Is American Anti-Intellectualism Growing?

I don't know. And I don't think you do either.

And I can't think of any good reason to start regarding Psychology Today as a valuable source of insight into America's intellect.

We know that anti-intellectualism has always been strong in the United States -- now, wait a minute. Do we actually know that? We know that it has been a popular assertion for a long time, but is anti-intellectualism actually stronger in the US than in other places? Again, I don't know. I don't even know what the assertion means.

Is anti-intellectualism stronger now in the US than it was in the mid-19th century? Back then, Herman Melville, after having started his career by writing 3 bestselling novels in a row, published Moby Dick in 1851 -- and it received unanimously negative reviews, and although Melville wrote several more novels, from a business standpoint, his career as a novelist was over. In 1955, William Gaddis published his first novel, The Recognitions, and the nearly-unanimously-negative reviews it received were eerily reminiscent of the strange case of Moby Dick, and resulted in very low sales for the novel for a least a decade. (jack green collected these reviews and published them along with some intelligent commentary, in what is now the book entitled fire the bastards! It's a great book, but its title, a to-the-point suggestion about what should be done with such book reviewers, misses the point in my opinion. The real problem here is the people who hired the reviewers who trashed Melville and Gaddis.)

But while Melville's career never recovered from the critical reaction to Moby Dick, which did not become widely regarded as a classic until long after Melville died in 1891, in the 1970's Gaddis won a National Book Award, in the 1980's he received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in the 1990's he won another National Book Award. I've heard that Gaddis even started to make some appearances on bestseller lists in the 1980's (back when bestseller lists only went down to #10 or in a few cases all the way down to #20, not like today's Amazon Sales Rank which goes down to #7,592,613 or so), although that's just hearsay, I haven't been able to confirm it yet.

You might well respond that the cases of 2 individual writers don't say much about American culture as a whole. On the other hand, these days, unlike the mid-19th century, things like the genius grants exist.

On the 3rd hand, even mighty things such as the genius grants are a puny substitute for state support of intellectuals, just as even the mightiest charities (thousand points a light goin round an round) are a puny substitute for a government social safety net. There's no doubt that state support of the arts, humanities and sciences is much stronger in some Western European countries than in the US. And I absolutely do believe, with no if's, and's or but's, that those countries are much more sensible and fortunate than we are in that regard. University attendance should be free, painters and sculptors and poets should get government grants as a matter of course, orchestras shouldn't need to go groveling to corporations for funding. If the lack of such things means anti-intellectualism, then game over, the US is anti-intellectual, period.

But I don't think that the lack of such things in the US, or, for example, the climate-change skepticism of many of our elected officials, reflect a hostility to learning and good sense on the part of the US population as a whole. I think they have been imposed upon us by corporations led by MBA's who don't care about either the opinions or the well-being of the entire populace.

The hero, result and major role model of those same asshole MBA's is currently running for President. If he's elected, or if he even comes close, then I think that would prove that anti-intellectualism has grown since W's administration.

But lest we forget, in the last 2 Presidential elections, a man who was about as different from W as a man can be, a bona-fide intellectual, has won by wide margins. W was the poster boy for anti-intellectualism, the Tea Party is now its locus and Donald Chump is their man -- but is the Tea Party growing? If it is, then I think you could say that anti-intellectualism in the US is growing. Yes, the Tea Party did very well in the 2010 and 2014 mid-terms, but that's the fault of Democratic voters who act as if they don't know that there are elections in the US oftener than every 4 years, and of Republican leaders who should have known better, but "followed the base" rather than leading. They have "followed the base" -- the fringe, actually, not the base -- all the way to the Trump campaign, and now, finally, some of them are beginning to see their mistake and to do something about it.

I don't know whether anti-intellectualism is growing in the US or not. I don't know whether there is a meaningful way to measure such things. In my opinion, the latest wave of American anti-intellectualism peaked when W was re-elected over John Kerry, a bona-fide intellectual. Today, even Republicans tend to be embarrassed by W, and even Republicans are speaking out against Trump. I think that the Tea Party (synonymous with the Trump campaign in my opinion), although there's no doubt that it's very loud right now, is getting weaker. Louder doesn't always equal stronger. More and more non-fringe Republicans are jumping ship. I think that the anybody-but-Trump voting bloc is bigger than Trump's block.

But whether I'm right or wrong, whether American anti-intellectualism is growing or declining, whether Trump will be elected President or cause a Democratic landslide, or neither, I think that pro-intellectual people should do very much the same things: speak up for intellect and learning, vote for better schools and for no tuition and for well-funded artists and scientists and for fact-based environmental and energy policies. Speak up (loudly), vote, campaign, petition, agitate, fight back against the bozos, whether we're a minority or a majority.

