Anti-intellectualism in American Life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life

by hhs • 7 years ago

86 113 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

codesushi422• 7 years ago

Honest question: which societies are considered "pro intellectual"?

philipov2• 7 years ago

Germany, Russia, China, Korea, and Japan come to mind.

wetpaws• 7 years ago

Russia copies a lot of anti-intellectualism from US. (just watch russian television if you dont believe me)

Mediterraneo105• 7 years ago

Russia

While under the Soviet Union intellectual pursuits were more appreciated among the general population than in other countries (though naturally there were significant restrictions on what topics could be breached in art and literature), a lot of that culture disappeared in Russia after 1991. You don’t see many commuters reading belles lettres on the metro any more, chess still has its fans but nowhere near like in the socialist era, and Russian television today is as garish and sensationalistic as anywhere else.

One of the reasons that there was such a book culture across the Eastern Bloc is because books were extremely cheap by local standards, but there was little other media to consume or few other products to spend one’s money on. After the fall of Communism, books were no longer as cheap because the state no longer artificially set their prices at low levels, and there was an explosion of new, free television, radio, and magazine media that the population could consume instead, and there were new consumer goods to spend money on (when one had money, as there were some rocky times).

oarabbus_9• 7 years ago

Korea is excessively conformist. I don't know what kind of definition of "intellectualism" it could fall under.

While if we're giving more credit to historical influence than modern day, Germany would make the list, I think they fall off if you give weight to the modern day. Nothing wrong with them, they're simply no longer a remarkable, intellectual nation on 2019's leaderboard.

Russia, China, and Japan I'd agree with, although I am not a big fan of the "brand" of intellectualism the first two adhere to.

blackflame70002• 7 years ago

It depends on how you define "Intellectual". If I define it as one with great knowledge of how to gain wealth then I would say the US is very pro Intellectual. I'm sure there are some people that think you have to be published in one of those journals whos results more often than not can't be replicated, to be considered intellectual, however. The definition of the word is up for interpretation.

prewett2• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual would be a good starting definition

packet_nerd• 7 years ago

Singapore and South Korea?

oarabbus_9• 7 years ago

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the definition, but I'd consider those to be excessively conformist nations and not the beacons of intellectualism.

dfischer• 7 years ago

Similarly, given a gradient of anti intellectual to pro intellectual where would all societies rest?

52-6F-623• 7 years ago

I’m seeing a range of answers that seem to betray individual value systems more than anything.

I’ll play along. I’d say Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan. Societies of continuing celebration of poetic, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievement.

(That’s a short list, and a fast-thought out one that is shorter than it should be. Don’t crucify me for it. There are entire ranges of the planet I’ve skipped)

tbabb• 7 years ago

Ancient Greece, too.

oarabbus_9• 7 years ago

You said all the other answers simply betray personal value systems, and not to crucify your list, but your list is essentially one of (Northern) Euro nations, plus Japan. Then you cite poetic, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievement as your criteria, but leave out countries like India, Russia, and China.

Could you explain your rationale here?

prewett2• 7 years ago

I don't think that celebration of the arts and science is a good metric of pro-intellectual culture. The US does all these things, too. It has a shorter history, though, so it has a smaller amount of cultural works (but you said celebration, anyway).

I think pro-intellectual culture is one that values thoughtful questioning, including of the status quo. Opinions are required to have a good argument; dogma (religious, political, technical, or otherwise) is not acceptable. It's G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis instead of fundamentalists; it's The Federalist Papers instead of "the free market fixes all problems"; it's original Agile instead of process-Agile; it's real Hungarian notation instead of MS-docs-"Hungarian" notation.

mc32• 7 years ago

You know this is tricky.

The CCP leadership is intellectual and is pro intellectual for its own cadres. But are they pro populace intellectualism?

Same for the Bolsheviks.

And to be honest, I think GWB's anti-intellectualism is as much a problem as is disconnected intellectualism who take it upon themselves to do what's "right" for the population at large.

skissane• 7 years ago

In France, there is still such a thing as a "celebrity philosopher".

bobthechef• 7 years ago

And that's good how? It's just snobbish pseudo-intellectualism. If anything, it can be more corrosive because it produces a suffocating, toxic atmosphere of fraud. Groupies and scenesters.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

Last time I was in Paris, in La Villette, there was a busker playing incredibly dissonant serial music. On an accordion.

