Anti-Intellectualism is a virus

ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rept20

Anti-intellectualism is a virus

Michael A. Peters

To cite this article: Michael A. Peters (2019) Anti-intellectualism is a virus, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51:4, 357-363, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1462946

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1462946

Published online: 25 Apr 2018.

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https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1462946

EDITORIAL

Anti-intellectualism is a virus

Is anyone else here solipsistic, or is it only me? –Posted on a website ‘The Most Intellectual Jokes’

Every age and every culture invents its own form of anti-intellectualism. –Apologies to Tolstoy.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1947 prosecuted a panic-driven anti-intellectualism against left-wingers associated with the USSR and communism. The Red Scare was a tactic and ideology pursued by McCarthy for some five years, attempting to expose communists and other ‘left-wing loyalty risks’ within the US government. During the Cold War, any perceived disloyalty was reason enough bring the charge of treason against those perceived as ‘Reds.’ McCarthy whipped up a kind of national hysteria that led to attacks on university professors on members of the armed forces and even those holding government positions. The defining feature of McCarthyism—so-called second Red Scarce (1947–1956)—was the practice of making accusations against individuals or groups emphasizing treason, sedition or subversion without evidence.

Anti-intellectualism was at the heart of McCarthyism with its orchestrated attacks on scholars, intellectuals and writers where attacks took on an evangelical fervor that posed a popular crusader and exhorter and coincided with the religious revival of fundamentalism in the South that expected an unquestioning patriotism. Anti-intellectual fundamentalism held hands with McCathyism to pare back the forces of progressivism in American politics. The Right wing as Hofstadter, (2012) noted exhibited ‘a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated.’

Hofstadter’s (2012, p. 37) Anti-intellectualism in American Life records the tensions between access to education and excellence in education. Hofstadter argued that anti-intellectualism was a consequence of the democratization of knowledge. American anti-intellectualism was a result of a certain utilitarianism and the cult of the practical or self-made man.

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.

The 1950s was a crucible for the American intellectual, then came the 1960s and the flowering of the ‘organic intellectual’ (a concept adopted from Gramsci) and a range of social movements that promoted social change and democratization that led to free-speech, Civil Rights, and anti-war movements. These movements were often associated with intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and the so-called New Left. Indeed, Marcuse is a perfect example: a member of the Frankfurt School, he migrated to the US in 1934 and became a citizen in 1940. Through his works he attained a kind guru status in the 1960s student rebellions that took place around the world as part of the emerging counter-culture. His OneDimensional Man (1964) that focused on the rise of social repression and the decline of the potential for revolution inspired a generation of students. His search for the radical or revolutionary subject was influenced strongly by Heidegger’s phenomenology and he thought only a radical subject could

overcome the repressive structures of advanced industrial society. In Marcuse’s (2004) edited papers The New Left and the 1960s (vol. 3) Douglas Kellner explains ‘Marcuse embodied many of the defining political impulses of the New Left in his thought and politics - hence a younger generation of political activists looked up to him for theoretical and political guidance.’ Marcuse’s paper ‘On the New Left’ was an influential formation. Kellner (2004) explains the distinctive of Marcuse’s analysis and, in part, why he was adopted as the darling of the student movement worldwide:

For Marcuse, the New Left at its best united spontaneity with organization, combining strong anti-authoritarian and liberatory tendencies with the development of new forms of political struggle and organization. The New Left sought to join change of consciousness with the change of society, the personal with socio-political liberation. The New Left, in Marcuse’s view, provided important emphases on the subjective conditions of radical social change and sought new and more humane values, institutions, and ways of life. It embodied the best features of previous socialist and anarchist traditions that it concretized in social struggles such as the antiwar, feminist, ecological communal, and countercultural movements. For Marcuse, it was the demand for total change that distinguished the New Left and its championing of freedom, social justice, and democracy in every sphere of life (p. 2).1

Much earlier, Harry S. Broudy a prominent philosopher of education wrote an article called ‘An Analysis of anti-intellectualism’ published in Educational Theory. 2 In 1954, he wrote: ‘Today the heresy is Communism, actual or suspected; tomorrow it may be Socialism or Economic Royalism; too few wives [Ed. really!]  or too many; too many gods or too few. Of this alone we can be sure: so long as pot shots at the intellectual pay political dividends, we shall lack neither suitable heresies nor zealous accusers.’ He goes on to argue: ‘Intellectualism is not a theory or a philosophy in itself; it is rather a degree of emphasis placed on the powers of the human intellect to achieve truth and happiness’ (p. 187) Dewey is the counterpoint to the rationalist philosophers, Plato, Descartes, and Spinoza. In rejecting the search for certainty associated with rationalism and prioritizing action over thought, Dewey might be deemed ‘anti-intellectual’ yet for his faith in human intelligence. Broudy’s concern is for a philosophy of education that can deal with intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. There have been expressed concerns about anti-intellectualism as a social condition and also within the disciplines.

