Hofstadter omläst

Nicholas Lemann är professor i journalistik på Columbiauniversitetet i New York och medarbetare i The New Yorker. Jag läste idag en artikel han skrivit i Columbia Journalism Review som handlar om en bok som utkom för femtio år sedan: Richard Hofstadters Anti-Intellectualism In American Life.

Den intresserade rekommenderas läsning av hela essän (ganska lång) men hans slutsats är så tänkvärd att den förtjänar att återges:

Just as it’s tempting, if you don’t know the history, to fall into the view that anti-intellectualism is a threatening new development, it can also be tempting to believe the opposite: that intellectuals have now assumed their rightful place of power and respect in American society. (A related idea is that the United States has become a “meritocracy.”) Hofstadter’s book is valuable as a guard against the second temptation as well as the first. Anti-intellectualism has always been with us, and always will be; that isn’t shameful, because it’s an aspect of our being a democracy. Conversely, intellectualism should be inherently uncomfortable, not triumphant. Experts, Hofstadter reminds us, have been important since early in the 20th century, but to point out that our complex society increasingly needs people who are intelligent and have formal technical education to staff government and business is not the same thing as saying that the United States has a rich intellectual life. Experts try to dwell in the realm of rigorously derived knowledge and facts. Intellectuals dwell in the much more difficult realm of ideas and values, where almost nothing is ever right without qualification, and where contention, contradiction, and uncertainty are inescapable.

So if anti-intellectualism is a natural aspect of a democratic society, humility ought to be a natural aspect of intellectual life. If you ever begin to think of American life as a struggle between the superior, enlightened few and the mass of yobs, pick up Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It ought to cure you.

http://www.cjr.org/second_read/richard_hofstadter_tea_party.php?page=all