Why Americans Are Anti Intellectual - Road to the Middle Class

“WHY IS THE US so anti-intellectual?” asked a Kerry-voting friend a month after the recent presidential election. “Don’t answer right now, but I’d like to hear your response.”

It’s right for Kerry supporters to be asking a question or two now that they are emerging from denial. They might learn something. They might learn why the American people just aren’t too enamored of America’s educated, intellectual elite these days. But why should this be? Why should Americans reject the people who have done so much for them, bringing them public schools, women’s suffrage, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, environmental protection, civil rights for blacks, women, gays, consumers, and support for the traditionally marginalized?

The answer is that the experience of living under the rule of America’s enlightened elite has not been quite the bed of roses that liberal Whig history likes to portray. The governance of America’s intellectual elite has been good for the elite, that is for sure. But it has not always been good for the rest of us. Let us take a look at a few examples.

The jewel in the crown of intellectual America is supposed to be the common school system that was enacted in the 1840s. Yet before Horace Mann had returned glowing from his tour of Prussian schools Americans were already about 90 percent literate. Almost everyone got at least 3-4 years of schooling in the mixture of academies, urban schools, and rural “old-field” schools that flourished in the early nineteenth century. In those days parents could select the school of their choice. Today, after a century and a half of schooling directed by the intellectual elite, average parents have little or no choice in schooling for their children. And about 30 percent of Americans have trouble reading a bus schedule. Should they be grateful for this?

About 70 years ago the intellectual elite grandly presented the American people with Social Security, a pay-as-you-go system in which beneficiaries have no property rights. But college professors, teachers, and many government employees enjoy fully funded retirement programs that are legally the property of the beneficiaries. Should the American people be grateful for this?

Let’s talk about crime. The intellectual elite told us that crime was a result of “root causes” such as poverty and lack of education. We shouldn’t blame the underprivileged youth that committed the crimes and just lock them up, for incarceration only dealt with symptoms. Only a program that attacked the root causes could reduce crime. In England, of course, they went a step further and actually convicted householders of the crime of resisting burglars. It has made householders “confused” and burglars “confident” according to the London Daily Telegraph. In New York, in the teeth of opposition from the intellectual class, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bratton tried the “broken window” policy proposed by neoconservative thinkers. They arrested young punks for public drinking, loitering, and turnstile-jumping. And crime rates went down. Today in New York, criminals feel “confused” and upright citizens feel “confident” about crime. And the dirty little secret is that 6 percent of men commit over 50 percent of crimes. Lock up the 6 percent, and the crime rate will plummet. Should the American people elect the candidate of the intellectual elite to power after the success of this little social experiment?

Then there’s the family. To free women from servitude to unwanted children and unhappy marriages, our intellectual elites have championed unrestricted abortion and no-fault divorce. They wanted women to have the right to live public lives and enjoy fulfilling creative careers just like men. Today American children yearn for the brothers and sisters they will never have, and they live in terror of their parents splitting up. But is the “creativity” of fulfilling work really a greater good than the act of creation and raising a family? Many Americans don’t think so. As David Brooks has written, many natalists and Patio-men have fled the cities and their elite mores for the ex-urbs where they can have big families and get them out of the nest before the intellectual elite notices. Should they be grateful that they had to hide in the boondocks to have the right to create the environment they wanted for their children?

Nobody doubts that our intellectual elites are highly evolved, profoundly tolerant of diversity, and environmentally sensitive. Understandably, they have used their cultural and political power to bring their concerns to the fore, concerns that are good and noble. But other Americans are not particularly attracted to their lofty goals. Most Americans are fully challenged by keeping a job, finding a home in a nice safe neighborhood, paying the mortgage, and finding a good school for the kids. That’s why they once voted for an “amiable dunce” and now for President Moron.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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