He had an audience - admittedly not a huge audience, but he certainly wasn't being ignored. There aren't many places that would happen.

Francophone cultures - and especially in Paris and Montreal - seem more comfortable with people who are clever, thinky, maybe creative, and a bit unusual, than Anglophone cultures.

The UK and US have their own version, but access is controlled more by class rather than raw talent. France is hardly class-free, but it seems more open to blue sky philosophy than the US, which seems to be impressed primarily by thought leadership in a corporate context, or social and academic theories with dogmatic authoritarian overtones - even among progressives - than in knock-about philosophical experimentation for the sake of it.

RootKitBeerCat• 7 years ago

I’d argue that in most societies that have existed, there is at least a caste or class that value and put their resources towards a form of intellectualism. How you measure its degree of new idea / innovative thought production or some such other intellectual endeavors realization, is really difficult, for example you could consider a religious leader position that shares moral or meaningful stories even if just historical stories, is someone in the society who inspires intellectualism if only for provoking the intellect to think about another perspective than their own.

darksaints• 7 years ago

Canadian society is quite a bit like American society minus a hell of a lot of anti-intellectualism. Not that it doesn't exist there, but the difference between the two is pretty stark.

mindcrime3• 7 years ago

Shades of Tocqueville[1] who wrote about the dangers of anti-intellectualism in America even earlier.

For instance, Kaledin says, to an extent greater than is usually emphasized, Tocqueville thought “populism would gradually lead to an anti-intellectual culture and to mediocrity in political leadership.”

I don't think you could come up with a better summary than "mediocrity in political leadership" to describe the current climate.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/2011/tocqueville-1129

SoylentOrange2• 7 years ago

I’m not sure this is accurate, if attempting to compare US political figures with those of other countries. I don’t know if there is hard data on this, but I would bet the US Congress has proportionally just as many graduates of top universities as any other legislative body in the world.

If anyone wants to crunch the numbers, I would be excited to see the percentage of US Congresspeople with serious educational attainments vs Japanese, French, German, Canadian, or any other similar body.

einpoklum3• 7 years ago

Graduating university does not an intellectual make.

human20190310• 7 years ago

Is mediocrity in political leadership so bad? History's greatest catastrophes were undertaken by overachievers.

lambdasquirrel• 7 years ago

Sure, but that’s probably a variance thing. The overachieving can be a multiplier unto itself.

Do you notice it though, when you have a Brezhnev, or a Qin Er Shi, or a Louis XVI? Napoleon was so much cooler than Czar Nicolas II. We don’t remember those other folks as much, and sometimes the effect of their rule isn’t immediately or decisively felt.

dang2• 7 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mindcrime3• 7 years ago

Your comment is irrelevant, since I did nothing of the sort.

_7fvc• 7 years ago

I find that different cultures and countries draw different lines between intellects and beliefs. I came from Vietnam. It has a communist leadership. The subject of evolution is widely taught and agreed. People in school show off their scientific intellect. There's an emphasis on the study of science subjects. You'll hear a lot about science competition, local scientists. Religious doctrines are suppressed. You rarely hear about them except through some friends who are associated with religions. Even those friends rarely talk about their religions in public.

In America, there's a somewhat different divide. Academia teaches evolution and almost never mentions religion. Churches and mosques are the places you would learn about religions. Government seems neutral. But if you dig around, you can find a lot of religious materials. You can meet people who openly expresses their religious beliefs. In some ways, science feels suppressed and has to compete with religions.

But this anti-intellectualism may make science better. Rather than agreeing with science, we constantly question it.

bllguo2• 7 years ago

The idea of questioning science and informed skepticism is valuable, but I don't think it stems from anti-intellectualism. How can people who distrust science to that degree come up with meaningful criticism? I don't see what value climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers are bringing to science, for example.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

It's not that climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers are themselves improving science, it's that their existence forces scientists to up their game. If you know that someone is going to question your findings, you tend to work harder to ensure that you're actually saying something true and there are no holes in your reasoning. This holds even if those people never actually question your findings - even if you never interact with them at all. The benefit is all because of your own self-criticism.

