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| ====== Anti-Intellectualism in American Life ====== | ====== Anti-Intellectualism in American Life ====== | ||
| - | Bear in mind while working through this book that Hofstadter was a centrist interested | + | It's amazing to realize |
| + | |||
| + | ===== Questions ===== | ||
| + | * How can we build a highly democratic society without discounting expertise? | ||
| + | * Can we have a church that values learning and discourse | ||
| ===== Chapter notes ===== | ===== Chapter notes ===== | ||
| + | Bear in mind while working through this book that Hofstadter was something of a centrist interested in moving academic discourse away from materialism and toward psychoanalysis. | ||
| + | |||
| ==== Anti-intellectualism in Our Time ==== | ==== Anti-intellectualism in Our Time ==== | ||
| * this work, like others in Hofstadter' | * this work, like others in Hofstadter' | ||
| Line 293: | Line 299: | ||
| ==== The Revolt against Modernity ==== | ==== The Revolt against Modernity ==== | ||
| + | * Sunday' | ||
| + | * on the one hand, many fundamentalists felt betrayed by the adoption of modernist ideas within evangelical denominations (Baptists and Methodists); | ||
| + | * the expansion of education increasingly forced conflicts between religious faith and secular thought | ||
| + | * previously secularism had been thought of as an elite affair, easy for fundamentalists to ignore or scapegoat | ||
| + | * it wasn't that full withdrawal of religious types from secular culture became impossible but rather that it was no longer desirable among the more militant religious types---and it made a nice outlet for those militants | ||
| + | * I think that in this and some of the following points (paragraph 2, p. 118), Hofstadter is responding to // | ||
| + | * Sunday embodied two new features of American fundamentalism: | ||
| + | * "One can trace in Sunday the emergence of what I call the on-hundred per cent mentality---a mind totally committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, | ||
| + | * Hofstadter also points out that sexual fundamentalism (fear both of " | ||
| + | * again, note the anti-feminine language of Sunday' | ||
| + | * this (and to a lesser extent the next quote) sounds exactly like something that would be said at NWC | ||
| + | * Sunday: "I have no interest in a God who does not smite." | ||
| + | * ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh, | ||
| + | * ayyyyyy, it's available at [[https:// | ||
| + | * learned skepticism was not a major threat to the early evangelists, | ||
| + | * following the Civil War, ideas like Darwinism (ooOOoOoOOooooOooOo) put orthodox Christianity on the defensive, further heightened by modern scholarly Biblical criticism among the learned ministry | ||
| + | * I have to wonder: why do fundamentalists chafe so hard against the idea that humanity is not cosmically special? Do they think that our only value derives from being forged by God specifically? | ||
| + | * toward the end of the 19th century, industrialism and urban churches begat a demand for a social gospel | ||
| + | * the choice between fundamentalism and modernism (or conservative Christianity and social gospel) was now sharpened to a point | ||
| + | * it became increasingly clear that fundamentalists were losing ground and respectability, | ||
| + | * consider the transition from Moody' | ||
| + | * Moody: "the Bible was not made to understand." | ||
| + | * then what the fuck are you doing, dude? And if it's not meant to be understood, then why should anyone bother reading it? Why does it exist? | ||
| + | * also, ancient people had theater and symbolism; not everything needed to be literal for them | ||
| + | * interestingly, | ||
| + | * Sunday, on the other hand: " | ||
| + | |||
| + | * quoting Reinhold Niebuhr: " | ||
| + | * cf. toxic positivity within the cryptosphere---dissenters //must// be outsiders spreading FUD, because if their criticisms are valid, then I've wasted a lot of time, energy, and money gambling on smoke | ||
| + | * look into: //Does Civilization Need Religion?// (Reinhold Niebuhr) | ||
| + | * look into: //The History of Fundamentalism// | ||
| + | * look into: // | ||
| + | * fundamentalists felt that rationalism and modernism could no longer be answered in debate and so sought to drown them out with violent rhetoric and attempts to suppress and intimidate | ||
| + | * the climax was the 1920s anti-evolution crusade | ||
| + | * Sunday, in a 1920s sermon: " | ||
| + | * lotta yikes there | ||
| + | * the fundamentalists now were the dissenters, even within the broader evangelical community | ||
| + | * everywhere, mass media threw the old mentality into direct conflict with the new | ||
| + | * Hofstadter describes this as // | ||
| + | * "The older, rural, and small-town America, now fully embattled against the encroachments of modern life, made its most determined stand against cosmopolitanism, | ||
| + | * look into: "Could a Protestant Have Beaten Hoover in 1928?" (Hofstadter) | ||
| + | * the 1920s reactionaries were aware that their ideals were outdated and articulated a belief that the intelligentsia were out to get them | ||
| + | * Hiram W. Evans, in a 1926 Klan manifesto of sorts, claimed that the main issue of the day was a struggle between "the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock" and the " | ||
| + | * wow, glad to see 100 years haven' | ||
| + | * look into: "The Klan's Fight for Americanism" | ||
| + | * of note in the extended Evans quote: a sort of proto-biotruth argument (humans have lived on emotion and instincts for far longer than reason, so they' | ||
