Anti-Intellectualism and the Debate
Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity represented an inversion of all natural values has quite a lot of psychological resonance for anyone who remembers high school. Early Christians, poor, marginalized, powerless and hated, articulated a religious system that valued poverty, powerlessness, and weakness over wealth, strength, and beauty (traditionally preferred, by Greeks and Romans, for example).
Whereas the classical value systems promoted heroic and worldly attributes, Judeo-Christianity declared: the world may detest you and you may lack traditional strengths, but God prefers you this way.
Nietzsche claimed that this was an act fundamentally based in resentment: a weak person resenting a strong person but unable to acquire his strength might so console himself: “It is better to be weak than strong, better to be ugly than beautiful.”
Thus did a religion develop, according to Nietzsche, that celebrates all the traditionally negative qualities in humans: meekness, ugliness, frailty, illness; at its head is a man called a criminal by the state and executed with thieves, who promised that the meek would inherit the earth and be rewarded in heaven.
Who has not at some resentful moment so thought to himself, “I wouldn’t want to be the way they are, anyway,” “I’m glad I’m not some rich dick,” “I didn’t want to go to the dance, honestly,” etc.
This basic cognitive response, to deny whatever one resents and elevate its lack to a virtue, informs much human behavior, regardless of whether Nietzsche’s thoughts about Judaism and Christianity have any merit. Better to passionately mock the value of what we want than to admit we want anything.
In American anti-intellectualism, dramatically on display tonight during the VP debate, we are reminded again of how fully we commit to our identities and how prideful we are about them; in school, if we aren’t athletic, we deride athletes; if we’re ignored by the mainstream, we proudly cultivate counter-cultural elan; if we are rich, we think the poor are lazy, and if we’re poor, we think the rich are lucky.
And if we’re not educated, not erudite, not intelligent -and the majority of any nation simply isn’t*- we react with hostility to even innocent displays of those qualities. We call the intelligent wonkish, pedantic, condescending, elite.
It is easy to imagine many of my fellow citizens responding to that debate differently than we did: sympathizing with the folksy, uninformed, smilingly inane representative of our Cult of the Ordinary.
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*I am aware that this is actually elitist; it is also statistically undeniable. Note also that I do not suggest that intelligence and erudition are purely positive virtues, or that intellectuals are morally better than average citizens; I do not think that is necessarily the case.
Having watched the debate, I don’t think Palin was actively anti-intellectual. That’s one way to frame it so that you can deride those who you say practice it. Talking differently from the way educated people generally talk is not anti-intellectual. Nor is there anything inherently anti-intellectual about being folksy (e.g., winking). As for her reasoning, it was as weak as other politicians (including the other guy) but I take that as a matter of course, not a celebration of anti-intellectualism. In the end, the main celebration of anti-intellectualism that I observed was the post-debate commentary that was gleefully celebrated by everyone on TV.
