Anti-intellectualism is the hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science. As political adjective, Anti-intellectual describes an education system emphasising minimal academic accomplishment, and a government who formulate public policy without the advice of academics and their scholarship.



In public discourse, Anti-intellectuals usually perceive and publicly present themselves as champions of the common folk — populists against élitists and academic élitism — proposing that educated people are a social group detached from the quotidian concerns of the majority, and that they dominate political discourse and higher education.

Anti-intellectualism expressed

Anti-intellectualism usually is expressed through declarations of Otherness — the intellectual is 'not one of us', he or she is dangerous to societal normality, for having little empathy for the common folk. Historically, this resulted in portrayals of intellectuals as an arrogant social group, whom rural communities viewed as ‘city slickers’ caring little for the country and country ways. It also is common for such communities to stereotype intellectuals as ‘foreigners’ or as ethnic minorities who ‘think differently’ than the natives; critics misrepresent them as prone to mental instability, because there is an organic, causal connection between genius and madness. Religion often portrays intellectuals as promoters of atheism, and as indecent, either because of their sexual mores, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, or celibacy.

Sources of anti-intellectualism

Religion

In Classical antiquity and in the modern era, religion tended to anti-intellectual sentiment — usually among fundamentalist who perceived doctrinal contradictions allowing too much freedom. Yet, said sentiment was not universal, e.g. Judaism’s scholarly and theologic traditions, and the Western university system evolved from religious schools. Moreover, mediæval and modern philosophers — Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant — considered themselves religious without contradicting their intellectualism; see the Conflict Thesis for further discussion of religious anti-intellectualism.

When religious doctrine stipulates definitive statements about natural and human history, the provenance of sacred texts, and other matters of faith, intellectuals usually propose that such claims be substantiated via external scholarship. Therefore, a claim about the authenticity of the mediæval Shroud of Turin (ca. 1260–1390) being a religious artefact from antiquity could be scientifically tested; and a theodicy could be logically examined for consistency — although the results might provoke intellectual and existential doubt either confirming or negating the faith of the believers. Furthermore, when bohemianism, avant-gardism, and romanticism became integral to the fine arts, religious anti-intellectuals perceived them as immoral, if not amoral — and demanded their censorship. Historically, this remains thematically common to the socio-cultural trends in the Americas and in Europe, since the Protestant Reformation (1517).

Authoritarian politics

Dictators, and people seeking to establish dictatorships, use anti-intellectualism to gain popular political support, because they perceive the educated as a politically dangerous social group who question extant social norms, dissent from established, popular opinion, and reject nationalism, hence are unpatriotic, thus subversive. In the event, violent anti-intellectualism usually is common to the rise and rule of authoritarian political movements, such as Italian Fascism, Soviet Stalinism, and Iranian theocracy.

Ideologically extreme dictatorships, such as the Khmer Rouge (1975–79), the Communist Party of Kampuchea, killed people with more than elementary educations. Other expressions of governmental anti-intellectualism range from closing public libraries and schools, to isolating intellectuals and scientists in an Ivory Tower, to official declarations that intellectuals are prone to mental illness, and, via mental health laws, imprison them in psychiatric hospitals, thereby rendering them scapegoats who divert popular discontent from the dictatorship.

Moreover, anti-intellectualism is neither always violent, nor oppressive, because most any social group can exercise contempt for intellect, intellectualism, and education. To wit, the Uruguayan writer, Jorge Majfud said that ‘this contempt, that arises from a power installed in the social institutions, and from the inferiority complex of its actors, is not a property of “underdeveloped” countries. In fact, it is always the critical intellectuals, writers, or artists who head the top-ten lists of “the most stupid of the stupid” in the country’.

Populism

Populism posits intellectuals as elitists with fearful rhetorical skills with which they deceive the common folk, the virtuous 'salt of the earth'. In the US, ex-president George W. Bush (2001–2009) used populism in gaining and retaining popular support for his government. For example, populists proposing such perceptions of intellectuals assert that knowledge needs to be regulated ‘by the people’, because educators need to work within the policies of the interested parties — such as parents’ groups — in matters of curricular content, (viz. including Creationism pseudoscience as academically analogous to evolution). Like-wise, the intellectual’s objectivity and curiosity towards and about foreign countries are misrepresented as unpatriotic, lacking in definitive moral clarity — hence subversive of the homeland’s social norms, popular opinion, and nationalism.

