are Americans hostile to knowledge?

[rm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html

Worth it for the "cultural conservationist" label alone. I've been looking for a phrasing of that sentiment.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

On the overall topic, the dumber-ing of Americans, I have to say this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Anti-intellectualism was one of the forces that helped Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in back-to-back elections.

I was going to post something very similar. A distrust of knowledge and intelligence has been common in the US since at least the mid 19th century. I don't understand the origins of it all, but I do know that this anti-intellectualism is quite pervasive. I first noticed it in the mid 1970s, when I visited the UK as a young teen and listened to ordinary middle class non-academics speaking in ways that I only typically saw among academics in the US, and it's clearly been around significantly longer than that.

I'm fairly certain that at least some of it came from the process of the US distinguishing itself from Europe, which has been long-characterized in the US as a continent of people who are lazy, over-educated, and possibly effeminate, traits that were contrasted with US traits like being "hard-headed", "realistic", and placing much value in "self-determination".