Anti-intel

Chester, et al, 9/22-23, 2001
I am sending to You a chapter segment from Richard Hofstadter’s
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1962.
I have found in this book several major clues and insights into why
my assiduous efforts over the past several decades, for ANY serious discussion /
analysis of / attempt to understand and work toward the solution of our overwhelming social and political problems, by ANY appreciable number of members of ANY class in our country, have been to tragically unavailing. My joyful discovery of a very few persons who care enough to look into what’s going on, has been about equally spread among a wide range of social classes.
There has been a slight preponderance of members of the laboring class, and a total absence of the very rich, and a severely disappointing level of interest in search for truth by members of Academia, who are ALL subsidized by the State for their disinterest, dilettantism, egotism, arrogance, ensconced comfort, and overwhelmed attention, and submission to the imposed details of bureaucratism.
This book traces the cultural development of the extreme opposition to thinking, which has been endemic to American society ever since, in the aftermath of its founding, the country was taken over by the forces of, by both extreme classes of, industrial capitalism. The book does a great job of tracing this cultural development.
I remember my absolute void of understanding of what th’ heck was meant by the “Mugwumps” of the late 19th Century. Now, I discover that, * It is us, the UU’s. *
I will copy several earlier chapters for the church, for this will be deeply pertinent to my next seminar series on the nature of EDUCATION in our society. But, here, I shall send you this segment, which largely presupposes some of the former, but which can be somewhat understood “cold,” at least I hope so. For with the almost total suppression of the understanding of history toward the citizens of our country, it is tragically difficult to go into ANY question seriously --= with ANYONE !
That is why I am dying in my ostracism, for along with the direct oppression
I have encountered in every realm of life, there is the overwhelming disinterest in addressing any serious social problems by almost all of my interlocutors over the past several decades. I could be described as manic-depressive because of my inordinate joy whenever I have been able to find anyone, anywhere, willing to go into the depths of an issue, or anyone who has previously looked into such a question so that a base of understanding exists which can then be validly discussed.
So: here goes: Hofstadter refers here to the capitulation of 95% of the intellectual class to the domination of Wealth & Power in America after the suppression of McCarthyism of the 50s was lifted. You, far more than most people, would know personally of the ABSOLUTE desertion of Henry Wallace by the entire liberal class, and their, backs-turned silence and acquiescence in the assault upon Paul Robeson
by the State Department and all their thousands of cronies.
From Part VI, Chapter 15, The Intellectual: Alienation & Conformity, section 3,
pp. 398-404
“ As one listens first to the dominant mood of the Partisan Review’s symposium and then to Mr. Irving Howe & other dissenters, what one hears are the two voices of an old & familiar dialogue. A self-conscious concern with alienation, far from being peculiar to American intellectuals in our time, has been a major theme in the life of the intellectual communities of the Western world for almost 2 centuries. In earlier ages, when the life & work of intellectuals had been bound up with the Church or the aristocracy or both, consistent alienation from society was rare. But the development of modern society, from the 18th Century onwards, created a new set of material & social conditions and a new kind of consciousness. Everywhere in the Western world, the ugliness, materialism, & ruthless human exploitation of early modern capitalism affronted sensitive minds. The end of the system of patronage & the development of a market place for ideals & art brought artists & intellectuals into a sharp & often uncomfortable confrontation with the mind of the middle class. In various ways intellectuals rebelled against the conditions of the new bourgeois world – in romantic assertions of the individual against society, in bohemian solidarity, in political radicalism.
It is natural * that in looking for a great historic precedent, Mr. Howe should turn to Flaubert, who was a tireless connoisseur of the fatuities of the French bourgeoisie. ”by dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.” In England, & in a different manner, Matthew Arnold tried to analyze the new cultural situation in Culture & Anarchy.
In America, the Transcendentalists 399 were constantly writing about the difficulty which
the individual sensibility experienced in coming to terms with modern society.