It's like how competition tends to make companies provide better service, even if the competition never actually steals a single customer away. The fact that it could changes the incentives in a way that makes you do your job more rigorously.

krapp3• 7 years ago

But this anti-intellectualism may make science better. Rather than agreeing with science, we constantly question it.

Anti-intellectuals by definition don't possess the intellectual curiosity necessary to contribute to science, rather, they fear and mistrust such curiosity, and any result of it more complex or less intuitive than high school algebra.

The myth that science is just slavish dogmatism is pushed by the anti-intellectual crowd, and by people who want to discredit scientific theses like evolution, climate change, parts of physics and astrophysics, mainstream medicine or vaccines. Science already has a process of constantly questioning itself - that's literally what the scientific process is. That constant questioning by science of its assumptions and revising them in the face of new evidence has led iteratively to models of reality which have proven fairly robust against criticism, and appear to accurately describe and predict the universe.

The anti-intellectuals, meanwhile, just scoff derisively at the "globalist elites" in their "ivory towers" with their "mumbo jumbo."

pnw_hazor2• 7 years ago

Intellectuals have fueled the rise of plenty of terrible ideas and outcomes. People -- even deplorables and bitter clingers -- are right to question intellectuals and in some cases raise barriers that are difficult for them to overcome.

Sometimes the mumbo-jumbo is bullshit or dangerous.

roenxi2• 7 years ago

The interesting question that may well be addressed in the book but not in the wiki; is it a mistake? The communist regimes were quite pro-intellectual [0]; and the modern communist party is relatively technocratic compared to the US.

The problem is although technical excellence is a benefit, intellectuals form their own class and have slightly abstract demands. As a body their first priority is not the material betterment of ordinary people, although individually there are intellectuals who punch well above their weight in that regard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union

shmerl4• 7 years ago

That's very moot. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

There is a well known story, when Stalin met with Vavilov¹ to hear his concerns about issues related to genetics, and was ridiculing his ideas, making fun of him, saying that all he does is "playing with pestles and stamens". Vavilov died of starvation in prison. I don't call such regimes intellectual.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov

Tade03• 7 years ago

And yet they had a successful space program - after Stalin died in 1953 that is.

Mediterraneo105• 7 years ago

You shouldn’t extrapolate from Stalin’s regime to the whole Soviet era. Stalin is infamous for making the USSR backward in genetics, history, archaeology, and linguistics. Yet as soon as he died, those fields recovered and significant progress on even a global level was made. My own academic background is in the latter three subjects, and I cite work by Soviet scholars in any publication I write.

Most academic libraries in the West keep Soviet academic publications from the Stalinist era in the closed stacks, because no one ever asks for them. There is a reason for that: the level of scholarship is poor, and the author feels compelled to praise the “Great Leader” (вождь) even if he was writing on something so removed from the modern Soviet Union and Communist ideology as e.g. 3rd-century CE grave finds. However, from the Khrushchev era on, Soviet scholarship in many fields was as strong as in the West and, as I said, some of those works are standard references for the field regardless of where on earth you live and work.

I would consider the late Soviet Union a fairly “intellectual” culture, because even as in the West the attraction of many such academic careers declined in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e. the belief that such degrees were useless and there was no way to make a living from them), in the USSR it was still very respectable to enter such fields. Naturally, however, that was only possible under an overall planned economy that turned out to be deeply flawed and inhuman, and as I mentioned elsewhere here Russia’s intellectual culture declined after the fall of Communism, but still.

Tade03• 7 years ago

I would say pro-educational, but not openly pro-intellectual, because that could be seen as bourgeoisie.

My uncle - an engineer born in communist Poland - is to this day frustrated by the way he was treated by the system.

Interestingly my father - also an engineer - had no such issues, although this might be explained by the fact that he was a son of a military surgeon.

geoalchimista• 7 years ago

"pro-intellectual" by sending intellectuals to Gulag?

roenxi2• 7 years ago

Turns out where a country sits on the authority-liberty spectrum is more important than pro-anti intellectualism. Being pro-intellectual doesn't necessarily mean being pro-liberty. America isn't going to send intellectuals to the gulags no matter how anti-intellectual the climate gets (assuming the legal system holds out).

