Anti-Intellectualism

It’s surprising that we’ve done as well as we have, as a country.

Here in the United States, we do not celebrate intellectual achievements, outside of the national spelling bee that’s on every year. If you’ve ever been to school, and most people have, it’s a contest to see how ignorant you can be and still graduate. The typical child will spend 15,600 hours in class and will spend the vast majority of that time trying to learn as little as possible.

I live in South Carolina, and as you probably know, football is pretty big in South Carolina. The five minutes devoted to sports on the local news every night is invariably about football—even in the offseason. My wife and I have a running gag about the college football coaches around here, who, had they not found a career in football, would probably be hanging drywall. Not to denigrate football coaches, because they are in possession of skills I do not have, but this is not what I would call an intellectual pursuit. When the news geeks interview the players, what’s certain is that this will be the pinnacle of their professional lives, and they are ultimately destined for jail, homelessness, or simply mediocrity. At present, they are our heroes. If you heard the audio clip of Georgia coach Kirby Smart’s pregame speech before the national championship game, you know what I am talking about. The guy is a blithering idiot.

America has an obsessive focus on sports. I am not anti-sports. I am just not very good at them. But I have played sports my entire life, including soccer, baseball, tennis, wrestling, volleyball, running, and racquetball. I am actually halfway decent at racquetball. Sports teach you about winning and losing, and trying your best, and all that stuff. Banks, and a lot of other companies, like to hire athletes, for their competitive skills. I don’t know if there’s been any research done on this, as to whether athletes make better employees than non-athletes, but Google seems to hire a lot of non-athletes, and last I checked, they do pretty well. I am fiercely competitive for a non-athlete, which kind of goes against the stereotype of a keyboard warrior that drinks Mountain Dew and eats Flamin’ Hot Cheetos all day. Sports are fine, but I can tell you that the captain of my football team in high school, last I heard, had a small landscaping company. Good for him—but it’s not Google.

If you really want to talk about anti-intellectualism, you have to talk about the military. I can only speak for my own branch of the service—the Coast Guard—which you’d think would be a little more thoughtful than the ground-pounders in the Army, but not by much, apparently. At some point in the eighties, the Academy decided it would be a good idea to have a class on ethics for the cadets—it was taught by this Ivy League effete snob with a chinstrap beard. It was, in essence, a philosophy class. There is that quote from A Fish Called Wanda—“Apes read philosophy, Otto, they just don’t understand it.” The professor encouraged lively discussion about ethical issues like abortion and antitrust, and it would typically devolve into screaming matches in the middle of the class. In the military, there is a culture of might makes right, and whoever can beat everyone up gets to be in charge. In the class of 1995 yearbook, a cadet wrote: “What kind of organization is it where a smaller man can tell a bigger man what to do?” By that logic, The Rock should be president. When I would go out to sea for eight weeks, I’d come back noticeably dumber. My wife would even comment on it. I would have to read a bunch of books just to get back up to speed. That’s not to say that the military doesn’t have some very smart people, because it does—but they tend not to spend an entire career there, and if they do, they’re in demand. Coasties are fond of telling the story of the cadet who was dead fucking last in his class at the Academy, John Hayes, who went onto be Commandant, the four-star admiral. I guess that’s a statement on mobility, but it is also a statement on what the service values.

I don’t have children, but if I did, I would instill in them the following values: It doesn’t really matter if you’re good-looking. It doesn’t really matter if you’re athletic. All of these things are good in the right quantities, but all that really matters is that you’re smart. If you’re smart, you can do anything. You can build an electric car company called Tesla. You can start a company that basically owns the entire internet. You can start a quantitative trading firm that sucks billions out of the markets each year. Of course, being smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are lots of broke smart people. But the unemployment rate for people who studied in school and learned shit is essentially zero.

Trump was an anti-intellectual president. So was W. Obama and Clinton were intellectuals. Clinton was a freaking Rhodes Scholar. There is an anti-intellectual streak that runs through the Republican party that I’m not much of a fan of. Which is odd, because you have a handful of real intellectuals on right-wing radio and at the think tanks. What if you had a Republican candidate for president who was…smart? DeSantis is no dummy, and I don’t think any Democrat wants to be sharing a debate stage with him. No offense to Reagan, but the last whip-smart Republican we had in the White House was Nixon. And Nixon was no libertarian, he of the wage and price controls. The guy was flawed, but a legendary genius. I would like a Republican to be able to articulate why income taxes should be less progressive, without resorting to calling the other side a bunch of socialists. There are a lot of people who can make that case articulately. Why don’t they run for president? The only person on the right in the developed world who is an articulate, passionate defender of free markets is Pierre Poilievre in Canada. And he has to wait two more years to run against Trudeau. If he loses, Trudeau could be in office for a decade. Canada is suffering from extraordinarily high taxes, interest rates, inflation, and an enormous housing bubble—you would think he would be the right guy for the zeitgeist. One would hope.

There has also been a huge backlash against so-called “experts.” Anti-expert sentiment is alive and well. This really picked up speed during the pandemic, after masks were shown to be practically useless and the vaccines were not as efficacious as advertised. Lockdowns resulted in a generation of psychologically troubled, uneducated children. It will be a long time before people trust the experts again. Years ago, I drafted a book proposal for a book that would have been called “Costanza,” about how when we intervene in complex systems we do not understand, we often accomplish the exact opposite of what we set out to do, or cause severe unintended consequences. To be an expert means that you know your field too well. Such is the curse of the PhD—you may have done your dissertation on the mating habits of the black-capped chickadee, and nobody in the world knows more about the black-capped chickadee than you, so when someone comes to you for advice on climate change writ large, it’s difficult to extrapolate your chickadee knowledge to a large and complex system, so you end up falling back on that ecology class you took as an undergrad, which means you’re basically as uninformed as everyone else. Let me ask you a question regarding this anti-expert climate. Do you think it is possible for thousands of scientists, who are currently in agreement about man’s contribution to climate change, warming temperatures, and severe weather, to be wrong? How you answer that question says a lot about not just your political beliefs, but whether you are intellectual or anti-intellectual, or whether you have an anti-authority streak. I’m just a knuckle-dragging trader, so I know that when everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking. The most dangerous word that starts with “c” in the world is consensus.

But we have been witnessing not just anti-expert sentiment, but anti-elite sentiment. Populism runs high. We have a deep distrust for smart, rich people, which is interesting, because for decades, we didn’t. Every time Bill Gates opens his mouth, I want to stuff a summer sausage in it. Hard to believe, but the fat, smoking McDonalds-eating redneck in West Virginia really does know what’s best for himself. You may not think so, but he does. But but but he’ll have reduced life expectancy! He knows, and doesn’t care. His decision to not eat vegetables is a rational one, weighed against the fleeting enjoyment he gets from eating fast food. Living to 100 is overrated, he thinks. The elites think that dumb people aren’t smart enough to make these decisions for themselves. The dumb people make choices that you or I would not make. But they are their choices. And part of living in a free country is having the freedom to make bad decisions. Take away their choices, and they no longer have the ability to be virtuous.

As an intellectual, a public intellectual, I decry this movement towards anti-intellectualism. But I get it. Because I’m on the outside looking in. I don’t have the pedigree. I didn’t go to Harvard. I’m not Bill Clinton, or Nassim Taleb, or Matt Yglesias. What qualifies me to think?

We are all qualified to think.