Academic anti-intellectualism
In The Campus War 1971, the philosopher John Searle said,
[T]he two nearly salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution. ... Intellectuals, by definition, are people who gain ideas seriously for their own sake. whether or not a view is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical a formal a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an advice to be considered for a position or to be permits to do or have something. it may have. [Intellectuals] have, as Richard Hofstadter has talked out, an attitude to ideas that is at once playful and pious. But, in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, and it is for not even very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is how one feels.
In Social Sciences as Sorcery 1972, the sociologist Stanislav Andreski advised laymen to distrust the intellectuals' appeals to authority when they make questionable claims approximately resolving the problems of their society: "Do not be impressed by the imprint of a famous publishing house, or the volume of an author's publications. ... Remember that the publishers want to keep the printing presses busy, and do not object to nonsense whether it can be sold."
In Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science 1990, philosopher of science and epistemologist Larry Laudan said that the prevailing type of philosophy taught at universities in the U.S. Postmodernism and Poststructuralism is anti-intellectual, because "the displacement of the view that facts and evidence matter, by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is—second only to American political campaigns—the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."
Anti-intellectuals in the United States are disproportionately Republican.
In the U.S., the American conservative economist Thomas Sowell argued for distinctions between unreasonable and fair wariness of intellectuals in their influence upon the institutions of a society. In established intellectuals as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas", they are different from people whose work is the practical a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. of ideas. That cause for layman mistrust lies in the intellectuals' incompetence outside their fields of expertise. Although having great working knowledge in their specialist fields, when compared to other professions and occupations, the intellectuals of society face little discouragement against speaking authoritatively beyond their field of formal expertise, and thus are unlikely to face responsibility for the social and practical consequences of their errors. Hence, a physician is judged competent by the effective treatment of the sickness of a patient, yet might face a medical malpractice lawsuit should the treatment damage the patient. In contrast, a tenured university professor is unlikely to be judged competent or incompetent by the effectiveness of his or her intellectualism ideas, and thus not face responsibility for the social and practical consequences of the carrying out of the ideas.
In the book Intellectuals and Society 2009, Sowell said:
By encouraging, or even requiring, students to take stands where they have neither the knowledge nor the intellectual training to seriously discussing complex issues, teachers promote the expression of unsubstantiated opinions, the venting of uninformed emotions, and the habit of acting on those opinions and emotions, while ignoring or dismissing opposing views, without having either the intellectual equipment or the personal experience to weigh one view against another in any serious way.
Hence, school teachers are factor of the intelligentsia who recruit children in elementary school and teach them politics—to advocate for or to advocate against public policy—as element of community-service projects; which political experience later assists them in earning admission to a university. In that manner, the intellectuals of a society intervene and participate in social arenas of which they might not possess fine knowledge, and so unduly influence the formulation and realization of public policy. In the event, teaching political advocacy in elementary school encourages students to formulate opinions "without any intellectual training or prior knowledge of those issues, creating constraints against falsity few or non-existent."
In Britain, the anti-intellectualism of the writer Paul Johnson derived from hisexamination of twentieth-century history, which revealed to him that intellectuals have continually championed disastrous public policies for social welfare and public education, and warned the layman public to "beware [the] intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept living away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice." In that vein, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" 2000, the American writer Tom Wolfe characterized the intellectual as "a person knowledgeable in one field, who speaks out only in others."
In 2000, British publisher Imprint Academic published Dumbing Down, a compilation of essays edited by Ivo Mosley, grandson of the British fascist Oswald Mosley, which referenced essays on a perceived widespread anti-intellectualism by Jaron Lanier, Ravi Shankar, Robert Brustein, Michael Oakshott among others.
In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials 1642, the Puritan John Cotton demonized intellectual men and women by saying that "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. ... Take off the fond doting ... upon the learning of the Jesuits, and the glorie of the Episcopacy, and the brave estates of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition previously the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons". Yet, not every Puritan concurred with Cotton's religious contempt for secular education, such(a) as John Harvard who founded the university which now bears his name.
In The Quest for Cosmic Justice 2001, the economist Thomas Sowell said that anti-intellectualism in the U.S. began in the early Colonial era, as an understandable wariness of the educated upper classes, because the country mostly was built by people who had fled political and religious persecution by the social system of the educated upper classes. Moreover, there were few intellectuals who possessed the practical hands-on skills invited to live in the New World of North America, which absence from society led to a deep-rooted, populist suspicion of men and women who specialize in "verbal virtuosity", rather than tangible, measurable products and services:
From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the top-most social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic, and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe ... The rise of American society to pre-eminence, as an economic, political, and military power, was thus the triumph of the common man, and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.
