Anti-intellectualism

Part of a series on
Discrimination
Forms Institutional Structural
Attributes Age Caste Class Dialect Disability Genetic Hair texture Height Language Looks Mental disorder Race / Ethnicity Skin color Scientific racism Rank Sex Sexual orientation Species Size Viewpoint
Social Arophobia Acephobia Adultism Anti-albinism Anti-autism Anti-homelessness Anti-drug addicts Anti-intellectualism Anti-intersex Anti-left handedness Anti-Masonry Antisemitism Aporophobia Audism Biphobia Clannism Cronyism Elitism Ephebiphobia Social determinants of health Social determinants of health in poverty Social determinants of mental health Fatphobia Gayphobia Gerontophobia Heterosexism HIV/AIDS stigma Homophobia Leprosy stigma Lesbophobia Discrimination against men Misandry Misogyny Nepotism Pedophobia Perpetual foreigner Pregnancy Reverse Sectarianism Supremacism Black White Transphobia Non-binary Transmisogyny Vegaphobia Xenophobia
Religious Ahmadiyya Atheism Baháʼí Faith Buddhism Catholicism Christianity post–Cold War era Falun Gong Hinduism Persecution Untouchability Islam Persecution Jehovah's Witnesses Judaism Persecution LDS or Mormon Neopaganism Eastern Orthodox Oriental Orthodox Protestantism Rastafari Shi'ism Sufism Zoroastrianism
Ethnic/national Afghan African Albanian Arab Armenian Asian France South Africa United States Assyrian Azerbaijani Black people African Americans China South Africa Bengali Catalan Chechen Chinese Croat Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Haitian Hazara Hispanic Hungarian Igbo Indian Indigenous people Australia Canada United States Iranian Irish Israeli Italian Japanese Jewish Korean Kurdish Lithuanian Malay Mexican Middle Eastern Mongolian Pakistani Palestinians Pashtun Polish Quebec Romani Romanian Russian Serb Slavic Somali Tatar Thai Turkish Ukrainian Uyghur Venezuelan Vietnamese
Manifestations Anti-LGBT rhetoric Blood libel Bullying Cancel culture Capital punishment for homosexuality Compulsory sterilization Corrective rape Counter-jihad Cultural genocide Defamation Democide Disability hate crime Dog whistle Economic Education Employment Eliminationism Enemy of the people Ethnic cleansing Ethnic conflict Ethnic hatred Ethnic joke Ethnocide Forced conversion Freak show Gay bashing Gendercide Genital modification and mutilation Genocide examples Glass ceiling Hate crime LGBT Hate group Hate speech Homeless dumping Housing Indian rolling Intersectionality Lavender scare LGBT grooming conspiracy theory List of people killed for being transgender Lynching Mortgage Murder music Native American mascots Braves Blackhawks Chiefs Occupational segregation Persecution Pogrom Political repression Purge Racialization Religious persecution Religious terrorism Religious violence Religious war Scapegoating Segregation academy Sexual harassment Sex-selective abortion Slut-shaming Trans bashing Victimisation Violence against women White flight White genocide conspiracy theory Wife selling Witch-hunt
Policies Age of candidacy Blood purity Blood quantum Crime of apartheid Disabilities Catholic Jewish Gender pay gap Gender roles Gerontocracy Gerrymandering Ghetto benches Internment Jewish quota Law for Protection of the Nation MSM blood donation restrictions Nonpersons Numerus clausus (as religious or racial quota) One-drop rule Racial quota Racial segregation Jim Crow laws Nuremberg Laws Racial steering Redlining Same-sex marriage (laws and issues prohibiting) Segregation age racial religious sexual Social exclusion Sodomy law State atheism State religion Ugly law Voter suppression
Countermeasures Affirmative action Anti-discrimination law Cultural assimilation Cultural pluralism Diversity training Empowerment Fat acceptance movement Feminism Fighting Discrimination Hate speech laws by country Human rights Intersex human rights LGBT rights Masculism Multiculturalism Nonviolence Racial integration Reappropriation Self-determination Social integration Toleration
Related topics Allophilia Amatonormativity Bias Christian privilege Cisnormativity Civil liberties Dehumanization Diversity Ethnic penalty Eugenics Figleaf Heteronormativity Human-oriented sexualism Internalized oppression Intersectionality Male privilege Masculism Medical model of disability autism Multiculturalism Net bias Neurodiversity Oikophobia Oppression Police brutality Political correctness Polyculturalism Power distance Prejudice Prisoner abuse Racial bias in criminal news in the United States Racism by country Religious intolerance Second-generation gender bias Snobbery Social exclusion Social identity threat Social model of disability Social stigma Speciesism Stereotype threat The talk White privilege
v t e

Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of

In the 20th century, societies systematically removed intellectuals from power, to expediently end public political dissent. During the

In 1966, the anti-communist Argentine

In The Campus War (1971), the philosopher John Searle said,

[T]he two most salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution. ... Intellectuals, by definition, are people who take ideas seriously for their own sake. Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical applications it may have. [Intellectuals] have, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, an attitude to ideas that is at once playful and pious. But, in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, and it is not even very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is how one feels.^[8]

In Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), the sociologist

In the book Intellectuals and Society (2009), Sowell said:^[12]

By encouraging, or even requiring, students to take stands where they have neither the knowledge nor the intellectual training to seriously examine complex issues, teachers promote the expression of unsubstantiated opinions, the venting of uninformed emotions, and the habit of acting on those opinions and emotions, while ignoring or dismissing opposing views, without having either the intellectual equipment or the personal experience to weigh one view against another in any serious way.

Hence, school teachers are part of the intelligentsia who recruit children in elementary school and teach them politics—to advocate for or to advocate against public policy—as part of community-service projects; which political experience later assists them in earning admission to a university. In that manner, the intellectuals of a society intervene and participate in social arenas of which they might not possess expert knowledge, and so unduly influence the formulation and realization of public policy. In the event, teaching political advocacy in elementary school encourages students to formulate opinions "without any intellectual training or prior knowledge of those issues, making constraints against falsity few or non-existent."^[13]

In Britain, the anti-intellectualism of the writer

In The Quest for Cosmic Justice (2001), the economist Thomas Sowell said that anti-intellectualism in the U.S. began in the early Colonial era, as an understandable wariness of the educated upper classes, because the country mostly was built by people who had fled political and religious persecution by the social system of the educated upper classes. Moreover, there were few intellectuals who possessed the practical hands-on skills required to survive in the New World of North America, which absence from society led to a deep-rooted, populist suspicion of men and women who specialize in "verbal virtuosity", rather than tangible, measurable products and services:^[18]

From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the top-most social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic, and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as

proletarians

, even when they came from Western Europe ... The rise of American society to pre-eminence, as an economic, political, and military power, was thus the triumph of the common man, and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

19th century

In U.S. history, the advocacy and acceptability of anti-intellectualism has varied, in part because the majority of Americans lived a

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 "real-life" redemption of the

In 1912, the New Jersey governor, Woodrow Wilson, described the battle:^[21]

What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that, in a democratic country, we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?

In Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) the historian Richard Hofstadter said that anti-intellectualism is a social-class response, by the middle-class "mob", against the privileges of the political elites.^[22] As the middle class developed political power, they exercised their belief that the ideal candidate to office was the "self-made man", not the well-educated man born to wealth. The self-made man, from the middle class, could be trusted to act in the best interest of his fellow citizens.^[23] As evidence of this view, Hofstadter cited the derision of Adlai Stevenson as an "egghead". In Americans and Chinese: Passages to Differences (1980), Francis Hsu said that American egalitarianism is stronger in the U.S. than in Europe, e.g. in England,^[24]

English individualism developed hand in hand with legal equality. American self-reliance, on the other hand, has been inseparable from an insistence upon economic and social as well as political equality. The result is that a qualified individualism, with a qualified equality, has prevailed in England, but what has been considered the inalienable right of every American is unrestricted self-reliance and, at least ideally, unrestricted equality. The English, therefore, tend to respect class-based distinctions in birth, wealth, status, manners, and speech, while Americans resent them.

Such social resentment characterises contemporary political discussions about the socio-political functions of mass-communication media and science; that is, scientific facts, generally accepted by educated people throughout the world, are misrepresented as opinions in the U.S., specifically about

Miami University anthropology professor Homayun Sidky has argued that 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudoscientific approaches to knowledge, particularly in the United States, are rooted in a postmodernist "decades-long academic assault on science:" "Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, except that science is bogus."[26]

In 2017, a

The American Council on Science and Health said that denialism of the facts of climate science and of climate change misrepresents verifiable data and information as political opinion.^[37] Anti-intellectualism puts scientists in the public view and forces them to align with either a liberal or a conservative political stance. Moreover, 53% of Republican U.S. Representatives and 74% of Republican Senators deny the scientific facts of the causes of climate change.^[38]

In the rural U.S., anti-intellectualism is an essential feature of the religious culture of

