Between Alienation and Conformity, Part 1

Last month, my local New Jersey town held a city wide yard sale to formally kick off the summer season. Numerous books from my masters and doctoral programs had gone neglected in places like the garage and attic for far too long. Fortunately, this communal event gave me the opportunity I was looking for to go through some of my most treasured possessions in hopes of culling the proverbial herd.

Five or six book boxes in I stumbled upon a classic in the field of US American intellectual history: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by historian Richard Hofstadter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1964, Anti-Intellectualism was primarily concerned with the cultural, social, and religious sources of an uniquely American anti-intellectual tradition of thought, behavior, and critique. Among the different cultural and intellectual sources explored by Hofstadter, Evangelical Protestantism, and its dependence on affective registers of human experience, was one of the most influential sources of anti-intellectual sentiment in the United States. Much of this is known, both in academic and periodical literatures, especially in regards to how Hofstadter’s writings continue to influence studies of the American right-wing. What is not known, however, is what Hofstadter described as the intellectual, and his or her relationship to American public life and society in dire times.

I began thumbing through the pages of Anti-Intellectualism in order to get to the most pertinent parts of the text. Hofstadter’s final chapter in particular addresses the less than clear relationship between American intellectual life, alienation, and cultural conformity. But before I could get there, a newspaper clipping fell out of the text. Meticulously cut out of the pages of The New York Times by an unknown hand, the clipping was nothing less than the obituary of Hofstadter himself. After explaining the significance of Hofstadter’s various monographs and edited collections, the obituary described the historian as one who borrowed much from the disciplines of sociology and social psychology. It also included Hofstadter in his own words describing the craft of historical study. “I offer trial models of historical interpretation,” Hofstadter explained. “I function as a historical critic.”

I want to think with and through the term historical critic because not unlike Hofstadter’s time, we too, are confronted by a climate of anti-intellectual sentiment. We, too, have witnessed the collapse of the social contract, the unraveling of our public life. We, too, have witnessed a form of governance by glorified rabble rousing. Looking back at Anti-Intellectualism from today’s vantage, Hofstadter helps us answer two different but related questions: what role should the intellectual play as a historical critic, and why? The following reflection will focus primarily on what Hofstadter may have meant by historical critic, and how such theoretical work relates to our complex historical moment. Do our present circumstances call for cultural and political conformity? Or, perhaps, do they speak to the need to distance ourselves even further from the surrounding society and its wares of instrumentalization and all out culture war?

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life explores the history of “the intellectual” itself from two separate but interrelated perspectives: that of society, and that of the intellectual. For Hofstadter, the fact that intellectuals have been the centers of the worst kinds of attention since their collective emergence says less about their irrelevance, and much more about their historic centrality to American public life. “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it,” Hofstadter explains. “Dealing as I do with the milieu, the atmosphere, in which American thinking takes place, I have had to use those impressionistic devices…to reproduce a milieu or capture an atmosphere” (7). The same largely goes for the intellectual. For Hofstadter, the intellectual lives for ideas in the same way that the cleric searches for meaning in scripture. As such, ultimate value can be found in the act of simple comprehension. “What everyone else is willing to admit…(the intellectual) imperatively feels” (28).

The intellectual traditionally defined is engaged, according to Hofstadter, along liberal or progressive lines of thought. “If there is anything that could be called an intellectual establishment in America, this establishment has been, though not profoundly radical (which would be unbecoming in an establishment), on the left side of center. And it has drawn the continuing and implacable resentment of the right.” (39). At its theoretical best, the intellectual impulse is one that is defined by its intellect. Compared to something like “intelligence,” intellect speaks to the creative, critical, and contemplative sides of the human personality. It ponders, theorizes, imagines, and examines its subjects. Intelligence, on the other hand, grasps, adjusts, manipulates, and re-orders. Once established, intellect and intelligence manifest themselves in two different ways: through piety, or through playfulness. For Hofstadter, the fundamental challenge of the intellectual is to maintain a balance between the two without succumbing to one or the other in calamitous times.