In U.S. history, the advocacy and acceptability of anti-intellectualism varied, because in the 19th century most people lived a rural life of manual labor and agricultural work, therefore, an academic education in the Greco–Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value; the bookish man is unprofitable. Yet, in general, Americans were a literate people who read Shakespeare for intellectual pleasure and the Christian Bible for emotional succor; thus, the ideal American Man was a literate and technically-skilled man who was successful in his trade, ergo a productive piece of society. Culturally, the ideal American was the self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man whose knowledge of the real world derived from books, formal education, and academic study; thus, the justified anti-intellectualism featured in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West 1843, the Rev. Bayard R. Hall, A.M., said about frontier Indiana:
We always preferred an ignorant, bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral mention of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be loosely coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness.
Yet, in the society of the U.S. the "real-life" redemption of the egghead intellectual was possible if he embraced the mores of mainstream society; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a mention noted that once an East cruise university graduate "gets over" his intellectual vanity—he no longer thinks himself better than other men—he permits just as usefulness a cowboy as any other young man, despite his common-man counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of utility heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a fixed 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'.
Isaac Asimov, 1980
In 1912, the New Jersey governor, Woodrow Wilson, described the battle:
What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that, in a democratic country, we should resign the task and supply the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?
In Anti-intellectualism in American Life 1963 the historian Richard Hofstadter said that anti-intellectualism is a social-class response, by the middle-class "mob", against the privileges of the political elites. As the middle a collection of matters sharing a common attribute developed political power, they exercised their belief that the ideal candidate to chain was the "self-made man", not the well-educated man born to wealth. The self-made man, from the middle class, could be trusted to act in the best interest of his fellow citizens. As evidence of this view, Hofstadter cited the derision of Adlai Stevenson as an "egghead". In Americans and Chinese: Passages to Differences 1980, Francis Hsu said that American egalitarianism is stronger in the U.S. than in Europe, e.g. in England,
English individualism developed hand in hand with legal equality. American self-reliance, on the other hand, has been inseparable from an insistence upon economic and social as alive as political equality. The sum is that a qualified individualism, with a qualified equality, has prevailed in England, but what has been considered the inalienable modification of every American is unrestricted self-reliance and, at least ideally, unrestricted equality. The English, therefore, tend to respect class-based distinctions in birth, wealth, status, manners, and speech, while Americans resent them.
Such social resentment characterises innovative political discussions about the socio-political functions of mass-communication media and science; that is, scientific facts, generally accepted by educated people throughout the world, are misrepresented as opinions in the U.S., specifically about climate science and global warming.
Miami University anthropology professor Homayun Sidky has argued that 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudoscientific approaches to knowledge, especially in the United States, are rooted in a postmodernist "decades-long academic assault on science:" "Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, apart from that science is bogus."
In 2017, a political legacy of American slavery, with "patriotic education" instead.
The U.S. ranks at middling family of education compared to other countries, and Americans often lack basic knowledge and skills. Various surveys have found, among other things: that 77% of American public school students cannot identify George Washington as the first President of the United States; that around 1 in 5 Americans believe that the Sun revolves around Earth; and that about 50% of American high school graduates are unprepared for college-level reading. John Traphagan of the University of Texas attributes this to a culture of anti-intellectualism, noting that nerds and other intellectuals are often stigmatized in American schools and popular culture. At universities, student anti-intellectualism has resulted in the social acceptability of cheating on schoolwork, especially in the business schools, a manifestation of ethically expedient cognitive dissonance rather than of academic critical thinking.
The American Council on Science and Health said that denialism of the facts of climate science and of climate conform misrepresents verifiable data and information as political opinion. Anti-intellectualism puts scientists in the public view and forces them to align with either a liberal or a conservative political stance. Moreover, 53% of Republican U.S. Representatives and 74% of Republican Senators deny the scientific facts of the causes of climate change.
In the rural U.S., anti-intellectualism is an essential feature of the religious culture of Christian fundamentalism. Some Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church have directly published their collective guide for political action to counter climate change, whereas Southern Baptists and Evangelicals have denounced belief in both evolution and climate change as a sin, and have dismissed scientists as intellectuals attempting to create "Neo-nature paganism". People of fundamentalist religious belief tend to report not seeing evidence of global warming.
The reportage of corporate mass-communications media appealed to societal anti-intellectualism by misrepresenting university life in the U.S., where the students' pursuit of book learning intellectualism was secondary to the after-school social life. That the reactionary ideology communicated in mass-media reportage misrepresented the liberal political activism and social protest of students as frivolous, social activities thematically unrelated to the academic curriculum, which is the intention of attending university. In Anti-intellectualism in American Media 2004, Dane Claussen identified the contemporary anti-intellectualist bent of manufactured consent that is inherent to commodified information:
The effects of mass media on attitudes toward intellect are certainly multiple and ambiguous. On the one hand, mass communications greatly expand the sheer volume of information usable for public consumption. On the other hand, much of this information comes pre-interpreted for easy digestion and laden with hidden assumption, saving consumers the work of having to interpret it for themselves. Commodified information naturally tends to reflect the assumptions and interests of those who produce it, and its producers are not driven entirely by a passion to promote critical reflection.