Anti-Intellectual Americans

Published in 1982, Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels predicts the collapse of Western Civilization, but without a timeline. Now, 30 years later, Tracinski points out in What Went Right that not only has the world not collapsed, it's actually headed in a positive direction. Part of Peikoff's case for a collapse was in demonstrating similarities between pre-Nazi Germany and the current state of America (in the 60's & 70's). However, he noted:

There are essential differences between the United States and Germany

The hope of the United States lies in the philosophical breach between the American people and the intellectuals.

By the "intellectuals" in this context I mean those whose professional field is the humanities, the social sciences, education, or the arts, i.e., the study and/or evaluation of man and his actions.  By the "people" I mean the rest of the country, including physical scientists and businessmen.

I believe part of "what went right" is that America became anti-intellectual, in the sense that most Americans stopped listening to the intellectual class, especially university philosophers.  Americans saw the vile ideas coming out of the universities, particularly in the 60's, and stopped listening in an act of self-preservation.

Can we actually measure the split between the people and the intellectuals? Art is a good barometer of a person's and a culture's sense of life, so I looked to art for my comparison. To represent the intellectuals, I chose the Pulitzer Prize committee that chooses the Fiction award for the best novel (awarded since 1917).  The Pulitzer Prize is administered by Columbia University. For the American people, I'm using the top 10 best-selling books each year as determined by Publishers Weekly. I then asked the question: how many Pulitzer Prize winners were also in the top 10 lists of books bought by the American people? The results shown below are quite striking.

From the beginning in the 1920's, the American public was in line with the intellectuals with more than half of the Pulitzer Prize winners also in the top 10. This alignment of the people and the intellectuals continued through the 1960's and then took a nose dive. Only one book in the last forty years, Humbolt's Gift by Saul Bellow in 1975, has won the Prize and has also appeared in the top-10 best-seller list.

The disconnect between the intellectuals and the people evident from the graph above fits my own experience as well. I've read almost 100 books in the last five years, and I'm always looking for something good to read. In looking at the Pulitzer Prize list, the only ones I've tried (i.e. downloaded the sample onto my Kindle) were The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I found both to be pretentious and boring, so I didn't buy them. I read Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, the 1989 winner, around the time it was published, but I only remember that it was depressing. To find a book on the list that I read and liked we have to go all the way back to 1961 for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee--this is also the final period in the graph above where the American people were aligned with the intellectuals in their choices of novels.

Turning to the top 10 list for the last three years (2010-2012), I've read five of the thirty books and quite enjoyed three of them: The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. None of these books are strongly philosophical, which is why they sell well in today's anti-intellectual culture, but they all have a good plot with interesting characters who make interesting moral choices.

So if it is true that ideas influence and even determine the fate of a society, what happens when a society gives up on ideas and divorces themselves from the intellectuals? This will be the subject of future posts.