Education system anti-intellectualism

Because the curricula of a country’s education system determine the cultural formation of its nation — thereby, the real-world occupational and professional destinies of its graduates, as either blue collar or white collar workers — the intellectuals and the anti-intellectuals vie to control the content of public and private education. This contest has been and is variously manifested as Kulturkampf in Bismarck’s Germany, culture war in the US, and cultural hegemony elsewhere. In the Anglophone world, especially in the US, anti-intellectuals such as the politicians David Horowitz (viz. the David Horowitz Freedom Center), Patrick Buchanan, and William Bennett, an ex-secretary of education, criticize schools and universities as 'Intellectualist', for teaching curricula emphasising impractical, rather than practical education that would not yield graduates prepared for ‘real-world’ work.

At school

In the 2004 newspaper article ‘When Every Child is Good Enough’, John Tierney reported that conservative parents believe that US primary and secondary schools over-emphasise equality of outcome to the detriment of their childrens’ individual (unequal) achievements. A literary example of that contention is the science fiction short story ‘Harrison Bergeron’ (1961), by Kurt Vonnegut, wherein the government’s Handicapper General imposes equality upon the eponymous hero, lest his existence — as the smartest, handsomest, most athletic boy in the world — hurt the feelings of the mediocre popular majority, (viz. the over-simplification, the dumbing down, of curricula).

At university

The “intellectualist” accusations against higher education, by such as David Horowitz, Patrick Buchanan and William Bennett, are based upon three conservative concerns about curricular content:

(i) Political bias: That university professors, instructors, and lecturers inculcate secular values to the students without ‘equal time’ for analogue views. Proponents of such arguments, assert that the political bias sacrifices objectivity and traditional religious values in favour of political radicalism and left-wing perspectives, especially in the Humanities, and in the social sciences that challenge the cultural validity of white patriarchy, and in some cases exist chiefly for the purpose of doing so, see Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Racial Studies.

(ii) Deficient curricula: The lack of general education requirements (i.e. the Humanities) such as philosophy, history, literature, music, et cetera, especially those emphasizing the contributions of Western civilization, in acquiring a balanced education.

(iii) Impracticality: That a humanistic education is not readily profitable in ‘real life’ as opposed to a technical (computer science, engineering, etc.) or professional (law, medicine, etc.) education.

Youth culture

Contemporary Youth Culture is a commercial form of anti-intellectualism orienting adherents to consumerism. The Frontline public affairs television series documentary The Merchants of Cool (2001) describes how the advertising business transformed adolescents’ language, thought, and action (cliques, fashion, fads) into commodities, and thus engendred a generation of intellectually disengaged Americans uninterested in progressing to adulthood.

The US youth sub-culture originated from the post–Second World War economic prosperity allowing adolescents to work and have a discretionary income — whilst still dependant upon parents. In turn, their economic power allowed business to sell them popularity — an identity as a young person — something that once was not for sale, but self-created; to wit, the British blog writer Paul Graham likened youth culture to an occupation permitting little time for education and intellectual interests.

American anti-intellectualism

17th Century

In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), the Puritan John Cotton wrote 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 Jesuites, 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 before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the appause of these persons.’ Hence, the anti-intellectualism that conservative Christians (Evangelicals and Fundamentalists) espouse proposes that contemporary education subverts religious belief and faith, arguing that the atheism and Deism characteristic to educated people during the The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, establishes the validity of their perspective.

19th Century

In the history of American anti-intellectualism, 19th century popular culture is important, because, in a time when most of the populace lived a rural life of manual labour and agricultural work, a ‘bookish’ education, concerned with the Græco-Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value, ergo unprofitable — yet Americans, generally, were literate and read Shakespeare for pleasure — thus, the ideal American man was technically skilled, successful in his trade, ergo a productive member of society.

Culturally, the ideal American was a self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man, whose knowledge derived from books, formal education, and academic study. To wit, in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843), the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, A.M., about frontier Indiana said, ‘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 [like-wise] incompetence and goodness’. Yet, the egghead’s worldly redemption was possible if he embraced mainstream mores; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a character noted that once an East Coast university graduate ‘gets over’ his intellectual vanity — no longer thinks himself better than others — he makes just as good a cowboy as any other young man, despite his counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of good heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.

20th and 21st centuries

Rightist perspective

The writer Robert Warshow proposed that the Communist Party of the USA was central to US intellectual life during the 1930s:

For most American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930s was a crucial experience. In Europe, where the movement was at once more serious and more popular, it was still only one current in intellectual life; the Communists could never completely set the tone of thinking. . . . But in this country there was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived, in one way or another, from the Communist party. If you were not somewhere within the party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition.

