ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

American anti-intellectualism is not new. It's a sentiment voiced as long ago as our colonial days, a time when John Cotton proclaimed, "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee." Perhaps Puritan Cotton's opinion had a biblical basis, grounded in the text of Genesis with God's admonition forbidding partaking of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Albert Einstein would later observe, "Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds." Indeed. Anti-intellectualism is pernicious class war waged by the same people who accuse others of waging class war when social inequities are raised. They accuse others of snobbery while demonstrating their own. Touted as a populist stance, anti-intellectualism grows faster than, well, arugula.

In order to better understand the bias against intellectualism, look to those who hold that bias. There is a segment of the American population fearful of free, progressive thought. They're uncomfortable if they perceive their own beliefs and values are being questioned. Independent thought confronts their frequently xenophobic status quo. In short, superior intelligence sends some folks 'round the bend. Einstein had it right.

Anti-intellectualism is evident in every aspect of our culture and no where more prominently than in our politics. Politicians with high I.Q.s (Obama, Clinton, Carter, Gore, Kerry, all contemporary examples) are vilified as elitist. As for George W. Bush, I don't recall another U.S. President in my lifetime who so personally or tenaciously clung to mediocrity, wearing it at times much like a badge of honor. No egghead, that one. But there was that sneer.

Our educational system suffers from the same anti-intellectualism. Teachers have time and get paid to do little more than teach to the test. There's no agenda for fostering and developing critical thinking skills; both very bright and very slow students are a bane to the average teacher. Daily de facto curricula at the elementary and highschool levels are more models of rote memorization and crowd control than exercises in education; on college campuses, students indignant over poor grades for poor work are writing bad performance reviews of professors and instructors who demand excellence. Untenured university staff are particularly vulnerable to those tactics, as their livelihoods are likelier impacted if they don't concede to the students' demands for higher grades. Learning for the sheer value and pleasure of learning itself has been mostly abandoned in the race for the right grade to get the right degree to get the right job. There's a great old Frank Zappa quote: "If you want to get laid (I would change the word to 'screwed'), go to college. If you want an education, go to the library." How revolutionary.

The most talented writers are rarely on best-seller lists and the best crafted movies are often not box office hits. The guy voted "most trusted newscaster" in a Time poll this year airs on Comedy Central and infotainment has replaced journalism. Even entertainment has been dumbed down to include "reality" shows; it's a bizarre world when the likes of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy have their own TV gigs. We demonstrate how little we as a society value education when we watch the NBA or NFL award multi-million dollar contracts to bad boys who can barely read or speak a cogent sentence in their native language. To acknowledge any of this is to invite being labeled imperious.

Intelligence is not so much about what you know as it is about what you have the capacity to learn. That's what's really at stake here. If we allow anti-intellectualism to stifle the curiosity that fuels innovation and challenges us to think outside-the-box in order to develop creative solutions to the problems facing us in the 21st century, what will we as a society miss? Where will the new answers for new problems come from? How will we hold on to a position of leadership in the world? The absurdity of anti-intellectualism must be shown for what it is: a misguided and out-of-date concept, one too dangerous to tolerate at this point in history.

In the interest of full disclosure, my own I.Q. is closer to 200 than it is to 100. Further, I eat both arugula and escargots (though not necessarily at the same time); I also enjoy fine wines and like cheese with mold on it. And I read.


- Dixie