By David C. DeWitt
Columnist
Ohio Capital Journal
Thoughtful, studied consideration does not reign supreme in American politics, and frankly, I can’t think of an era it did. Conversely, I also can’t think of an era like ours where crankery and ignorance are entertained so prominently and with such deference.
Author Isaac Asimov may have best characterized the mindless beast of legitimized stupidity in a 1980 column for Newsweek magazine.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been,” he wrote. “The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” blew up like a keg of gunpowder when he dropped it on what he perceived to be the increasingly thick skulls of his fellow Americans in 1963.
Hofstadter argued that anti-intellectualism was a function of America’s cultural heritage from European colonialism and evangelical Protestantism, and not necessarily a byproduct of small-d democracy.
In 1985, Neil Postman’s crowning achievement, “Amusing Ourselves To Death,” provided a most prescient analysis of the current lobotimization of American public discourse.
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