The reportage of corporate mass-communications media appealed to societal anti-intellectualism by misrepresenting university life in the U.S., where the students' pursuit of book learning (intellectualism) was secondary to the after-school social life. That the reactionary ideology communicated in mass-media reportage misrepresented the liberal political activism and social protest of students as frivolous, social activities thematically unrelated to the academic curriculum, which is the purpose of attending university.^[42] In Anti-intellectualism in American Media (2004), Dane Claussen identified the contemporary anti-intellectualist bent of manufactured consent that is inherent to commodified information:^[43][44]

The effects of mass media on attitudes toward intellect are certainly multiple and ambiguous. On the one hand, mass communications greatly expand the sheer volume of information available for public consumption. On the other hand, much of this information comes pre-interpreted for easy digestion and laden with hidden assumption, saving consumers the work of having to interpret it for themselves. Commodified information naturally tends to reflect the assumptions and interests of those who produce it, and its producers are not driven entirely by a passion to promote critical reflection.

The editorial perspective of the corporate mass-media misrepresented intellectualism as a profession that is separate and apart from the jobs and occupations of regular folk. In presenting academically successful students as social failures, an undesirable social status for the average young man and young woman, corporate media established to the U.S. mainstream their opinion that the intellectualism of book-learning is a form of mental deviancy, thus, most people would shun intellectuals as friends, lest they risk social ridicule and ostracism.^[45] Hence, the popular acceptance of anti-intellectualism led to populist rejection of the intelligentsia for resolving the problems of society.^[46] Moreover, in the book Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (2013), Aaron Lecklider indicated that the contemporary ideological dismissal of the intelligentsia derived from the corporate media's reactionary misrepresentations of intellectual men and women as lacking the common-sense of regular folk.^[47]

In Europe

Soviet Union

In the first decade after the

In October 1937, there was a mass extermination of Belarusian writers, artists and statespeople by the Soviet Union occupying authorities. This event marked the peak of the Great Purge and repressions of Belarusians in the Soviet-controlled area of eastern Belarus. More than 100 notable persons were executed, most of them on the night of 29–30 October 1937. Their innocence was later admitted by the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's death.^[48]

At the beginning of World War II, the Soviet secret police carried out mass executions of the Polish intelligentsia and military leadership in the 1940 Katyn massacre.

Fascism

Part of a series on
Fascism
Principles Actual idealism Aestheticization of politics Anti-communism Anti-intellectualism Anti-materialism Anti-pacifism Authoritarianism Chauvinism Class collaboration Conspiracism Corporatism Cult of personality Dictatorship Direct action Dirigisme Eugenics Heroic capitalism Heroic realism Heroism Imperialism Indoctrination Interventionism Economic Social Irrationalism Machismo Masculinity Militarism National syndicalism Nationalism Integral Palingenetic Ultra New Man One-party state Perpetual war Populism Proletarian nation Propaganda Racism Reactionary modernism Social Darwinism Social order State capitalism Statolatry Supercapitalism Syncretism Third Position Totalitarianism
Topics Definitions Economics Fascism and ideology Fascism worldwide Symbolism
Politicians Arcand Araki Balbo Böszörmény Bottai Bucard Ciano Codreanu Darnand Déat Degrelle Doriot Franco Goga Hitler Ljotić von Marées Monshizadeh Mosley Mussolini Nakano O'Duffy Quisling Pavelić Pelley Preto Primo de Rivera Ramos Rodzaevsky Saadeh Salgado Sima Starace Starhemberg Strasser Szálasi Tiso Türkeş Valois Van Severen
Intellectuals Baeumler Bardèche Chamberlain Chesterton D'Annunzio Darré De Benoist Devi Dugin Eckart Evola Feder Freda Gentile Giani de Gobineau Haushofer Jung Kita von Liebenfels von List Marinetti Michels Nihal Atsız Ōkawa Olivetti Panunzio Pound Ramos Rosenberg Schmitt Sorel Spirito Valois Yockey
Literature "Fascist Manifesto" (1919) Mein Kampf (1925) My Autobiography (1928) The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) La Conquista del Estado (1931) "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932) Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948) Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) The Last Will of a Russian Fascist (2001)
Organizations National Fascist Party Blackshirts Squadrismo Nazi Party Gestapo Hitler Youth RAD SA SS Iron Guard Ustaše Ustaše Youth Blueshirts British Union of Fascists Stewards Brazilian Integralist Action Silver Legion of America Fatherland Front FE de las JONS National Radical Camp National Christian Party Rexist Party Axis powers FET y de las JONS Slovak People's Party Arrow Cross Party Imperial Rule Assistance Association Great Japan Youth Party Yokusan Sonendan Republican Fascist Party Kataeb Party
History March on Rome Beer Hall Putsch Aventine Secession Second Italo-Senussi War Mukden Incident German election of 1932 Enabling Act Austrian Civil War 1934 Montreux Fascist conference Second Italo-Ethiopian War Spanish Civil War Unification Decree Battle of Cable Street Second Sino-Japanese War Marco Polo Bridge Incident Japanese war crimes Anti-Comintern Pact Kristallnacht Italian invasion of Albania Pact of Steel World War II The Holocaust Downfall in Italy Downfall in Germany Surrender of Japan Nasjonal Samling Nuremberg trials International Military Tribunal for the Far East
Lists Anti-fascists Books about Hitler British fascist parties Fascist movements by country (A-F G-M N-T U-Z) Nazi ideologues Nazi leaders Speeches by Hitler SS personnel
Variants Argentine Nacionalismo Orthodox Peronism Austrian Banderism Brazilian British Christian Clerical Crypto Eco French Révolution nationale Hindutva Hungarism Hutu Ilminism Islamic Italian Jewish Kahanism Revisionist Maximalism LaRoucheism Mystical Nazism Austrian Esoteric Hitlerism Neo-Nazism Strasserism Neo Pan-Turkic Rexism Romanian Legionarism Neo-Legionarism Romanianism/Stelism Russian Neo-Eurasianism Sosism Spanish Falangism Francoism Shōwa Statism Restoration Syndicalist Syrian Social Nationalism Techno Third Position National-anarchism National Bolshevism Nazi-Maoism Ustašism
By continent Asia Europe Bulgaria North America Canada South America Peru Uruguay
Related topics Alt-right Anti-fascism Culture of fear F-scale Fascist as an insult Feudal fascism Futurism Glossary of Fascist Italy Glossary of Nazi Germany Para-fascism Post-fascism Proto-fascism Red fascism Supremacism
Politics portal
v t e

