{"id":14073,"date":"2017-08-29T10:42:14","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T17:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/?p=14073"},"modified":"2020-01-29T15:51:17","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T23:51:17","slug":"american-idiot-rethinking-anti-intellectualism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/leadership\/leadership-co-lab\/leadership-co-lab-blogs\/third-party\/american-idiot-rethinking-anti-intellectualism\/","title":{"rendered":"American Idiot: Rethinking Anti-intellectualism in The Age of Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opening Insights: Anti-Thinking Age<\/h2>\n

An Open Democracy article by Nicholas Baer, dated\u00a0August 28, 2017, highlights the realities of the growing anti-expert, anti-intellectual climate that has taken hold of the U.S. and world. The article highlights a number of important points, such as:<\/p>\n

Institutions of higher education have lowered their standards, providing affirmative \u201csafe spaces\u201d rather than necessarily uncomfortable intellectual challenges. No longer a time of disciplined learning and personal growth, college has become what Nichols describes as \u201ca consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Informational Insights: Can I Get Reality, Not an Opinion?<\/h2>\n
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\u201cOn my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among the heads of the Government.\u201d Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We may fairly assume that Tocqueville, the famous French historian, would be even more surprised if he were to visit America today. The 45th President, Donald Trump, has made no secret of his disdain for learning and specialized knowledge, sneering at a campaign rally in 2016, \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve always wanted to say this\u2014I\u2019ve never said this before with all the talking we all do, all of these experts, \u2018Oh we need an expert\u2019\u2014the experts are terrible!\u201d<\/p>\n

Such comments provide ample fodder for Tom Nichols\u2019 topical and engaging new book, The Death of Expertise<\/em>. For Nichols, the anti-intellectual strain in the U.S. has transmuted into an arrogant contempt for intellectual authority due to major shifts in education, journalism, and the media and political environments. Taken together, he claims, these shifts have driven American democracy to the brink of authoritarian populism.<\/p>\n

A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.<\/p>\n

This leveling of viewpoints has been accelerated by digital technologies and platforms, which have further lowered the barriers to participation, opening the floodgates to those without the requisite educational backgrounds and professional credentials. As Nichols puts it:<\/p>\n

\u201cI fear we are witnessing [\u2026] a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers\u2014in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the absence of these crucial distinctions, Nichols asserts, public discourse has become degraded by unquestioned cognitive biases and a dearth of informed, evidence-based argumentation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Referencing recent commentaries such as Susan Jacoby\u2019s \u201cThe Dumbing of America,\u201d Nichols vividly sketches the denigration of expertise in key areas of society. Institutions of higher education have lowered their standards, providing affirmative \u201csafe spaces\u201d rather than necessarily uncomfortable intellectual challenges. No longer a time of disciplined learning and personal growth, college has become what Nichols describes as \u201ca consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consumer rankings and ratings are also ubiquitous in cyberspace, where every buyer is now a critic and an opinion maker on websites like Amazon and Yelp. Drowning out expert perspectives, the Internet offers quick facts and views without the guarantee of accuracy, consistency, or disinterested, non-partisan oversight. Finally, contemporary journalism has adopted an open-ended and participatory format that caters primarily to customer interests, blends news with punditry and entertainment, and perpetuates both ideological segregation and distrust in government, the media, and other democratic institutions.<\/p>\n

In addressing the depreciation of established knowledge, The Death of Expertise<\/em> joins a tradition of writing that extends back to Richard Hofstadter\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American Life<\/em>, published in 1963. Yet Nichols\u2019 analysis fails to assimilate Hofstadter\u2019s account of the \u201ccyclical fluctuations\u201d of anti-intellectualism that have rippled across all spheres of U.S. society for centuries, often rising in periods of complex and bewildering global change. On what basis, then, can one contend that American anti-intellectualism has become more pervasive over the past half-century and is now, in Jacoby\u2019s words, \u201cless a cycle than a flood\u201d?<\/p>\n