Marcuse and Hofstadter were followed by a range of thinkers from the Left and the Right. Jacoby’s (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in The Age of Academe examined the disappearance of the public intellectual in America: he argued there are no new intellectuals to replace the last generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Bloom (1987) in The Closing of the American Mind argued that higher education has failed American society by devaluing the ‘great books’ of the Western tradition as a source of wisdom. Posner’s (2003) Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline charts the increasing specialization in academia on the one hand, and the huge multiplication of public discussion sites on the other, leading to a situation where academics often comment on matters outside their area of expertise. Jacoby (2008) in The Age of American Unreason plots the convergence of forces of anti-rationalism and ignorance including the influence of religious fundamentalism and the failure of public education. As Kakutani (2008) complains, in a review of Jacoby:

Conservatives have turned the term ‘intellectual’, like the term ‘liberal’, into a dirty word in politics (even though neo-conservative intellectuals played a formative role in making the case for war against Iraq); policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making everyone an authority on everything. Traditional policy channels involving careful analysis and debate have been circumvented by the Bush White House in favor of bold, gut-level calls, and reasoned public discussions have increasingly given way to noisy partisan warfare among politicians, commentators and bloggers alike.3

Anti-intellectualism is not just limited to the political right. Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Parenti (2004) in ‘“Action Will Be Taken”: Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents’ examines the ideology of the activist left to coin the term ‘Activismism’:

This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hypermediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous. The activistists seem to borrow their philosophy from the factory boss in a Heinrich Böll short story who greets his employees each morning with the exhortation ‘Let’s have some action.’ To which the workers obediently reply: ‘Action will be taken!’

Activist anti-intellectualism can damage progressive social movements. They go on to argue: Activistism is also intimately related to the decline of Marxism, which at its best thrived on debates about the relations between theory and practice, part and whole. Unfortunately, much of this tradition has devolved into the alternately dreary and hilarious rants in sectarian papers. Marxism’s decline (but not death: the three of us would happily claim the name) has led to wooly ideas about a nicer capitalism, and an indifference to how the system works as a whole.4

They are not calling for less activism just more thought or activism informed by thinking. I noticed this tendency when I was elected NZ Academic vice-president for the then Association of University Staff in the late 1990s. On being appointed one of the members of head office said to me: ‘How can you be in the union? You’re a poststructuralist aren’t you?’ What became my standard reply was to emphasize that we needed an analysis of what it is to be knowledge workers under neoliberal managerialism and learn how to stop the aggregation of power to knowledge managers at the expense of academic leadership. Often the line management system promoted administrative staff without an understanding of academic culture and ended up undermining collegiality. I chose not to criticize their use of the word ‘poststructuralism’ as a slogan (a form of academic gossip) without understanding that poststructuralism does not mean anti-Marxism or anti-structuralism. In the 1990s, the bias against contemporary French thinkers, like Derrida and Foucault, and the cultural identification with the English tradition, was very strong even to the extent of inheriting English prejudices against Continental thinkers.

In ‘A Brief History of Anti-Intellectualism in American Media’ Claussen (2004) follows Rigney’s (1991) theory of American anti-intellectualism identifying three major types:

(1) ‘religious antirationalism,’ the view that emotion is warm (that is, good) and reason cold (bad), an outlook often complemented by absolute systems of belief (primarily conservative Protestantism);

(2) ‘populist anti-elitism,’ public skepticism first of the patrician class of ‘gentlemen politicians’ and old money (which still flares up, as against George H. W. Bush) and later public hostility toward progressive politics and support of such figures as Joe McCarthy or George Wallace; and

(3) ‘unreflective instrumentalism,’ beliefs and behavior indicating that knowledge is worthless unless it immediately and directly leads to material gain, such as profits or higher salaries and wages.5

Of course, anti-intellectualism is not confined to America. It is a virus and condition that affects the health of the body politic anywhere, any time. It is an infective agent that it is only able to multiply only within the living cells of a host which I am identifying as public discourse. Its technical or dictionary meaning describes ‘a piece of code which is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.’ This description fits perfectly with the new media digital ecology. That it has no life of its own, and its power of infection depends upon replication within the host of living cells seems to me almost the perfect metaphor.