| + | * the Goldwater quote (footnote 4, p. 124) further demonstrates the belief that conservatives are a silent majority being ridiculed by a liberal-controlled mass media | ||
| + | * look into: //The War on Modern Science// (Maynard Shipley) | ||
| + | * consider this speech by Bryan: "All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save //just the first three verses of Genesis// | ||
| + | * I am shocked by the willingness to discard all of the Bible except the first three verses (ironically, | ||
| + | * the Scopes trial served as the climax of the crusade against evolution; it was not the first battle against Darwinism (which had taken place in the universities from the 1860s--1890s), | ||
| + | * the public school system had exploded in the years surrounding WWI, and that schooling was becoming increasingly necessary for success | ||
| + | * for the fundamentalists, | ||
| + | * John Washington Butler introduced the TN law against teaching evolution mainly because of a young woman in his community who went to university and returned an evolutionist, | ||
| + | * Clarence Darrow' | ||
| + | * look into: //Bryan and Darrow at Dayton// (Leslie H. Allen) | ||
| + | * it was clear to them that Darrow (and the ideas he represented) sought to destroy religion and family loyalties | ||
| + | * random Tennessean to Darrow: "Damn you, don't you reflect on my mother' | ||
| + | * Bryan combined evangelical faith with populistic democracy; he described his opponents in the case as a " | ||
| + | * to him, this was a case of the people and the truths of the heart versus a small, arrogant elite taken by false science and mechanical rationalism | ||
| + | * Christianity, | ||
| + | * to paraphrase Walter Lippmann, all men being equal before God had been taken to mean that all were equally good biologists before the TN ballot | ||
| + | * to Bryan, the issue of evolution in schools was a challenge to popular democracy | ||
| + | * Bryan: "What right have the evolutionists---a relatively small percentage of the population---to teach //at public expense// a so-called scientific interpretation of the Bible when orthodox Christians are not permitted to teach an orthodox interpretation of the Bible?" | ||
| + | * whoa, that's a huge jump there. Surely nobody was arguing that evolution was an interpretation of the Bible. I assume his reasoning was Bible = reality => claims about reality = interpretation of the bible => evolution = interpretation of the Bible. | ||
| + | * the question at the core of this case, in the mind of Bryan, was whether the minority (the evolutionists) had the right to force their views on the majority (the Christians) | ||
| + | * if Christians had to build their own schools and universities, | ||
| + | * in his ideal world, evolutionary biology would have been banned outright and modern science confined to private secularist schools; sound education and orthodox faith were to him one and the same | ||
| + | * Bryan: "If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education." | ||
| + | * I do wonder if this attitude made more sense when public education was still relatively new. | ||
| + | |||
| + | * at the time of writing, the evolution controversy felt old hat to intellectuals in the East, but elsewhere the issue was (and is today) still very much alive | ||
| + | * although the intellectuals were largely vindicated by the trial, the trial was a frightening time for them | ||
| + | * during the buildup to the trial, the anti-evolution case had a great deal of support, particularly in the South but also outside it | ||
| + | * even those intellectuals in the more secure centers of learning could still fear for the future of the nation' | ||
| + | * at the time of writing, high school texts still often discussed evolution in guarded terms, and barely more than a third of adolescent poll respondents agreed with the statement "man was evolved from lower forms of animals" | ||
| + | * look into: //Are American Teachers Free?// (Howard K. Beale) | ||
| + | * the trial marked the first time in the 20th century that intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies of the people by leaders of a large segment of the public | ||
| + | * the militant fundamentalists, | ||
| + | * as they saw it, the loss of faith among their children would be the first step in a greater loss of morality; many were motivated by specifically sexual fears: "They had a good deal to say about the ' | ||
| + | * my only guess on this last part is that " | ||
| + | * thinking on that further, I can see that the Sexual Revolution really was a huge deal, if indeed that was the bridge between then and now; that a concept as unsexy as natural selection could arouse (pun intended) such a fervor is quite surprising to me | ||
| + | * after the trial, the fundamentalists set to looking for other areas they could strike against the modernists | ||
| + | * in the wake of the Great Depression, the non-fundie evangelical groups (the clergy more so than the laymen) began moving politically left, especially compared to their fundie counterparts; | ||
| + | * this sense of isolation and impotence help pull the fundamentalists far to the right and into the ranks of New Deal opposition | ||
| + | * "The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag." | ||
| + | * this was the first mixture of fundamentalism with the far right, where their influence continues to be felt to this day | ||
| + | * look into: //The Radical Right// (ed. Daniel Bell) | ||
| + | * look into: //Apostles of Discord// (Ralph Lord Roy) | ||