Positing a qualitative shift, Nichols often makes recourse to lapsarian, technological-determinist arguments that attribute the decline of critical intelligence in large measure to digital culture. Ironically, such claims reactivate familiar tropes in the history of media, issuing pessimistic diagnoses of mass manipulation and stupefaction that can be traced back to previous historical junctures, when older technologies were likewise new. Writing after the first televised presidential debates in 1960, Hofstadter himself noted that twentieth-century politics had been shaped by \u201cthe American mania for publicity and the development of the mass media.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, Nichols misses a crucial opportunity to revisit Hofstadter\u2019s work in light of the economic and social transformations of the past half-century. Noting the ubiquity of the business paradigm in American culture, Hofstadter wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness not only appealed to vigorous and ambitious men but set the dominant standards for the rest of society, so that members of the professions\u2014law, medicine, schoolteaching, even the ministry\u2014aped businessmen and adapted the standards of their own crafts to those of business.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The hegemony of business logic has significantly expanded over the last three decades, as Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos. <\/em>Neoliberal rationality has subjected all spheres of human existence to economic metrics, such that even non-monetized domains of action are now framed and measured according to a market model. Privatizing public goods and thinking only in terms of capital enhancement, neoliberalism has undermined the necessary conditions of democratic citizenship, leading to a situation in which, as Brown writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cpolitics [is] peculiarly unappealing and toxic\u2014full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Insofar as Brown contends that \u201csmugness in ignorance\u201d has supplanted a Socratic sense of humility, she shares Nichols\u2019 view of contemporary American political discourse. Yet whereas she stresses the ominous threat posed to democracy by neoliberal capitalism, Nichols sees the nation\u2019s fate hinging on individual action:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is plenty of blame to go around for the parlous state of the role of expertise in American life [\u2026]. Experts themselves, as well as educators, journalists, corporate entertainment media, and others have all played their part. In the end, however, there is only one group of people who must bear the ultimate responsibility for this current state of affairs, and only they can change any of it: the citizens.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While this behaviorist approach prompts readers to contemplate what actions are within their immediate control, it remains fixed on the level of cultural symptoms or epiphenomena, without regard for pathologies or underlying forces.<\/p>\n

In a troubling passage from the Introduction to The Death of Expertise<\/em>, Nichols reflects on the massive social transformations since the 1960s:<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial changes only in the past half century finally broke down old barriers of race, class, and sex not only between Americans in general but also between uneducated citizens and elite experts in particular. A wider circle of debate meant more knowledge but more social friction. Universal education, the greater empowerment of women and minorities, the growth of a middle class, and increased social mobility all threw a minority of experts and the majority of citizens into direct contact, after nearly two centuries in which they rarely had to interact with each other. And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Filled with ambivalence, Nichols thus recognizes the crucial significance of expanding access to education and widening the parameters of participation in the American public sphere, even as he links advances in sociopolitical equality with the rise of epistemological relativism such that expert knowledge is no longer revered.<\/p>\n

Identifying the Vietnam War and Watergate as key causes of declining trust in political elites and institutions, Nichols fails to mention the longstanding abuses of expert truth-claims such as scientific racism and sexism, as well as subsequent efforts to challenge, redefine, and broaden the figure of the \u2018expert\u2019\u2014who historically was assumed to be both white and male. Moreover, in citing \u201cincreased social mobility\u201d as a contributing factor, Nichols obscures the conservative measures of recent decades that have restricted, and even reversed, democratizing reforms, attacking the diversified middle class and contributing to our present situation of economic polarization and intensified social inequality.<\/p>\n

Not only has the dismantling of the American welfare state perpetuated disenfranchisement and increased wealth disparities along racial lines; the liberal arts curriculum has come to be seen as antiquated amidst the utilitarian, market-driven regime of neoliberalism. If, as Nichols correctly argues, college is now perceived as a commodity\u2014with students treated as clients and instructors regarded as service providers who are evaluated based on customer satisfaction\u2014this has emerged in tandem with the precarization of teaching positions and the implementation of corporate logic, personnel and funding models in institutions of higher education...<\/p>\n

Sources:\u00a0https:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/transformation\/nicholas-baer\/american-idiot-rethinking-anti-intellectualism-in-age-of-trump<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Possibilities for Consideration: Divided We Fall<\/h2>\n

The cultural and educational climate in the U.S. and around the world continues to divide and fall. Institutions, academia and expertise<\/em> grow more distrusted by the culture at large.<\/p>\n