IF YOU liked George W. Bush, it wasn’t because of his brain. Bush was, rather notoriously, the president of quick decisions, few regrets and long vacations. He was the person you wanted to have a beer with, and whom you thought you could trust because he was a lot like you. In Stephen Colbert’s famous formulation, he was the epitome of “truthiness” – of knowing things not from books, but from the gut.
All this meant that Bush was widely reviled by intellectuals as precisely the opposite of the kind of person you want running the most powerful country in the world. The Bush administration’s extensively documented attacks on science (discussed in my book , among other places), and his exaltation of Jesus as his “favourite philosopher”, further cemented the idea that here was not a mind to be respected. Add to that the malapropisms, the apparent uneasiness with any kind of verbal improvisation, and the scripted debating, and one could easily conclude the US was being governed by the consummate anti-intellectual.
With the coming of Barack Obama to the presidency, the phrase “sea change” is not too strong. Here is a former academic who is deeply familiar with the world of thought. In his inaugural address, Obama pledged to restore science to its “rightful place” in our government; heck, he even extolled the virtue of “curiosity”. And for the first time in history, he has appointed a Nobel laureate to the presidential cabinet. The worm has turned in American life – but for how long?
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Anti-intellectualism is a central thread of America’s culture and spirit. In his Pulitzer prize-winning 1964 work , historian Richard Hofstadter showed how the anti-intellectual impulse arose from a complex set of historical factors which included religious evangelism, a bustling business culture and a deeply rooted emphasis on egalitarianism: “the American dream”. In short – and this is what is so insidious about it – distrust of the pointy-headed thinker springs, at least in part, from Americans’ better nature. The value placed on hard work and fairness plays as big a role as ignorance in the lamentable resilience of anti-intellectual sentiment, in Hofstadter’s view.
Hofstadter also pointed out that anti-intellectualism waxes and wanes in American life. It was extremely strong in the McCarthy era, for instance, when President Dwight Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows”. Yet by the time of Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower could be found welcoming the nation’s scientists into the White House. John F. Kennedy went further, and invited in an even broader slice of academia. The intellectuals were back, and they were busy.
But not for long. If you read Hofstadter today – and everyone should – you’ll also find a more sobering explanation of why intellect began its most recent popularity decline. As expertise grew in stature in an increasingly science-dominated world, smarts came to be resented – at least in the eyes of the burgeoning modern conservative movement: its adherents saw intellectuals putting themselves above everybody else, speaking with dripping disdain and walling themselves off in ivory towers where their liberal politics made them even more suspect. This is very much what the Reagan revolution was all about, and George W. Bush was its heir. Thus intellect became a central issue in our so-called “culture wars”.
The Bush-Obama handoff feels like an echo of the transition to Kennedy. But history suggests that it won’t last, and we’ll soon be fighting the same old battles. Unless, of course, Obama can break the cycle.
Obama’s first task, then – and so far, he’s been very good at it – is to make appreciation of intellect a shared American value again, rather than something that divides us. That means defining it as central to who Americans are as a people.
There’s a lot to work with. The US was founded by scientists and intellectuals who radiated Enlightenment values, and at times it has rallied behind science. Obama has not shied from this message and, most important, he didn’t lose because of it. John McCain and Sarah Palin certainly did try out the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism on Obama. Palin mocked the fact that he’d made much of his personal wealth through the sale of books and sneered at research on fruit flies and grizzly bears in a bid to make science sound like a self-indulgent pursuit that spends money but doesn’t produce anything useful. The attacks failed.
If Obama pulls off governing as an intellectual president, the dividends could be enormous. Already, he has been more than true to his word when it comes to the support of science. It is too soon to tell, but his soaring language about building a new energy future could be his Apollo programme, and could dramatically improve America’s long-term competitiveness.
Yet he also faces a challenge that other “intellectual” presidents have not, or not to the same extent. It’s a factor highlighted by Susan Jacoby in her recent attempt to update Hofstadter, : the vacuous, dollar-driven mass media. If Obama’s message about the importance of science makes its way through even this medium, he will have changed America more than we can possibly calculate.
“If the message makes its way through the vacuous, dollar-driven media, Obama will have changed America”
The goal must be nothing less than to break the cycle – to make intellectualism a permanent value of American culture. A two-term presidency would help. So would maintaining those early pledges of support to science. And most of all, there is leading by example, continuing to extol thinking, and not being afraid to come to its aid now and again.