Horrock’s (2016) recent essay on anti-intellectualism in NZ in Spinoff under the inflated heading ‘The Monday excerpt: Why are New Zealanders so fucking intolerant of anyone with a brain, i.e. intellectuals?’6 is a classic example. The excerpt begins:

Every culture has areas of repression that make it distinctive or notorious, such as various forms of puritanism, racism, or sexism. New Zealand has outgrown much of the puritanism that dominated its way of life at least until the 1960s. But another old repression—anti-intellectualism—still rules. Its style has changed over the years, but the basic belief persists that thinking leads to trouble once it departs from the quiet, normal suburbs of common sense. Less down-to-earth ideas stir up scorn and suspicion.

He quotes the Left-wing critic Bruce Jesson’s 1977 remark ‘New Zealand radicalism must be about the most theoretically-barren in the world.’7

I had the good fortune to hang out with Bruce at the University Club at Auckland on a Friday night over a pint, along with a few others. He was the only NZ academic I knew who had read Kojève’s account of Hegel and knew of its significance (that really impressed me at the time). Growing up in NZ as a

working-class kid from immigrant parents of English and Italian descent, I was a poorly disciplined and poorly schooled kid. (Maybe it was the dyslexia, AGHD and ‘institutional defiance disorder’ I suffered—I regarded them as all part of my philosophical disposition). It was all the more curious that I should be attracted by philosophy and a kind of existentialist intellectualism that Sartre had popularized in the 1960s. Bertram Russell in a very different way exemplified the role of the public intellectual in England at roughly the same time, leading the anti-war movement and nuclear disarmament. One of the very first books I read was Sartre’s The Words (Les Mots, 1963) an autobiographical of his first 10 years recalling French provincialism in the period before the World War I (WWI). It was not a story about an extraordinary childhood, as George Braziller (1964) comments ‘but the extraordinary fantasy about childhood of a man who has created things with words all of his life.’8 (One of the reasons I was attracted to it was its length—it is a very short book. It was the second book I had read and I was 15–16 years old at that stage!).

I don’t know what sparked my interest in ideas. There were no books in our home Although there was plenty of dinner time conversation, often quite raucous (it was a form of street philosophy). I bungled my way through my secondary education at Onslow College in Wellington and I much admired the upper middle class kids from the posh suburbs of Khandallah and Ngaio (which persuaded me to take speaking lessons). Maybe, I wanted to emulate them and perhaps I envied their cultural self-assurance. University in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Victoria University of Wellington really opened my eyes. I had brilliant professors: Don McKenzie, the Shakespeare critic who became a Don at Oxford; Keith Buchanan, a geographer of ‘under-development’ in Africa and China; and Peter Munz, a historiographer and student of both Popper and Wittgenstein. They were all intellectuals in the traditional sense, although their politics differed. They were truly inspiring. Much later, I got ostracized for speaking in a certain way—with a kind of polished accent and for using ‘big words.’ My nickname was ‘Words’ among the geographers and historians in the staffroom at Linwood High School where I was a young teacher. I took this as a good-natured ribbing as it was intended. It was also at Linwood that Rod Harries, vice principal and also tutor in the Philosophy Department at Canterbury, encouraged me to do a philosophy degree. Philosophy at Canterbury captured me entirely. It was as though I finally found a comfortable place where I didn’t have to watch my vocabulary. I think this was true also of Philosophy at Auckland University even although there were also counter-forces that encouraged a conformity.

As a student and lecturer at various NZ universities I discovered not the intellectual diversity I expected or intellectual debate but all too often a kind of dogmatism heavily policed, on the Right and the Left, that sprang from the surety of a belief in ‘realism’ or ‘truth.’ It was pronounced in education departments that prided themselves on ‘practice’ in a way that seemed to deny any theory of practice. The 1970s ideology of the reflective practitioner provided elevated status that was immune to revision or critique even though the actual practice of teaching or lecturing was rather dull.9 Famously, Bestor’s (1985) Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools, first published in 1957 was a scathing review of American public education that suggested teacher educators and policy wonks had created a rigid system of formal schooling entrapping the classroom teacher in pedagogical dogma and excessive regulation that had nothing to do with the free world of science and learning.10 If anything, this situation has worsened in recent years with the introduction of national standards, greater compliance regulation and other features of neoliberal managerialism that have the effect of muzzling the teacher, deprofessionalizing and burdening them with huge amounts of administration. Noddings (2007) writes of ‘The New Anti-Intellectualism in America’ brought about by ‘curricula rigor and pedagogical fraud’:

It seems odd to accuse the schools of anti-intellectualism when they are engaged in a relentless drive for higher test scores, and students are required to take more difficult academic courses. Passing rates on some state and local tests show small increases, but there has been little if any improvement on well-established national tests. The small gains we’ve seen may be the result of concentrated instruction on narrowly defined objectives. But we are not promoting intellectual habits of mind. Indeed, we may be reducing intellectual life to mental labor.11

It suits some interests to have an ‘educated’ but dumb population—a population that achieves certain standards but knows little of the rest of the world, let alone the living conditions of their own people.

One of NZ’s most statute TV critics, Diana Wichtel, describes an anti-intellectualism that resonates with my experience:

The anti-academic hostility in the media, on talkback and in letters to the editor took me back to my first primary school teaching job. Someone looked at my file and discovered you certainly knew better than to mention such a thing - that I had a degree. A torrent of “Been to the university, have you?” was unleashed. They seemed to assume that made me some sort of long-haired hippie protester. Which I was, in a lackadaisical way, but that was beside the point. Even worse, I’d majored in English. I never lived it down. Yes, I know we’re an egalitarian nation with a proud intellectual tradition of just scraping through School C. And some highbrows over the years haven’t helped by casting themselves as victims of a Philistine society that failed to appreciate their genius.12

The NZ Novelist (and winner of the Booker Prize) Eleanor Catton’s gives a caustic take on New Zealand’s anti-intellectualism:

New Zealand has the misfortune in not having a lot of confidence in the brains of its citizens. There is a lot of embarassment, a lot of discrediting that goes on in terms of the local writers. I, for example, grew up just having a strange belief that New Zealand writers were automatically less great than writers from Britain and America, for example. Because we were some colonial backwater, we weren’t discovered, which I’m hoping will change. The matter of having this kind of cultural embarrassment about your place in the world, we really need to actively resist that and be brave.

She is also worth quoting further because she describes not so much an anti-intellectualism but crass political pragmatism that targeted critics:

At the moment, New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, ( is dominated by) these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture. They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want. I feel very angry with my government.’13

Fortunately, in 2018 we have a new government, a Labor-led Coalition under Jacinda Ardern, that is dealing with the consequences of a decade of child poverty, the Auckland housing crisis driven by easy profits, the stripping out of the regions, and market environmentalism. Needless to say, Catton was savaged in the national media with one commentator calling her a ‘traitor’ and an ‘ungrateful hua.’ She described the national outburst as a ‘jingoistic national tantrum.’

Australia also suffers anti-intellectualism. The Sydney Morning Herald heads up a column: ‘We love being dumb and dumber’; and begins with a reported statement ‘The word ‘intellectual’ has now almost become a term of abuse’ from Paul Verhaeghe’s What About Me?14 John Elder (2015) writing in The Age asks: ‘Is anti-intellectualism killing the national conversation?’ and continues:

In the main we Australians get along pretty well, as long as we don’t try to talk to one another about anything complicated. In that event, the name-calling begins. We’re at each other’s throats.

Then we try and put things back on an even keel, show that we’re a top bunch of blokes and move on as best we can. Because what we really want from, say, the Adam Goodes imbroglio is the same thing we want from asylum seekers and climate change: we want the trouble to go away and for everything to be lovely.15

In The Courier Mail (2006) going back some years it is reported that an Australian politician Lindsay Tanner that ‘most Australians are anti-intellectual and hostile towards education’ arguing that ‘parents are partly to blame for a culture of anti-intellectualism in Australia.’ He is reported as saying: ‘There’s a lot of evidence that we’re still disdaining of learning, we’re still regarding learning activity as something that `real Aussies’ don’t get into too much.’16 (see Glasson’s, 2012, study of anti-intellectualism in Australian newspapers).

The character of anti-intellectualism in small white settler ex-colonies share a instrumental pragmatism, a distain for the theoretical, a suspicion of anything that does not seem to have an immediate use value, and a strong emphasis on force, strength and masculinity that exhibit itself in sporting prowess. (I noted recently that a rugby player’s groin injury had considerably more air time that the ongoing Syrian genocide, especially in Ghouta that gets little coverage in NZ). As rapid urbanization erodes a rural and agricultural past and the middle classes become stronger in their own professional identities, anti-intellectualism gives way to cultural emulation and also to a sustainable intellectual culture.