Each country had its own variation of this general problem, much as each country
had its own variety of bourgeois development. The background of alienation in America
made an uncompromising position of alienation seem orthodox, axiomatic, & traditional, for 20th Century intellectuals; for in the 19th Century American society both the accepted, standard writers and the avant-garde writers were likely to be in the one case at least moderately, and in the other intensely alienated. One can truly say that by the middle of the 19th Century even those who belonged did not altogether belong. Hence, in our own time, those intellectuals whose conception of their role is formed by the history of this society find it strange & even repellant that intellectuals should experience success or have any association with power.
It was not always so. In our earlier days two groups of intellectuals were associated with or responsible for the exercise of far-reaching social power, the Puritan clergy & the Founding Fathers. Each group, in time, lost its supremacy, partly because of its own failings, partly because of historical circumstances beyond its control. Yet each also left a distinctive legacy. The Puritan clergy founded the tradition of New England intellectualism; & this tradition, exported wherever New Englanders settled in large numbers, was responsible for a remarkably large portion of the country’s dynamic intellectual life throughout the 19th Century & into the 20th. The Puritan founders had their terrible faults, but they had at least the respect for mind & the intensity of spirit which are necessary to distinguish intellectual achievement. Where it survived, this intensity often had a wonderfully invigorating effect.
The legacy of the Founding Fathers, itself tinctured by Puritan ideas, was equally important. In the development of new countries, while people are engaged in liberating themselves from colonial status & forging a new identity, intellectuals seem always to play an important role. The leaders of the American Enlightenment did so with signal effectiveness: they gave the new republic a coherent & fairly workable body of ideas, a definition of its identity & ideals, a sense of its place in history, a feeling of nationality, a political system and a political code. 400
After about 1820, the old republican order in which the Revolution had been carried out & the Constitution adopted, was rapidly destroyed by a variety of economic & social changes. With the settlement of the trans-Allegheny West, the development of industry, the rise of an egalitarian ethos in politics, & the submergence of the Jeffersonian South, the patrician class that had led & in a measure controlled American democracy became more & more enfeebled. The laymen & the evangelicals had already dethroned the established clergy.
Now, a new type of democratic leader with a new political style was to dethrone the mercantile-professional class from its position of political leadership. Soon a new type of industrialist and promoter would completely overshadow this class in business as well.

What was left was a gentlemanly class with considerable wealth, leisure, & culture, but with relatively little power or influence. This class was the public & the patron of serious writing, & of cultural institutions. Its members read the books that were written by the standard American writers, subscribed to the old highbrow magazines, supported libraries & museums and sent their sons to the old-fashioned liberal-arts colleges to study the classical curriculum.
It developed its own gentle tradition of social protest, for it had enough of an aristocratic bias to be opposed to the most vulgar features of popular democracy that was emerging everywhere and enough of a code of behavior to be opposed to the crass materialism of the new capitalists and plantation lords. The most eloquent tradition of moral protest in America is the creation
of a few uncompromising sons of the patrician gentry.
But if one thinks of this class as having inherited the austere traditions of the older republican order, the traditions crystallized by the Founding Fathers, one sees immediately the relative weakness of a type that kept the manners and aspirations and prejudices of an aristocratic class without being able to retain its authority. The mental outlook of the leaders of the old republican order, inherited by subsequent generations of patricians, became transformed into something less Spirited & less Powerful. The culture of the Founding Fathers was succeeded by what I like to call MUGWUMP Culture -- & by Mugwump I refer NOT just to the upper-class reform movement of the Gilded Age, 401 which is the conventional usage, but to the intellectual & cultural outlook of the dispossessed patrician class. Throughout the entire 19th Century this class provided the chief public to which the independent & cultivated American mind expressed itself. The mugwump mind, in which the influence of New England was again decisive, inherited from the Puritans a certain solemnity & high intent, but was unable to sustain their passion. From the Founding Fathers & the American Enlightenment it inherited in a more direct & immediate way a set of intellectual commitments and civic concerns. In the mugwump ambience, however, the intellectual virtues of the 18th Century republican type dwindled and dried up, very largely because mugwump thinkers were too commonly deprived of the occasion to bring these virtues into any intimate or organic relation with experience. It had been essential to the culture of the Founding Fathers that it was put to the test of experience, that it was forced to cope with grave and intricate problems of power;
It was characteristic of mugwump culture that its relation to experience and its association with power became increasingly remote.