A contemporary philosophic descendant of Warshow, is David Horowitz, an ex-Marxist advocating an ‘academic freedom’ movement, via the David Horowitz Freedom Center (1988), proposing that identity politics and left-wing academics indoctrinate university students with anti-Americanism.

Feminism

In Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2001), the Canadian religious studies academics, Nathanson and Young propose that ‘ideological feminism’ — akin to the gender feminism proposed by Christina Hoff Summers — is ‘profoundly anti-intellectual’.

Leftist perspective

The 1960s anti-war movement protesting the thirty-year US war against Vietnam (1945–75) manifested its anti-intellectualism against US defense secretary Robert McNamara, whose business school intellectualism manifested itself in that war’s published body counts, a feature of attrition warfare, a militarily strategy applied when conquest is infeasible. The Marxist Theodor Adorno criticised this left-wing anti-intellectualism as actionism, philosophically-baseless action for its own sake, meant to effect political change. Furthermore, non-conformist students romanticized the poor people of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, as an ideal wherein illiteracy was freedom from the suburban conformism of post–Second World War US society.

News media

Public intellectuals, such as Professor Noam Chomsky, observe that the news media’s low-quality intellectual content is spectacle in service to commerce (high viewership ratings) promoting Establishment perspectives with manufactured consent.

In the US 2000 presidential election, the mass communications media, especially stand-up comedians on television, portrayed the Democratic Party candidate Al Gore as a boring ‘brainiac’ (a portmanteau word of brain + maniac) who spoke in a monotone about abstruse facts and figures incomprehensible to hoi polloi. His reported claim to ‘have invented the Internet’ was especially ridiculed by anti-intellectuals, thus stereotypically portraying him as an intellectual detached from the common folk. Like-wise, conservative political commentators, such as Ann Coulter (an attorney), Bill O’Reilly (MA, public administration), and radio personality Rush Limbaugh, argue that the news media betray left-wing intellectual snobbery when they portray right-wing politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin, as illiterate incompetents. In particular, O’Reilly, a Harvard University alumnus, is known for hostility towards the East Coast ‘liberal Ivy League élites’.

As talk programme hosts, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Scarborough (an attorney) practise anti-intellectualism by habitually interrupting the guests’ presentations of complex arguments; about that behaviour, Scarborough said, ‘If my guest is allowed to speak uninterrupted for more than fifteen seconds, then I’m not doing my job’.

European anti-intellectualism

The Græco-Roman world

In the Roman Republic (509–27 BC), the public career of the statesman Cato the Elder displayed traits that would be considered anti-intellectual in the contemporary world. He vehemently opposed the introduction of Greek culture to the Roman republic, believing them subversive of traditional Roman military values and plain-spokenness. In 186 BC, he convinced the Senate to decree against the Bacchanalia, then a recently imported mystery religion, they agreed with him via the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus. He urged the deportation of three Athenian philosophers, Carneades, Diogenes the Stoic, and Critolaus, in Rome as Athenian ambassadors, because he believed their opinions dangerous to the Republic.

The USSR

In the first decade after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks suspected the Tsarist intelligentsia as potentially traitorous of the proletariat, thus, the initial Soviet government comprised men and women without much formal education. Lenin derided the old intelligentsia with the expression (very roughly translated): ‘We ain’t completed no academies’, (мы академиев не кончали). Moreover, the deposed propertied classes were termed Lishentsy (‘the disenfranchised’), whose children were excluded from education; eventually, some 200 Tsarist intellectuals were deported to Germany on Philosophers' ships in 1922; others were deported to Latvia and to Turkey in 1923.

During the revolutionary period, the pragmatic Bolsheviks employed ‘bourgeois experts’ to manage the economy, industry, and agriculture, and so learn from them. After the Russian Civil War (1917–23), to achieve Socialism, the USSR (1922–91) emphasised literacy and education in service to modernising the country via an educated working class intelligentsia, rather than an Ivory Tower intelligentsia. During the 1930s and the 1950s, Stalin replaced Lenin’s intelligentsia with a Communist intelligentsia, loyal to him and with a specifically Soviet world view, thereby producing the most egregious examples of Soviet anti-intellectualism — the pseudoscientific theories of Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory, most damaging to biology and linguistics in that country, by subordinating science to a fundamentalist interpretation of Marxism.

