charlie Daniels, “Out here in the country, we don't see too many pointy-headed intellectual college professors who haven't worked a lick in their lives.”
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND PARENTS’ RIGHTS
In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter traced the roots of anti-intellectualism to the Protestant evangelical “Great Awakenings” of the 18th and 19th centuries, the surging revival movements that appealed to piety and religious zeal, the movements of the emotional spirit instead of those of the rational mind.
Hofstadter also discussed how early American politicians like Andrew Jackson promoted democratic and egalitarian ideals associated with popular folk wisdom over intellectual expertise, and how this anti-elitism converged with the pietist beliefs of Protestant evangelicals during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial in Tennessee.
During this trial, former presidential candidate and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan — a fervent creationist — was lead attorney for the prosecution. Bryan launched a vigorous attack upon the teaching of evolution in public schools, rejecting scientific expertise and empiricism. Bryan proclaimed that “evolution is against religion,” and that such instruction would undermine traditional religious beliefs about divine creation. Bryan argued that ordinary citizens should have more say about what is taught in schools than intellectual experts, and that parents “have a right to determine what is taught to their children."
Sound familiar?
ANTI-MODERNIST FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS REACTION
Chapter V of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is entitled, “The Revolt Against Modernity.” I’d specifically like to focus the remainder of this newsletter on the themes of this chapter because they provide context for the profoundly anti-modern impulses that characterize our own moment of political irrationality, emotion, and reaction.
To be clear, when we talk about anti-modernism, we’re really talking about secularism. Abrahamic religious extremists all can (and often do) coalesce and find common cause with each other because their shared enemy — the Antichrist — is not being religious at all. The “godless communism” refrain from the 1950s certainly reflects this panic — that the end times are upon us, not when we believe the wrong things about God and faith and dogma, but when we don’t believe in or care much in any way about these matters.
Secular, modernist ideals generally accept the disenchantement of the world and the notion that humans might liberate themselves from the shackles of spiritual bondage to a variously rapacious, cruel, and indifferent God. The vaguely intuitive assocation of these ideas, ideals, and values with communism and socialism doubtless explains much of the loose (and groundless) conflation in the talking points of right-wing blabbermouths between secularism, liberalism, socialism, communism, and any other “ism” you can name.
In Chapter V of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter analyzed the religious fundamentalism that sprouted during the early 20th century as a reaction against decadent modernism. Hofstadter argued that fundamentalists led a revolt against the cultural changes brought by modern industrial society. They particularly opposed secularized intellectual elites who embraced modernist trends like Darwinism, biblical criticism, and progressive reforms.
Fundamentalists viewed intellectuals and experts as the sleazy sponsors of immorality (groomers!) and as the eager subverters of traditional religious values. Movements like Prohibition and state laws against evolution instruction were efforts to legislate against modernist influences. Prominent fundamentalist preachers, activists, and orators like Billy Sunday — a former major league baseball legend — denounced intellectuals and secular science, promoting instead a populist evangelical Christianity grounded in emotion that reinforced Biblical literalism.
Richard Hofstadter argued that the fundamentalist backlash represented a broader American ambivalence toward modernity, as rural traditionalists felt increasingly alienated by intellectual and cultural change. The Scopes Trial highlighted this clash between religious anti-modernists and secular intellectuals over science and education.
CATHOLICS AND ANTI-MODERNISM
Anti-intellectualism surged again in the 1950s during the McCarthy era, as expertise and intellect became associated with communism and leftist politics. Conservative thinkers such as William F. Buckley — himself an orotund (itself, recursively, an orotund term) Yale-educated intellectual — led an assault on liberal academics and intellectuals. Next time, we’ll begin to tease out the connection the anti-modernist crusade and influence of Pope Leo XIII during the tail end of the 19th century and its recrudescence during the 1950s as American Catholics began to claim their place at the table.
THINGS YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963)
A Brief, 90-Year History of Republicans Calling Democrats ‘Socialists’ (ThinkProgress, March 6, 2019)
Are Democrats Really ‘Godless’? The Numbers Say Mostly Not, but the Rap still Sticks. (Washington Post, September 8, 2019)
The Attack on Yale (The Atlantic, November 1951)