WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE MARX

PART TWO:

THE SO WHAT FACTOR

Of course, the joke isn't really quite true. People with liberal arts degrees from the right places--back to Harvard and Stanford and Yale, again--not only do very well, but on the average do far better than people with "practical" degrees from less prestigious universities. Parents and students know that. That's why Harvard can turn down twenty-five applicants for every one it accepts, and charge $35,000 a head for the privilege of attending.

In spite of that, though, the joke struck a cord, and continues to, not only for the graduates of less prestigious institutions, but for the very Harvard alumni it was meant to mock. That's because the general consensus has changed. Only forty years ago, people who did not have elite college educations felt more than a little defensive about it. Self-made multi-millionaires bought respectability by endowing art museums just to prove they weren't ignorant boors. Ordinary men and women didn't much like elite culture, but they knew they were supposed to like it, and felt embarrassed that they did not. President Roosevelt had a brain trust, and Kennedy made a point of displaying his friendships with intellectuals and his taste for the fine arts. PBS concentrated on classical music, ballet, and opera, and everybody agreed that this was what it was supposed to do. The purpose of public television was to save American culture from the mindless pablum of masscult TV. Even masscult paid homage to highcult. Before Charles van Doren crashed and burned in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, his appeal to middle America came precisely from the fact that he had a Ph.D., taught at a prestigious university, and preferred Beethoven to bebop.

In 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the magazine National Review to represent conservative ideas, but most importantly to eradicate the generally held opinion--to be examined brilliantly some years later by Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life--that no intelligent person could be a conservative. To that end, Buckley was careful to gather solidly credentialed intellectuals to write for the magazine, and to distance the magazine, and the conservative movement, from its historical embarrassments. Chief among those historical embarrassments was the movement's connection to creationism, from the Scopes trial on downwards. In an argument between impressively credentialed Ph.D. biologists and religiously committed small-town doctors and lawyers and evangelical preachers, there was no contest. Credentials and expertise won every time, and Buckley knew that if he didn't at least skirt the creationist issue--if the impression remained that one could not be conservative without also being ignorant and stupid--his new movement was dead in the water.

Thirty five years later, National Review had begun to publish the incoherent but ideologically fervent work of Phillip Johnson, a Berkeley law school professor whose real issue was that evangelical Christians were considered stupid and ignorant just because they were evangelical Christians. It didn't matter that his "critiques" of evolution were wrongheaded, misinformed, and positively funny to anybody who actually knew anything about evolutionary biology. Johnson and his followers simply denied that scientists knew anything more about science than anybody else, and went from there.

As an all-out war against expertise, it was unprecedented, and it spread across the country like a computer virus. That evolution was a fact was accepted by the vast majority of credentialed scientists across the globe made no difference. That creationism was the explanation of choice almost exclusively of nonscientists made no difference, either. The people supporting evolution had Ph.D.s in biology? So what? The opinion of the dentist down the street was just as good as Stephen Jay Gould's.

In no time at all, the "issue" became not a scientific, but a civil liberties one. Schools that refused to teach "creation science" alongside "evolution science" were said to be discriminating against Christian students on the basis of religion. Courts that refused to okay creationist curricula in the public schools were said to be activist ideologues bent on imposing a secular religion on America's schoolchildren. Evolutionary biologists with doctorates, years of research experience and even Nobel prizes were deemed to be "scientists" within quotation marks only. The Christian Courier's obituary for Stephen Jay Gould identified him not as one of the world's most respected biologists, but as an "anti-creationist."

It got worse. When John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in the public schools in 1925, the conviction, and the law that made it possible, were widely regarded as bringing shame and justified ridicule down on the state of Tennessee. In 2003, when a student accused Texas Tech biology Professor Michael Dini of religious discrimination for refusing to give recommendations to students who did not "truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer" to the question of human origins, Dini became the target of an investigation by the Department of Justice.

It wasn't that the forces of creationism, or of conservative politics, didn't know that scientists had established evolution as a fact. It was that they didn't care. "Facts" were in the eyes of the beholder, and all eyes were created equal. Men and women who had spent their lives in the rigorous study of biology were to be considered no more knowledgeable than community college drop-outs whose "education" consisted of not much more than reading through the polemical tracts of dozens of creationist advocacy groups. In the public argument over which was true, evolution or creation, the fact that one of the participants was a Caltech-trained biologist with three books and a hundred scholarly articles to his credit was greeted with a colossal so what?

The swelling tide of new-wave anti-intellectualism didn't confine itself to areas, like evolutionary biology, where the facts might be difficult for laypeople to understand. The revolt against expertise surfaced everywhere, sometimes with good cause, sometimes without. Teachers and others with education degrees were no longer automatically considered experts on education. Psychologists were no longer considered experts on psychology. Climatologists were no longer considered experts on climate.