The mugwump mind reproduced the classicism of the Founding Fathers, their passion for order and respect for the mind, their desire to rationalize the world and to make political institutions the embodiment of applied reason, their assumption that their social station
is a proper fulcrum for political leadership, and their implicit concern for the decorous exemplification of one’s proper social role. But having retreated from the most urgent & exciting changes that were taking place in the country, having been edged out of the management of its central institutions of business & politics, & having chosen to withdraw from any identification with the aspirations of the common people, the patrician class produced a culture that became over refined, desiccated, aloof, snobbish – everything that Santayana
had in mind when he identified the genteel tradition. Its leaders cared more that intellect be respectable than that it be creative. *or relevant* What G.K. Chesterton said in quite another connection may be applied to them: They showed more pride in the possession of intellect
than joy in the use of it.
402 Unlike most Americans these men had a firm sense of tradition, but for them tradition was not so much a source of strength or a point of departure as a fetish. In the inevitable tension between tradition & the individual talent, they weighed the scales heavily against anything assertive or originative in the individual, for it was an essential part of their philosophy that such assertion must be regarded as merely egotistical and self-indulgent. The tenets of their code of criticism were eminently suited to an entrenched class that is anxious about keeping its position. The business of criticism was to inculcate “correct taste” & “sound morals” – and taste & morals were carefully defined in such a way as to establish disapproval of any rebelliousness, political or esthetic, against the existing order. Literature was to be a firm custodian of “morality”; and what was meant by morality was always conventional social morality, NOT the independent morality of the artist or thinker which is imposed upon him by the discipline of the artistic form or his vision of the truth. Literature was to be committed to optimism, to the more smiling aspects of life, & must not countenance realism or gloom. Fantasy, obscurity, mysticism, individuality, and revolt were all equally beyond the pale.
So it was that Wordsworth & Southey were condemned by an American critic, Samuel Gilman, in the North American Review in 1823 for their “disinclination to consult the precise intellectual tone and spirit of the average mass to which their works are presented.” Such writers, Gilman thought, had a deserved unpopularity, “Theirs is the poetry of soliloquy. They write apart from and above the world. Their original object seems to be the employment of their faculties and the gratification of their poetical propensities.” Of course, the rejection of originality that is justified here is not significantly different from the rejection experienced by many of the best poets of the 19th Century in Europe. The difference was that the European environment, despite such critical philosophies as those of Gilman’s European counterparts, was complex enough to give the writers some room for assertion in its interstices. The American cultural environment was simpler, more subject to domination by the outlook of a single,
well-meaning, but limited class.
403 The discomfort this class felt in the presence of true genius is exemplified at its best & in its worst in the relationship of Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Emily Dickinson: he, who was so encouraging & so kind to her, even at moments understanding, could never quite rise above thinking of her as another aspiring lady poet, and referred to her now & again as
“my partially cracked poetess at Amherst.” Nor could he resist suggesting to her that
she might overcome her loneliness by attending a meeting of the Boston Women’s Club.
For generations, the effort of established criticism was to make writers accede to the sensibilities of a social type which was itself “apart from and above the world.” The Puritan intensity of conviction which had produced fiery dissenters as well as guardians of the laws, was lost: lost too was that engagement with challenging realities and significant power that had helped to form and test the minds of the Founding Fathers. Puritan society, when one pays due regard to its tiny population and its staggering material problems, had laid the foundations for a remarkable tradition of intellectual discipline and had produced a vital literature, first in religion, then in politics. The Founding Fathers, working under exigent political pressures, had given the world a striking example of applied reason in politics, and their generation had made long strides in literature, science, & art as well. Although it drew upon a wealthier society, mugwump culture was notable neither for its political writing nor for its interest in science.
It was at its best in history and polite letters, but its coolness to spontaneity and originality disposed it to be a better patron to secondary than to primary talents. It rarely gave the highest recognition to a first-rate writer when a second-rate one was to be found. It passed over the most original native minds – Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Whitman – and gave its loudest applause to Cooper, its most distinguished figure, and to Irving, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier. It is easy to yield to the temptations to speak slightingly of the mugwump public, which, after all, provided the support for a large part of the nation’s cultural life, but its failure to appreciate or encourage most of the nation’s first-rate genius is an ineluctable part of the record.