| + | * look into: "The Radical Right and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority" | ||
| + | * Charles B. Hudson: "We are going to take this government out of the hands of these city-slickers and give it back to the people that still believe two plus two is four, God is in his Heaven, and the Bible is the Word." | ||
| + | * apparently there was little scholarship at the time tracing the links from the Depression to post-Depression right | ||
| + | * many of the right-wing leaders had been preachers, ex-preachers, | ||
| + | * I'm still struggling to understand the jump from fundie to fashy---were they just so butthurt about " | ||
| + | * some man associated with Billy Sunday in the mid-30s later turned up as right-wing or quasi-fascist agitators | ||
| + | * Gerald Winrod, Gerald L. K. Smith, J. Frank Norris, Carl McIntire (look these dudes up, they are wild) | ||
| + | * Gerald Winrod: "the Jayhawk Nazi"; wrote a book defending //The Protocols of the Elders of Zion//; believed that the Depression was the work of Satan, that F.D.R. was an element of the Jewish Communist conspiracy, and that Hitler would save Europe from Communism; his son was later involved with Christian Identity | ||
| + | * Gerald L. K. Smith: started out as a leader of the Share Our Wealth before jumping dick first into Christian nationalism and white supremacy; his organization distributed //The International Jew//; started up the short-lived America First Party in the 40s | ||
| + | * J. Frank Norris: described evolution as " | ||
| + | * Carl McIntire: started two organizations to oppose liberal tendencies in the churches | ||
| + | * the John Birch Society (which was new at the time) brought the far right' | ||
| + | * and we know that the JBS bled into the Patriots and the sovereign citizens and Christian Identity and so on | ||
| + | * the literature of the extreme right is similarly continuous from Christian fundamentalism to militant nationalism | ||
| + | * people like to believe their worldviews are complete, and the fundie mind feels more satisfied when linking religious and political antipathies | ||
| + | * the fundies of the 20s linked issues of WWI with anti-German sentiment; in particular, higher (Biblical) criticism was strongest among German scholarship, | ||
| + | * you know that Eddie Izzard bit about Henry VIII and the origin of the Anglican church? Yeah, Billy Sunday said the exact same thing about the Kaiser and higher criticism, only Sunday was being serious. Yikes. | ||
| + | * again, note the poor reasoning typical of authoritarian followers: " | ||
| + | * OK, Hofstadter mentions what he calls "the generically prejudiced mind" (footnote 3, p. 133), noting a strong correlation between religious orthodoxy and ethnic prejudice; as I've noted previously, I believe he's responding to right-wing authoritarianism as described by Altemeyer (indeed, one of the citations is a book titled //The Authoritarian Mind//) | ||
| + | * he definitely is; the " | ||
| + | * authoritarianism, | ||
| + | * pp. 134--135, he really goes in for the kill: we cannot overlook the essentially theological underpinnings of the right wing; it does not tolerate nuance or scale, and every conflict must be | ||
| + | * hence the derivation: liberal policies = socialist = communism = atheism | ||
| + | * So what can we take from this to apply to today' | ||
| + | |||
| + | * while Protestantism has been the major focus thus far, American Catholicism has also contributed notably to anti-intellectualism | ||
| + | * despite strong anti-Catholic sentiment, it has been growing in size and acceptance | ||
| + | * American Catholicism has focused on Americanizing itself and denouncing the aspects of American life it could not approve | ||
| + | * in other areas where it holds comparable influence, the Church holds some intellectual prestige | ||
| + | * because of the early anti-Catholic sentiment in the US, the Church had to prove its Americanism; | ||
| + | * footnote 5 (p. 137): French Catholics are apparently taught to think through modern problems in Catholic ways rather than through strict courses in apologetics | ||
| + | * the Church also had to expend considerable resources to accommodate a massive influx of immigrants, so that what was left over for higher culture was spent on Catholic culture | ||
| + | * footnote 6 (p. 138): Hofstadter argues that education can serve as a barrier between parents and upwardly-mobile children: " | ||
| + | * Catholicism in the US had more adherents among immigrants; to American Catholics, the true Church seemed to be in Europe | ||
| + | * | ||
| ==== The Decline of the Gentleman ==== | ==== The Decline of the Gentleman ==== | ||
| ==== The Fate of the Reformer ==== | ==== The Fate of the Reformer ==== | ||
| Line 318: | Line 448: | ||
| ===== Related works ===== | ===== Related works ===== | ||
| - | * [[The Civil War as a Theological Crisis]]: should provide additional detail on inter- and intra-denominational schisms, particularly where the issue of slavery was concerned | + | * [[the_civil_war_as_a_theological_crisis|The Civil War as a Theological Crisis]]: should provide additional detail on inter- and intra-denominational schisms, particularly where the issue of slavery was concerned |
| + | * [[: | ||
| + | |||
| + | {{tag> | ||
| ---- struct data ---- | ---- struct data ---- | ||
| + | readinglist.author | ||
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| + | readinglist.summary | ||
| + | readinglist.status | ||
| + | readinglist.subjects : history, politics | ||
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