“At one end of the spectrum, an excess of playfulness can lead to triviality, to the dissipation of intellectual energies on mere techniques, to dilettantism, to the failure of creative effort,” Hofstadter explained. “On the other, an excess in piety leads to rigidity, to fanaticism, to messianism, to ways of life that may be morally mean or morally magnificent but which in either case are not the ways of intellect” (32). For Hofstadter, what he called the “tensile strength of the thinker” can be gauged based on the degree to which she is able to keep the two impulses in check. The particularity of historical moments calls upon the intellectual to exercise her strength as a thinker by being able to “comprehend and express not only different by opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas.” Such work often takes place in the classroom, but it can also take place beyond the ivory tower in professions such as journalism and political commentary.

For Hofstadter, intellectuals shape “the public mind” in both sacred and profane capacities. Experts or ideologues take advantage of the intelligence of the intellectual despite the fact that neither the expert or ideologue is necessarily desirable to the intellectual traditionally defined. The world of commentary and twenty-four-hour news is not the same as the academy, per say, but the latter is fast becoming as all consuming as the former. There is also a tendency in the world of the expert to be reductive in one’s analysis for the sake of a clickable headline. This is nowhere more evident than in the study of American evangelicalism today. Such analytic tendencies are mostly the product of an over enthused sense of piety. “If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas,” Hofstadter explains, “it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea” (29).  As a result, culture industries churn out the latest hot takes from academics and intellectuals alike hurting for branding and exposure and likes at the expense of scholastic inquiry and intervention. As critical theorist Max Horkheimer once observed, social prevalence is not something to succumb to, but rather to critically examine as one’s sociological subject.^[1]

The degree to which intellect assumes the characteristics of intelligence can be observed in the broader relationship between the intellectual, and social power. If intellectuals were once barred from the most important platforms of American public life, including during Hofstadter’s own time, they have since experienced a level of exposure virtually unheard of in its history as a coherent class. The briefest of glances at the variety and volume of academic social media accounts, for example, speaks to both the influence I’m attempting to describe, but also to the conformity that lurks just beyond the tweet button. As a result, with such social power has come a virtually untenable situation.  “Intellectuals in the twentieth century thus found themselves engaged in incompatible efforts: they have tried to be good and believing citizens of democratic society and at the same time to resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces” (407).

As the intellectual assumes more and more power in a given historical moment, either as expert or ideologue, the more tempting it becomes to subsume one’s intellectual faculties to larger sociological concerns like tenure and branding. Despite the dire state of the academy today, it could not be a more visible presence in American public life in terms of politics and popular culture. A second glance at social media would reveal a virtually endless stream of “public facing” book talks and events as well as academic hires and postdocs awarded across the country. This suggests that with great visibility (prevalence), has come great instrumentality, and even greater deception. Few are after literally changing the system since to change the system would be to change the rules of academic engagement and reward. Seeing the less than vigorous response from the tenured to today’s hiring calamity, expecting those who benefit to change their ways is delusional and unrealistic. The demands of the academic profession, which now include developing the proverbial “platform,” threaten the very purpose of the guild itself: to further inquire into what makes us human.

“For American intellectuals, so long excluded from places of power and recognition, there is always the danger that a sudden association of power will become too glamorous, and hence intellectually blinding” (429). Due largely to the proliferation of social media usage within intellectual circles, celebrity academics have become much more prevalent as a form of public scholarship. In some instances, these individuals may even be considered public intellectuals. The analysis that emerges from such projects, however, reflects less the investments of the academic profession, or of intellect itself as Hofstadter understood it, and more the transitory whims of the journalist or cable news pundit. In an effort to be more “public facing,” academic departments have succumbed to social prevalence in hopes of furthering their respective faculty members’ careers. Instead of contributing something novel, one is simply expected to echo back the latest claims, in the realm of Christian theology or the history of American religion, for instance, of the “hot” article on Christian nationalism, or white conservative evangelical men. This type of intellectual subject would be persona non grata in most academic times and places, but it is deemed acceptable today because the subject serves a larger political purpose than simply filling a gap in the proverbial scholarly literature. …

[Editor’s Note: Please stay tuned for Part 2, which will appear tomorrow (Tu, 7/6/21). – TL]

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^[1] Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York, NY: Continuum, 1972), 264.