At any rate, the consequences for American literature of the insulation & deprivation of mind that characterized mugwump culture have long been amply recognized and fervently lamented in American criticism. In 1915 Van Wyck Brooks complained that American literature had suffered from a disasterous bifurcation between the highbrow and the lowbrow; and more recently Phillip Rhy, borrowing from D.H. Lawrence, has written of the polarity between the paleface and the redskin, symbolized by Henry James and Walt Whitman. What these critics had in mind was the divorce in American writing & thinking between 404 sensibility, refinement, theory, & discipline on one side, and spontaneity, energy, sensuous reality, & the seizure of opportunity on the other – in short, a painful separation between the qualities of mind and the materials of experience. This separation, traceable to mugwump culture, could be followed through American letters in a number of incomplete and truncated minds. Hawthorne might have been complaining not simply for himself, but for almost all of well-bred and thoughtful America in the nineteenth century when he wrote: “I have not lived, but only dreamed of living…. I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of.”
All this may help us to understand why the case against intellect took the form it did during the 19th Century. When the spokesmen for hardy, masculine practicality, the critics of aristocratic & feminine & unworldly culture, made their case against intellect, they had some justification for their point of view. But they mistook the paler, more ineffectual manifestations of intellect that they saw around them for intellect as such. They failed to see that their own behavior had in some measure contributed to making intellect what it was, that intellect in America had been stunted in some part by their own repudiation of it – by the arrant populism, the mindless obsession with “practicality.” which they had themselves insisted upon. The case of the anti-intellectualist had taken on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Partly by their own fiat, intellect had become associated with losing causes and exemplified by social types that were declining in vigor and influence, encapsulated by an impermeable world. “

My point herein, you may notice, is that the Mugwumps are us.
The New England liberal capitalist, refined, elite, are PRECISELY
Represented by the UU’s. This explains greatly the stone wall of arrogant class insularity I have encountered in my 14 years of attempting to raise and address a vast array of social concerns.
So whence cometh my hopes that such a group might be reformable ??? Well, the possibility of reform is built into our ideology and method, slow though it may be, and corrupted by entrenched power of position and personality. The very nature of such an intellectual discipline as exemplified by the best of our tradition, does actively foster such growth. It is a legacy of the tenets of the Founding Fathers which have thus far preserved the gradual expansion of American democracy and the ring of justice which it empowers. These traditions are often under threat, especially from the top. Yet for two & a quarter centuries, the Fascists have never quite been able to take over the entire process to serve their exclusive ends. This perennial threat is again upon us, in spades, this very moment. Now, 2003, this is established fact.
It is the very healthy humanitarianism of the UU tradition, represented by the mugwumps, that inspired the Black Empowerment effort of 67-70, and also which fostered the valiant attempt to deal with the various ultimatums presented at that time. The silence of that history, as experienced by myself for 14 years, is frightening. But, as the story now becomes again available, with the suffusion of new blood and some direct sponsorship by our formal leadership, the possibility beckons again. I choose to make the effort, knowing full-well the powerful array of class forces aligned against any effectuality in the effort. Paltry as our strength commitment, and level of understanding may be, internally as well as in society, I believe that our traditions and processes do radically hold open the door to that possibility. And even though our class bias may hold us far back from a Christian type commitment which sometimes plays out positively in the evangelical, and even the more institutional churches, I believe that we hold one of the valuable keys to the whole picture, which, if we are neither too arrogant nor too cowardly to use it, might well serve to foster the syncretistic gathering of the humanitarian impulse which suffuses a vast portion of the ideology of so many of our cultural institutions, even if currently so corrupted as to be beyond recognition save in wish or dream.
In short, if we have the guts, we are now called to involve ourselves decisively in the definition of how our country and world are to function, and thereby to help to correct, and to create who we are as a species, which should, and could, and MUST begin to accept the “STEWARDSHIP” of the earth which devolved upon us with the Fall from Eden..