I'll point out what seems obvious to me here - if "pro-intellectualism" means identifying a class of people, labelling them intellectuals and giving them a systemic advantage than that isn't a good idea. That is class warfare. If it means philosophically believing that rationalism and science are the keys to a better future then that was trialed in Soviet and Chinese systems of thought. It wasn't the only thing going on at the time and I agree it didn't work out very well - better to let people do what they want than to enforce that they believe 'good ideas'.

mushufasa3• 7 years ago

I truly believe this is a substantial part of the reason why there's such a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA. https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-s-companies-continue-to-look... . There could be much more talent unlocked if mainstream culture promoted intellectual pursuits.

deogeo• 7 years ago

I'm not so sure. I heard (second-hand anecdote, sources welcome) that primary education in the US is of poor quality - that seems like a more likely cause. Unless we blame anti-intellectualism for that poor quality.

Edit: dlp211 inspired me to find a source, and it confirms his suspicions - US education seems reasonably good: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-...

Even so, a few doubts remain. Could the US have good students on average, but fail to fully utilize its more talented students?

hhs• 7 years ago

I wonder if a poor level of civics education could also be a factor?

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

"Math class is tough" Barbie is a byproduct of this attitude. It directly feeds into under-performance in academics. The education system itself isn't broken so much as expectations are low to let the less studious scrape by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_Talk_Barbie

dlp211• 7 years ago

I feel like this is one of those things that everyone knows but just isn't true.

germinalphrase• 7 years ago

It’s a educational quality distribution problem. States/regions with good education rival the best in the world, but that’s balanced against states/regions that have middling and poor education. The US is a big country, and it has a shaky history when it comes to providing high quality education for ALL citizens.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

It's of very poor quality since we've had Prop 13, Howard Jarvis and all the same in the lesser states

tabtab• 7 years ago

Tech is cyclical. I got punched in the face financial-wise by the dot-com crash of the early 00's. I have little reason to believe such crashes won't happen again.

For example, our web standards are ill-fitted for productivity-oriented business applications, creating a lot of wasteful busywork. If new standards came along to address that, many coders would be let go.

And I'm sure there's an AI bubble at play. The PE ratios of AI companies are not realistic: they can't carry themselves from revenue alone. When the crutch of investment money dries up, they'll fall like dominos. If you are in AI, have a Plan B career.

dvt• 7 years ago

People keep parroting this urban myth, but I just don't see it. The best engineers I've worked with (by far) have been US-educated. Yes, mostly from the upper strata of academia (Stanford/Berkeley/UCLA/MIT/Caltech/etc.) but I'd say that the "average" US developer is significantly more capable than the average off-shore developer.

I mean, the great majority of the main technological advances of the past 20 years have generated by American companies (and more often than not by US-educated entrepreneurs).

Anti-intellectualism might indeed be a problem (maybe?) but to say that tech has been adversely affected is, imo, untrue.

traderjane• 7 years ago

A lot of outsiders can agree that American tech has been vibrant, but what about America outside of tech? Do the other parts of American society smell intellectually vibrant? Other jobs outside of tech appear extremely de-skilled, so I wonder what motivation a person has for furthering their mind -- to impress their peers?

Modern thinking on financial optimization has destroyed the spirit of work.

xtreme• 7 years ago

there's such a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA
> The best engineers I've worked with (by far) have been US-educated

GP's statement does not preclude your experience. For example, all US engineers could have great expertise but there could be only a few of them.

username902• 7 years ago

57% of silicon valley tech workers and 43% of New York tech workers are immigrants, so advances made by American companies are not necessarily made by domestic American workers.

I'd argue that USA has lots of high quality tech workers mostly thanks to brain drain and its size.

https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-row-foreign-workers-make-...

leftyted• 7 years ago

There isn't a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA. US tech companies import workers so they can drive down wages.

This isn't controversial and it's not xenophobic. The NYT has many op-eds covering this issue:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/opinion/workers-betrayed-...

See also the criticisms on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pr...

username902• 7 years ago

There is definitely a shortage of top tech talent domestically in USA if you consider that USA has more top tech companies than the rest of the world combined. The only way to reasonably distribute top talent to those companies is to either accept lots of high quality immigrants or to move some of them abroad to spread out the competition for talent.

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

"there's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated" - NOFX

ykevinator• 7 years ago

Fox news

Anti-intellectualism in American Life

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