Today, in 2018 we face a particular virus of anti-intellectualism often called ‘fake news’ or ‘post-truth’ politics (Peters, Rider, Hyvönen, & Besley, 2018). Some scholars in journalism talk of ‘fake news’ (Bakir &

McStay, 2017); others focus on the age of Twitter. Tandoc, Wei Lim, and Ling (2018) usefully examine a number of academic articles that have used the term ‘fake news’ to draw up a typology of types of fake news, including: news satire, news parody, fabrication, manipulation, advertising, and propaganda. Brian Ott (2017) examining ‘Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement’ indicates how ‘Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil.’

The particular character of anti-intellectualism in the era of post-truth politics is associated with ‘strongman politics,’ anti-immigration sentiments, anti-globalization and local protectionism, antiwomen, anti-environment and a kind of national populism that swings on emotion and belief rather than fact, reason or argument. (‘Make America great again!’) Post-truth politics is an assault on liberal democracy and on liberal media. It does indicate new alliances against liberal internationalism and the emergence of a new political media ecology based on the micro-tagging of national audiences using data analytics to harvest the data of millions of Facebook accounts to bolster Trump’s election campaign, fix the Brexit election, and to engage in psychological warfare.17 Trump’s highly personalized form of Twitter politics with its narcissistic TV reality surrealism, firing staff, attacking and threatening individuals, is a particular form of anti-intellectualism—Trumpism—that is based on the repeated lie, the buy-off, sexual predation, anti-immigrant sentiments, ‘America First’ and the tactics of personal intimidation.

Only a pedagogy that names and recognizes these threats and works hard to deal with them can possibly be called ‘intellectual’ in the sense that ‘teachers as intellectuals’—indeed, as philosophers— realize that ideas matter, that malignant ideas brewed out of prejudice can dupe and hurt people, and that their status desperately needs problematizing. Every time the body politic gets run down, the anti-intellectualism virus, while structurally diverse, gets copied as a form of mutant media replication. The virus can damage and eventually kill the life of debate or public discourse in a democracy. Its best cure is public education based on principles of social democracy that fosters debate, critical thought, and questioning.

Notes

1. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/newleftand1960s.pdf

2. Broudy’s article was delivered as the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society held at Kansas City, Kansas, in April 1954.

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/books/11kaku.html

4. https://we.riseup.net/assets/7250/versions/4/Action%20Will%20Be%20Taken.pdf

5. https://www.aaup.org/article/brief-history-anti-intellectualism-american-media#.WrmxepNua1s

6. Roger Horrocks is Emeritus Professor at Auckland University and works on film and television. The excerpt appears at https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/27-06-2016/the-monday-excerpt-why-are-new-zealanders-so-fucking-intolerantof-anyone-with-a-brain-ie-intellectuals/

7. See also, Brian Easton’s comment: https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/are-new-zealanders-anti-intellectual.

8. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1964/12/8/jean-paul-sartres-the-words-pjean-paul-sartre/

9. See Zais (1977) ‘Performance‐based teacher education: New cult for the anti‐intellectual profession’ and Brock’s (2003) ‘They Sound the Alarm Immediately: Anti-Intellectualism in Teacher Education.’

10. See e.g. Wellens (1959) ‘The Anti-Intellectual Tradition in the West’; Cross (1990) ‘The Historical Development of Anti-Intellectualism in American Society’; Labaree (1992)’Power, knowledge, and the rationalization of teaching: a genealogy of the movement to professionalize teaching’; Novoa (2007) ‘Anti-intellectualism and Teacher Education in the twenty-first Century.’

11. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/03/20/28noddings.h26.html

12. Diana Wichtel, Our anti-intellectualism a no-brainer, NZ Herald, 2003, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3528221

13. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/pzEq1u3frRLWQehmXjyzHL/Eleanor-Catton-In-the-last-year-Ive-really-struggledwith.html

14. https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/we-love-being-dumb-and-dumber-20150108-3nraf.html

15. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/is-antiintellectualism-killing-the-national-conversation-20150801gipidj.html

16. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/australians-branded-anti-intellectual/news-story/0f278bb6050a 7d1eb72d04c966eb7f5c

17. In particular see The Guardian’s expose at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analyticafacebook-influence-us-election

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Michael A. Peters

Wif Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, Waikato University, Hillcrest, New Zealand mpeters@waikato.ac.nz