The

To counter the "passive intellectual" who used their intellect abstractly, and was therefore "decadent", he proposed the "concrete thinking" of the active intellectual who applied intellect as praxis—a "man of action", like the 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 materialist logic, because it relies upon a priori principles improperly counter-changed with a posteriori ones that are irrelevant to the matter-in-hand in deciding whether or not to act.

In the praxis of Gentile's concrete thinking criteria, such consideration of the a priori toward the properly a posteriori constitutes impractical, decadent intellectualism. Moreover, this fascist philosophy occurred parallel to

The

When the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the Khmer Rouge (1951–1981) established their regime as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) in Cambodia, their anti-intellectualism which idealised the country and demonised the cities was immediately imposed on the country in order to establish agrarian socialism, thus, they emptied cities in order to purge the Khmer nation of every traitor, enemy of the state and intellectual, often symbolised by eyeglasses.

Ottoman Empire

In the early stages of the

• Antiscience – attitudes that reject science and the scientific method
• Populism – when the democratic ethos moves into places it is purported not to belong; paradigmatically academic research
• Ressentiment – tendency to reflexively detract from others, e.g. as regards their greater, implicitly perceived, intelligence; as described chiefly by Nietzsche and Scheler
• Conspiracy theory – attributing events to secret plots instead of more probable explanation
• Decapitation strike and or just cultural genocide
  generally – imperial strategy, wherein destroying a society's epistemic elite makes subduing it much easier;
• Counter-Enlightenment, not to be confused with the more recent Dark Enlightenment – Various intellectual stances against mainstream attitudes of the 18th-century Enlightenment
• Noble savage – stock character
• Equality of outcome – political concept, as commonly approximated per affirmative action as opposed to an academic meritocracy
• Dumbing down – deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content
• Harrison Bergeron – 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut
• Philistinism – hostility to intellect, art and beauty

Footnotes

Further reading

• Dane S. Claussen (2004). Anti-Intellectualism in American Media. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
  ISBN 978-0820457215
  .
• Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, "'Action Will be Taken': Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents," Left Business Observer.
• William Hinton, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. New York: New York University Press, 1972.
• Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
• Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
• Aaron Lecklider (2013). Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8122-4486-1
  .
• Elvin T. Lim (2008). The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. New York: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 978-0199898091
  .
• "Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America". psychology today. 2014. There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

External links

Look up anti-intellectualism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Media related to Anti-intellectualism at Wikimedia Commons

Wikiquote has quotations related to Anti-intellectualism.