The very access to the knowledge of Good and Evil makes us absolutely and ultimately responsible for choosing the Good. The capture and corruption of our entire society, and especially the entire educational system, by the capitalism greed and power mongers renders this choice currently impossible. It is our job to force it back on the table
as a viable option in the determination of human destiny which hangs in the balance this very moment. Your friend, Paul Robeson, wrote in 1958, “To live in freedom one must be prepared to die to achieve it, and while no one can ignore the fact that in a difficult struggle those who are in the forefront may suffer cruel blows. He who is not prepared to face the trials of battle will never lead to a triumph.” Have You ever seen or heard of Song of the Rivers, a film made in 1954 by the Dutchman Joris Ivens ? Paul Robeson commissioned the translation of the title song, written by Bertolt Brecht, score composed by M. Shostakovich, sung and smuggled out of America by Paul Robeson, commentary by Vladimir Pozner, & posters created by Pablo Piccasso. The film was shown all over the world, but was
BANNED in the United States, the “Land of the Free.” I want to find it.
************** *************
I wrote a sketch today about some of the ramifications of current events, which is far too soon for the public, but which MUST soon be said. I would appreciate Your thoughts on the matter.
“The rage at the murder of innocents:
The condemnation of shadowy cowards.
Yes, there were very many innocents inside the WTC --
I think of the kitchen workers, the porters, the janitors, the secretaries& mail room clerks & bicycle messengers – as innocent as any person can be, in an imperialist country. Yet, how innocent are the operatives in the most massive and deadly theft in the history of our lovely planet ?? When the wealth of the entire globe is appropriated by a self-selected few who have arbitrarily created the rules by which to do so, and who employ the instruments of execution, without review by ANY public body on earth, and who capture this power and privilege by operation of the single criterion of GREED,
Where can the line of innocence be drawn ? What of the operatives, who receive compensation from ten times to a thousand times that of a worker for their services rendered, those regular businessmen and policymakers who employ their skill, dexterity, cunning, & efficiency in service of their masters, while praying every moment to replace them in their seats of power -- and luxury ? What is innocence ?
And what of the children of Iraq, of the 200,000 who died under the rain of our heroic bombs dropped from invisible STEALTH aircraft whose pilots become instant heroes because of the impunity with which they operate against a country with no defenses ?
The 7000 in New York are innocent civilian victims of a vicious, cowardly attack by ruthless terrorists. The 200,000 in Iraq, the 30,000 in Panama, whatever, are the “collateral damage” necessarily attendant upon the heroic actions of the defenders of Freedom. *Actually only 2000*
And what of the 1,000,000,000 people on earth who are starving for the bare rudiments, or scraps of garbage, merely trying to survive for another day – without hope ?
And what of the majority of humankind, perhaps 3,000,000,000 or more persons who live on the barest margins because their homes, their land, their forests and fields, their governments, their very cultures and communities have been appropriated – stolen – by the Masters of Wealth whose very Capitol, both symbolic and in reality, was lodged in those World Trade Towers ? This majority of humanity lives only at the pleasure of the next paycheck, dispensed ONLY as recompense for continuous service to the System of Wealth of the Wealthy.
As for the remainder, those of us who receive real pay, treats and trinkets, tours, & trips, TVs & DVDs, and entertainments, and the right to hire, dismiss, and abuse underlings as the perks for our personal service to our masters, how innocent are we ?
Why this year, for the first time in 15 years, I am likely to earn MORE that $10,000.
How innocent are we when we create, empower, and maintain an “education” system for our entire society which specifically teaches ignorance to our children, and motivates ALL programs, and grades ALL progress, by the enticements of greed and luxury: Get Yours before the other guy does !! Get ahead !! Get ! Get ! Get !

If we as a species are truly this corrupt, there is no hope.

But, as Lt. Cable sang,
“You’ve GOT to be carefully taught.”

I am an Educator. Every moment of my life, I have been an educator,
(as well as a student). This is why the good rulers of America, at EVERY level, have starved me and oppressed me throughout my entire life. This is why I am slandered & ridiculed and dismissed as of no consequence, because I have been robbed of my shoes, of my home and family, of my land and liberty, of my teeth and health, and almost, even, of my sanity as, and BECAUSE, even in the midst of the insult and abuse and my own hunger and anguish,
I continue --- to educate.

And, What have they done to the rain ??

Strider