Signet Classics Covers From The 1960's

I've harshly criticized nostalgia in this blog, but naturally, I myself am not completely immune to it. To my emotions, certain novels are no longer printed in the correct way because they're not made with the covers they had in the Signet Classics series in the 1960's. For example, Moby Dick:

Naturally, since the Signet Classics paperbacks were so popular back then, I'm not the only one who has these sorts of feelings. For example, consider this tribute posted on Goodreads, and I quote:

"Aren't those covers awesome? And doesn't the paper hold up well, after all these decades, especially in the earlier copies? Aren't some of those afterwards interesting?"

Yes, yes and yes!

Many readers of Signet Classics of that era may recall what a terrible translator of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky Constance Garnett was -- really, really awful -- you don't have to understand a single word of Russian to know how badly she translated it -- and yet know exactly what I mean when I say that I mourn the Signet Classics covers which passed away as better translators took over, and that no other edition of The Brothers Karamazov looks like the real one except this:

I was into the Signet Classics well before I was full grown. I moved from the children's section of our excellent small-town library and into the stacks with the books for adults just as soon as I realized that there was no rule against it -- I'm terrible with dates, but this was probably around 1971, when I turned 10. The head librarian was wonderful. She took note of my grown-up tastes in reading material with definite approval.

The people who made the picture for the covers of the Signet Classics in the 1960's were several, and unfortunately they are not named anywhere in the volumes themselves, at least not in the ones I've inspected. I'm not sure, but I think that whoever made the title illustration for that edition of Moby Dick also made this picture:

And this one, too, my very favorite book-cover illustration:

Why my favorite book-cover ever? Probably just because it was my favorite when I was a child, and nostalgia has kept those childish sensations alive in me.

Not that I'm actually a great fan of James Fenimore Cooper. As far as historical accuracy goes: The Mohicans, or Mahicans, didn't die out centuries ago, as Cooper would have you believe. They are still among us today. Cooper didn't write well. There was not a witty bone in his body nor a supple phrase in his soul.

I am a very great fan of Melville, though. I have a copy of Moby Dick which looks like the one pictured above. It was printed in 1962, acquired by me in the 1980's, I think, and the paper, just as the person quoted above from Goodreads says, is very nice indeed, very high-quality, and much sturdier than the binding. Repeatedly, avidly read, certain pages pored over with especially great attention, the volume is coming more and more to resemble a collection of loose leaves in a folder rather than an actual bound book. Likewise, the paper in my Signet Classics copy of Tom Jones, printed in 1964, is very good paper, might as well be new rather than 51 years old, although the book's front cover is gone, worn off many years ago.

It wasn't much of a cover to me. No offense to anyone who treasures it.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.

Founders Of National Literatures

In some cases it's very easy to spot the first great figure in the literature of a nation -- "great" not in the sense that they were bettter writers than others, that's a subjective call, but in the sense that they formed a reference point for the literature that followed, great in the sense that the writers and readers of that nation looked at each of them as a kind of founder of their culture.

In some cases that figure is very easy to spot: in Greece it's Homer, in post-Roman Italy it's Dante, in Spain it's Cervantes, in England it's Shakespeare, in Russia it's Pushkin.

In ancient Rome, some would say, it's Vergil. Others would say it's Cicero. I, and perhaps a few others, would say that Horace and Sallust and Ovid write rings around those two. (Then again, by my own criteria, that's not the point.)

The situation is quite murky in Amurrka, because after the mediocrity of Irving and the so-so melodramatic novels of Cooper came Melville, the most accomplished writer in our nation's history, but dishonored in his own time, and always an outsider. He even founded an Amurrkin tradition of outsider-writers: Emerson, Faulkner, Gaddis, the Beats. The fucked-upness of our literature is world-famous.

Who's the first great German writer? Luther, Grimmelshausen, and Goethe, the top 3 choices, are about as different from one another as 3 writers can be. Is that bad for Germany, or nice for Germany?

(Or is this all incredibly meaningless and beautiful?)

France just simply doesn't have one. Maybe because the field is more crowded with geniuses that the literature of any other nation.

And when I think that there must be similar sitchy-ashuns in the literature of Portugal and Lithuania and Mexico and hundreds of other nations, discussions including thousands of writers whose names I have never heard, my mind reels at how much bigger the world is than my mind.