Fascist Italy

The idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile established the intellectual basis of Fascist ideology with the autoctisi (self-realisation) via concrete thinking that distinguished between the good (active) intellectual and the bad (passive) intellectual:

To counter the ‘passive intellectual’ who used his or her intellect abstractly, and therefore was ‘decadent’, he proposed the ‘concrete thinking’ of the active intellectual who applied intellect as praxis — a ‘Man of Action’, like Fascist Benito Mussolini, versus the decadent Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The passive intellectual stagnates intellect by objectifying ideas, thus establishing them as objects — hence the Fascist rejection of logic — because it relies upon a priori and a posteriori facts that hold principles (external to the matter-in-hand) as considerable in effecting an action or not. In the praxis of Gentile's concrete thinking criteria, such consideration of the a priori constitutes impractical, decadent intellectualism. Moreover, this fascist philosophy occurred parallel to Actual Idealism, his philosophic system; he opposed intellectualism for its being disconnected from the active intelligence that gets things done, i.e. thought is killed when its constituent parts are labelled, and thus rendered as discrete entities.

Asian anti-intellectualism

China

The Tao Te Ching (ca. 6th c. BC) advises emperors to keep their subjects occupied and content with a ‘full belly and an empty mind’, and that for a people, ‘ignorance is better than knowledge’. Qin Shi Huang (246–21 BC), the first Emperor of unified China, consolidated political thought, and power, by suppressing freedom of speech at the suggestion of Chancellor Li Ssu, who justified such anti-intellectualism by accusing the intelligentsia of falsely praising the emperor, and of dissenting through libel. From 213 to 206 BC, the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought were incinerated, especially the Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry, ca. 1000 BC) and the Shujing (Classic of History, ca. 6th c. BC); the exceptions were books by Qin historians, and books of Legalism, an early type of totalitarianism — and the Chancellor’s philosophic school, (see the Burning of books and burying of scholars).

Democratic Kampuchea

When the Communist Party of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge (1951–81), established their régime as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) in Cambodia, their anti-intellectualism idealised the country and demonised the cities — which they emptied to purge the Khmer nation of every traitor, enemy of the state, and intellectual (often symbolised by eyeglasses) — to establish agrarian socialism, (see the Killing Fields and the Other).

Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic régime established in 1979, effected its anti-intellectualism by replacing secular law with religion, thereby provoking the brain drain-emigration of most of Iran’s Western-educated and -trained intelligentsia. In 1980, the government closed the country’s universities until the curricula were ‘purified’ of the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979) corruption. The assassination of the poet Saïd Soltanpour, in 1981, was the theocracy’s most notorious anti-intellectual suppression; and secular education remained proscribed until 1982.

See also

• Anti-science
• Appeal to emotion
• Obscurantism
• Pseudo-philosophy
• Dumbing down

References

1. Political Affairs Magazine - Power and the Intellectuals
2. Baker, Peter; “The President as Average Joe: Trying to Boost Support, Bush Brings Banter to the People”; washingtonpost.com; 2 April 2006.
3. John Tierney, “When Every Child Is Good Enough”, The New York Times, 21 November 2004
4. Graham P (February 2003). Why Nerds are Unpopular.
5. Hofstadter, Richard Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1962), p.46.
6. Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy
7. FrontPage Magazine
8. Nathanson, Paul and Kathleen Young. 2001. Spreading misandry: the teaching of contempt for men in popular culture. McGill-Queen's Press, ISBN 0773522727.
9. Transcript: Vice President Gore on CNN's 'Late Edition' - 9 March 1999
10. Intelligentsia / Lenin to Gorky
11. Gentile, Giovanni, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (with selections from other works), A. James Gregor, ed., pp. 22–23, 33, 65–66
12. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy (2005), Ted Honderich, ed., p. 332.

Further reading

• Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter: ISBN 0-394-70317-0
• Anti-Intellectualism in American Media, by Dane S. Claussen: New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. ISBN 0-8204-5721-3
• Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament, by Perry Link: New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. ISBN 0393310655
• Hinton, William. Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. New York: New York UP, 1972. ISBN 0-85345-281-4.
• Moynihan Commission Report, Appendix A, 7. The Cold War, footnote 103 quoted from Robert Warshow, The Legacy of the 30’s: Middle-Class Mass Culture and the Intellectuals’ Problem, Commentary Magazine (December 1947): 538.
• "Action Will be Taken" Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents by Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti (Left Business Observer)