I’m old enough to remember the 1952 presidential election (as a 10-year-old I handed out flyers for candidate Adlai Stevenson at our subway stop in New York City). Back then, the term “egg-head” was often contemptuously applied to him. I remember one woman complaining, “That Stevenson – he’s so smart he makes me sick!”
There are widespread historical factors that have led many Americans to assume a posture that might be considered “anti-intellectual.” America has always been primarily a nation of pragmatists – of people who do stuff, not just speculate about it.
Many early immigrants abandoned countries where the aristocracy disdained manual labor in favor of leisure activities, sporting pursuits and dilettantish inquiry into science or the arts, or where the church monopolized higher learning and was content to keep ordinary folk ignorant and humble.
Although a number of our Founding Fathers were very learned men (and Jefferson famously warned, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be”), the frontier beckoned as terrain where a good life was forged by hard physical work, rather than by scholarship and erudition.
We can embrace a useful tension between intellect and pragmatism – too much of either at the expense of the other can lead to the foolishness and folly of “absent-minded professors” and “country bumpkins.” We are right to be wary of sharpies and con men who claim access to information unknowable to “common” men and women. The “smartest guys in the room,” whether in Enron or Wall Street, often turn out to be crooks.
But as our civilization has progressed from a predominantly rural and manual skills economy to the Information Age and beyond, the divide between “the intellectual” and “the pragmatist” has shrunk markedly.
Today, no real progress in any field of human endeavor is possible without a close association of the two.
Factory workers in high-tech industries (and even in many lower-tech businesses) are required to read, communicate, and solve problems at a much more sophisticated level than their forebears. Scientists and economists, no less than psychologists and sociologists, know the results of their inquiries must contribute to the solution of real problems that ordinary folk experience, or else their scholarship will be ignored. College grads lacking essential skills in communication, technology and problem-solving can no longer count on finding good jobs. Unskilled workers compete for lower-wage jobs that are insufficient to support a family.
Today we find ourselves in a nation where the divide between so-called “intellectual elites” and so-called “god-fearing, gun-toting, red-blooded common folk” has grown so wide that the two seem unable to communicate as neighbors on common ground.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency has meant at least a temporary ascendancy of the latter over the former, with even the veracity of undisputed facts now cast into doubt. Evolution, climate science, an independent judiciary, a free press, quality public education, the right of workers to organize, the rights of women and minorities – all those values that intellectuals and progressives have largely taken for granted – now appear “up for grabs.”
If this situation continues it will imperil our society. Our economy will suffer, our public dialogue will ossify, our streets will be filled with protests and counter-protests. Our ability to stand as a world leader based on our democratic values, scientific innovation and moral principles that include respect for diversity and the welcoming of refugees from oppression could fall apart. If America attempts the impossible feat of turning back the clock so as to presumably “make America great again,” it will founder and decline.
And if Trump were to be replaced by an avowed progressive like Elizabeth Warren, can we assume that denizens of “Red America” would fade into the woodwork? They’ve found their bullhorns, and they and their talk-radio incendiaries intend to keep using them. Unless we somehow discover a way of respectfully talking things through, America could see a division perhaps as great as that which preceded the Civil War.
Is it too late to walk this back? Have we gone too far down the road of red state/blue state, working-class/professional-class enmity to such that we are no longer willing or able to meet one another on neutral ground and talk about what we feel we have a right to count on from one another as fellow Americans, regardless of political views?
I may be too elitist myself to envision supporters of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and, yes, Donald Trump reaching out to those on the left: “Okay, we realize that we don’t have all the answers. We too are frightened of the effects of climate change on our grandchildren. We get it that America is a nation of diversity and that we have to embrace that or retreat into rural white enclaves and gated communities. We agree that there’s something cockeyed about the 1 percent getting ever richer while the rest of us stagnate. We just don’t know how to talk with you guys about it.”
Now that moderate Republicans have been decimated by extremists, if there is to be any reaching out, it is more likely to come from those on the left, who actually do have something to say to their conservative counterparts that they might find worth listening to – under the right conditions.
We can say: “Even if climate change may not bring about the disaster that many of us think it will, doesn’t it make sense, as temporary custodians of our planet for us to do things that will safeguard the earth for our grandchildren and beyond? Isn’t it worth paying a bit more in taxes if by doing so we can slow down the effects of climate change?”
We can say: “Wouldn’t we all be better off if every worker in America was paid a living wage, so that they could provide for their families and help educate their kids to embrace ‘the American Dream’? Isn’t it time that those whose incomes have soared to unimaginable heights – while the rest of us have flat-lined – began to pay back some of their wealth so that we could have good schools, good roads, good clinics and hospitals?”
We can say: “Look at all the advanced nations – Canada, England, Sweden, France, Germany – that provide tax-supported free health care to all of their citizens. What actual freedoms have citizens of these countries lost as a result of a government-run, single-payer system? What freedoms would Americans actually forfeit if we were to do the same, here?”
We can say: “Let’s take a good, hard look at that institution we call “the Government.” Back in our grandparents’ day in the fifties and early sixties, Americans had a lot of respect for our government. Then came Vietnam, then Watergate, then hyper-inflation, then Iran-Contra, then Monica Lewinsky, then Iraq and the fake weapons-of-mass-destruction, then the banking scandals and the near-depression – how could Americans fail to lose faith in ‘Government’?”
So, let’s talk about what it would take to restore that faith, a faith that keeps us all under the same umbrella of democracy. As our world gets ever more complex and ordinary citizens feel less in control of their destiny, can we not come up with safeguards to protect individual liberties from excessive and intrusive bureaucracy, rather than just take a sledgehammer to our government and try to return to an America of the 18th century?
Of course none of these conversations are possible unless we accept the conditions that are vital to allow people who disagree to come together. It begins with respect and empathy for the sense of betrayal and loss that so many of our fellow Americans are feeling. The antidote to anti-intellectualism requires intellectuals to practice the discipline of not talking down to people who have less education than they have (under the mistaken belief that such folk are somehow less sensitive and less intelligent). It requires that those who are financially secure and relatively free from anxiety try very, very hard to “walk a mile in the other person’s moccasins” and imagine how our lives would be if we were insecure and fearful about our security and our children’s future.
So, how do we begin? Where does such a conversation take place? Whom can we all trust to moderate such an interchange? How can we reach out to those whose views we habitually belittle and condemn so that they will feel safe joining us in such a conversation?
Unless we can answer these basic questions, we will be unable to reunite our country and its diverse people. We cannot rely on the emergence of some leader who can bind the fissures that are tearing us apart. And, in the absence of civil discourse, we will leave it to the extremists on both sides to carry the word.
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)