Education reform, the rehabilitation of sex offenders, and global warming all became political footballs in which the advice of experts was often considered less valuable than the advice of people with no claim on expertise at all. Education experts insisted that improving American education meant moving to hands-on learning experiences, portfolio assessments, and a concentration on critical thinking. Education reform ignored that advice and opted for back-to-basics rote learning, competitive grading systems, and high-stakes testing. Psychologists insisted that sex offenders could be rehabilitated so that they would not offend again. Legislators ignored that determination and all but a handful of states passed sex offender registry and community notification laws that branded convicted sex offenders as menaces to the community for life. Climatologists insisted that global warming was real and that at least some of it was the result of human behavior. Politicians insisted that global warming didn't exist and that a silly scare idea shouldn't be allowed to restrict the freedom of ordinary people. It was the politicians, not the climatologists, the country listened to.

If credentialed professionals in practical fields like education, psychology, biology and climatology were having problems maintaining credibility with the public, credentialed professionals in the pure humanities were often up the creek without a paddle. Patients might be increasingly likely to reject their doctors' advice and go chasing after alternative medicine, but doctors could still point to the solid work their profession had done in preventing and curing disease. It wasn't clear that professors of literature could point to anything at all. What was it, exactly, that such people did for a living? What did art historians do for a living? What about music historians? Film theorists? Philosophers? Wasn't all that sort of thing just a matter of taste? Wasn't there something, well, snobbish about claiming that a taste for Shakespeare's plays was better than a taste for Bruce Willis movies?

Still, the pure humanities did better with the public than the social sciences, which were increasingly seen to be areas where people got paid a lot of money to advance narrow political and social agendas that were deeply offensive to the vast majority of ordinary people. Roger Kimball called social science professors "tenured radicals," and the attribution stuck, echoed in thousands of articles in hundreds of conservative magazines and newspapers from one end of the country to the other.

The caricature was helped along by a vocal and flamboyant minority of the professors involved, often from the new "victims' studies" departments, whose behavior only seemed to get more outrageous and nonsensical the worse their reputations became. It was difficult for anybody to defend women's studies in the wake of revelations about courses from which male students were excluded, books that defined all heterosexual intercourse as rape, and "rape awareness" events that trafficked in making false charges against random male students. African-American Studies never quite recovered from its embrace of conspiracy theories claiming that the Greeks stole their civilization from black Africans by way of the library at Alexandria--even though the library wasn't built until after the flowering of Classical Greece and Alexandria was an Egyptian, not a black African, city.

Then there was "Science Studies," and the mess that came to be known as the Sokal Hoax. "Literary scholars," making the assumption that all texts are just texts and that the best way to understand science was to analyze it like any other piece of literature, happily accepted an essay entitled "Transcending the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," by New York University Professor of Physics Alan D. Sokal for publication in the prestigious scholarly journal Social Text. After all, the whole purpose of Science Studies was to show that science was a political enterprise, no more or less valid than any other, and Sokal's essay illustrated that basic "fact" brilliantly and with footnotes.

The editors of Social Text should have checked the footnotes. If they had, they might not have been caught with their pants down a few weeks later, when Sokal revealed that he had not only made the whole thing up, but that any student in a freshman college course in physics would have known that the "science" was all wrong.

The Sokal Hoax was the last gasp in a long drawn-out death agony. The story was everywhere, in the mainstream media and in the right and left wing political publications, too. Conservative magazines had a field day. Rush Limbaugh made fun of Social Text. So did stand up comedians from New York to LA. The public reputation of credentialed professionals in the humanities and social sciences collapsed. Trends that had been inching forward slowly for thirty years suddenly picked up speed.

Faced with Australian philosopher Peter Singer's contention that it might be morally acceptable for parents to kill their newborns for up to a month after birth, the American public decided that religion made a lot more sense than philosophy and opted for that. Faced with one ringing denunciation of "corporate culture" after another, the American public bought SUVs and went to Disney World. Even the few vestiges of high culture still supported by the general population shrank in importance. Classical stations were going off the air in one radio market after another. PBS was concentrating on swing music and middlebrow kitsch instead of opera and highcult. Publishers began to mumble that it might be more "efficacious" to publish literary novels in paperback than in hardcover.

What had been for half a century an anti-intellectual trend had become a rout. No, it wasn't true that liberal arts majors ended up asking "do you want fries with that?"--but that was what most of their fellow citizens thought their "expertise" was worth.

The choice culture had arrived--and people were not choosing to listen to intellectuals.

(Part 3 is right around the corner...)

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