Michael’s Reviews > Anti-Intellectualism in American Life > Status Update

"If we have to give up religion or education, we should give up education." - William Jennings Bryan (former presidential candidate of the early 20th century). The schism of the 1600s between Purtians who supported scholarship, vs evangelicals who snubbed their noses at any form of secular learning growing ever more militant, and dangerous by the time of the scopes monkey trial (of which Bryan prosecuted).

Hofstadter credits American anti-intellectualism in part to the watering down of religious teachings which resulted in the breakdown of social norms and cohesion. Now, fast forward 100s of years later to social media, which has diminished the power of the expert/authority/teacher/intellectual etc and has in part resulted in the breakdown of norms. History echos in the present but with entirely different catalysts.

Fascinating learning about the revivalist movement (in America) which undercut a more traditional, learned clergy that viewed rational thought as intrinsic to faith. This idea of feeling over thought in religion eventually resulted in today's evangelical Christians and their rejection of intellectual discourse,

"the intellectual life here has taken on a kind of primary moral signifigance. It is this aspect of the intellectual's feeling about ideas that i call his piety. The intellectual is engage - he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels"

Learning the etymology of the word egghead and it's connection to the words anti-intellectual and pretentious is an odd sort of pleasure.