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“Anti-intellectualism,” Schlesinger remarked, “has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.…
The Sputnik was more than a shock to American national vanity: it brought an immense amount of attention to bear on the consequences of anti-intellectualism in the school system and in American life at large.
regard for intellectuals in the United States has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations;
the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated.
the danger that American society as a whole will overesteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that need hardly trouble us.
Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture.
Although the difference between the qualities of intelligence and intellect is more often assumed than defined, the context of popular usage makes it possible to extract the nub of the distinction, which seems to be almost universally understood:
the professional man lives off ideas, not for them. His professional role, his professional skills, do not make him an intellectual.
The intellectual is engagé—he is pledged, committed, enlisted.
it is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.
curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.
The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.
We need not be surprised, then, if the intellectual’s position has rarely been comfortable in a country which is, above all others, the home of the democrat and the antinomian.
in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.
the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself.
the less they understand the inner world of power, the more apt they are to share and arouse popular suspicions of the uses to which power is put.
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.
“We ‘intellectuals’ in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions [church, army, aristocracy, royalty].
The truth is that the right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.
the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to socialism, and socialism to Communism.
so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power of international Communism where it really mattered—in the arena of world politics.
the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them.
America religious culture has been largely shaped by the evangelical spirit, for here the balance of power between evangelicalism and formal religion was long ago overwhelmingly tipped in the direction of the former.
Transcendentalism—which sometimes set itself up as the evangelicalism of the highbrows.
it would be a mistake to suggest that there is anything distinctively American in religious anti-intellectualism.
enthusiasts’ reliance on the validity of inward experience always contained within it the threat of an anarchical subjectivism, a total destruction of traditional and external religious authority.
did nothing to make men less sinful, and in stirring
the middle-of-the-road awakeners were almost as much alarmed by the barking and howling that the movement had unleashed as were the regular ministers.
But the Great Awakening, even in New England, revealed the almost uncontrollable tendency of such revivals toward extremes of various kinds.
“the discrediting of ‘human learning,’ characteristic of only a minority during the Awakening, later became typical of a majority of Protestantism.”
the impulse given to humanitarian causes—to anti-slavery and the conversion of slaves and Indians—must also be chalked up to the credit of the Great Awakening.
The Southern revivalists carried the light of the gospel to a people who were not only unchurched but often uncivilized.
perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790.
The Episcopal Church had fallen to eighth place—a significant token of its inability, as an upper-class conservative church, to hold its own in the American environment.
As one group of evangelical workers had put it years earlier to Finney: “It is more difficult to labour with educated men, with cultivated minds and moreover predisposed to skepticism, than with the uneducated.”
the union between the evangelical and the business mind which was to characterize subsequent popular revivalists was, to a great extent, his work.
explain what Will Herberg has found to be such a prominent characteristic of contemporary American religion—a strong belief in the importance of religion-in-general coupled with great indifference to the content of religion.
The proportion of the population having church membership rose roughly from about 15 per cent in 1855 to 36 per cent in 1900, 46 per cent in 1926, and 63 per cent in 1958.
Becoming identified in the minds of many with Christianity, its narrowness and mediaevalism, its emotionalism and lack of intellectuality, its crass supernaturalism and Biblical literalism, its want of sympathy with art and science and secular culture in general, turned them permanently against religion. In spite of the great work accomplished by evangelicalism, the result in many quarters was disaster.” Protestant Thought before Kant (New York, 1911),
Up to about 1800 there was, as Mead himself has pointed out, a kind of informal understanding between the pietist and the rationalist mind, based chiefly on a common philanthropism and on a shared passion for religious liberty.
Ministers and laymen alike now had to choose between fundamentalism and modernism; between conservative Christianity and the social gospel.
To prevent the minority from teaching their doctrines in the public schools would not infringe on their rights. “They have no right to demand pay for teaching that which the parents and the taxpayers do not want taught.
The more spiritually earnest the great religious public was, the more violently it might differ from the views of the majority of intellectuals.
There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies of political intolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that zealous church-going and rigid religious faith are among the important correlates of political and ethnic animosity.
One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world.
Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists, who share a common puritanism and a common mindless militancy on what they imagine to be political issues,
in a country in which millions of children of almost illiterate parents have gone to high school and millions more whose parents have only modest educations have gone to college, the process of education is as much a threat to parents as a promise.
Jefferson and other secular intellectuals thus joined the pietistic denominations in a curious political alliance based upon common hostility to established orthodoxy.
preference for the wisdom of the common man flowered, in the most extreme statements of the democratic creed, into a kind of militant popular anti-intellectualism.
