Motus Mentis

We’ve heard a lot lately about anti-intellectualism. The word “intellectual” often evokes, it seems, negative associations even in people who could fairly be called intellectuals themselves; we’ve even seen some of that in recent discussions here. Why?

Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much in the definition of the word to object to. Typing ‘define: intellectual’ into Google’s search box yields some examples:

• An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate, or ask and answer questions about a wide variety of different ideas.
• a person who uses the mind creatively
• involving the faculty of knowing, perceiving, reasoning, reflecting.

It’s hard to see why anyone would see any of this as something to be avoided. Why, then, has so much of American conservatism become to such a great extent a movement of anti-intellectuals?

There may be several reasons. One is that in recent decades the conservative movement has allied itself with America’s fundamentalist Christian community. Given their faith in simplistic Biblical literalism, young-Earth creationism, and other absurdities, such traditions are understandably better off when skeptical intellectual inquiry is discouraged. “It says so right here in the Bible, and that’s good enough for me” is hardly the sort of mindset that is going to stop at nothing to get to the bottom of things.

Another is that intellectual inquiry is to some extent a natural enemy of conservatism. Conservatism is a reluctance to tinker. Human societies are evolved organisms that have been subject to millennia of stress-testing, and the stable ones effectively embody a great deal of design — even if that design is not due to the conscious effort of any human designer. Such societies are living laboratories, seeking optimal solutions in a changing “fitness landscape” of power balances, economic variables. The solutions they find, when stable, can be compared to a livng species that is well adapted to a particular ecological niche. These solutions may, however, include all sorts of features that, taken by themselves, seem undesirable: rigid class boundaries, severe penal systems, state-imposed religions, and gross inequities of wealth and power to name a few. The social scientist, flush with a sense of superior perspective and keen to remedy these shortcomings, may well feel justified in calling for various adjustments, or even for the violent overthrow of the existing system.

But the biological metaphor also tells us that it is awfully difficult to make changes in one part of a living system without causing unforeseen, and usually detrimental, changes in another. The conservative, then, will point to historical examples of theorists imposing political and social change, and will note that the more radical the alteration, usually the more disastrous the result. It is this line of thinking that, for example, leads a conservative like Peggy Noonan — herself a woman of formidable intellect — to say “intellectuals start all the trouble in the world“.

Another factor is that a populist political strategy is naturally supportive of anti-intellectualism. Educated “elites” are put forward as an “other” that have entirely different views and priorities than the popular masses, and indeed hardly even speak the same language (all of which is indeed quite true). Rather than earn their way by honest toil, they are cast as being parasitic on the productive labors of ordinary folks — the ones who grow their food, build their houses, and defend their freedom — producing nothing but words and fancy ideas for others of their kind to consume.

This sort of populist appeal can in principle be employed equally well by both Left and Right — and the history of American politics provides ample instances of both — but once the symmetry is broken by one party taking sides, the other will pick up the slack. Democrats having become, over the last decades, ascendant among educated coastal “elites”, it is natural that the Republicans would make a play for the common folks, which is indeed what we have seen through the Reagan and Bush years, and what we see today with the selection of You-Know-Who as John McCain’s running mate.

Who’s right? To be sure, history is full of catastrophic intellectual experiments in social engineering, and there is good reason to be contemptuous of a certain sort of smug and pompous intellect that lives in feckless and abstract isolation — the sort of conceited know-it-alls skewered by Jonathan Swift in his portrayal of the Laputans.

What is wanted, of course, as in everything, is balance. If we live unexamined lives, without respecting and applying our uniquely human gifts of reason and curiosity, we are little more than animals. But even that is better than the dreadful effect of knowlege without wisdom.