Anti-Intellectualism Pays Well
Where the threat to knowledge lies within privilege rather than poverty.
The war on information seems to arrive at a new Gettysburg every month. Public schools in Florida went viral last month after emptying their libraries to comply with Governor Ron Desantis’ winning right-wing strategy — book bans. Around the same time, Canadian conspiracy theorists organized dozens of protests in Edmonton. Their source of anger? “Fifteen-minute cities,” or the idea that one should have all their needs met with no more than a fifteen-minute walk to any location.
Anti-intellectualism describes a distrust or contempt towards experts, intellect, and academic institutions. I remember my high school history class discussing the Catholic Church banning books and offering indulgences in a desperate opposition to the bloom of scientific thought. The Enlightenment era, most known for vaccines and batteries and secularism, is perhaps the most taught battle over intellectualism. At the time, it felt like a thing of the past. After all, most high schoolers I knew updated their vaccination records, believed in climate change, and were planning to attend college.
Unfortunately, the phenomenon has returned ten-fold with the rise of algorithms and echo chambers. Rural areas are not getting vaccinated, with vaccination rates rising at half the rate of urban areas. Climate change denialism has shifted from not existing to being a natural cosmic occurrence not at all related to human activity. And Donald Trump won the 2016 election with populist talking points like for a primarily uneducated voter base. There is no denying that anti-intellectualism is everywhere. However, blame and victimhood seem to be focused on two parties, the first being rural and low-income areas, typically considered breeding grounds for anti-intellectual thought.
The second party is the ruling class, who have long weaponized anti-intellectualism since before the Enlightenment era. From the divine right of kings to Adolf Hitler, history has shown that stripping education bare is in the best interest of the powerful. In recent years, an investigation into Exxon Mobil found that the company suppressed climate change science for decades. Fox News is currently facing the strongest defamation lawsuit yet, after fanning the flames of election denialism. And southern states like Texas are using dangerously deceptive mechanics like school vouchers to gut public school funding. Not to mention how lucrative religion still is. In my backyard, I see Joel Osteen, the Texan pastor of Lakewood Church who has $40 million in the bank. Or perhaps I could point to Edir Macedo, a Brazilian bishop worth $1.1 billion with a capital B. The ruling class — whether they be corporations, politicians, or religious leaders — have long weaponized anti-intellectualism.
However, there is another party whose blame and victimhood are overlooked. And that is the regular, everyday educated person like me or (probably) you. Perhaps it is because we have diplomas to separate ourselves from the uneducated but are not rich enough to exploit the system that we feel immune to anti-intellectualism. And yet it is the well-educated peers of mine who studied rigorous topics like mathematics or computer science that are perhaps most prone to anti-intellectual thought. For people like me, the breeding ground is not the countryside but the school campus.
I recall — and I imagine this is a ubiquitous experience — the white frat guy showing up to my liberal arts class in a collared shirt and some flip flops. His backpack, if he had one that day, had a notebook with no pens. And he spoke with such hoarse vocal fry, it was as if he wanted to make sure everyone knew how little he cared. When the topic of white supremacy or patriarchal systems of oppression came up, he rolled his eyes despite being the exact target audience who needed to hear it the most. Learning ideas that crucified his identity is not worth learning. And unfortunately, there is no requirement to care when trying to graduate.
Apathy is not limited to the Chad’s of the world. Computer science students have taken to TikTok to advertise their new software like Conch or Cactus which help write so-called useless essays. The first line in a promotional TikTok from Conch says, “stop wasting your time on busywork.” And commenters are praising its ability to bypass detection software because of those gosh darn general education classes. After all, there’s nothing worse than having to apply what you learned from history class into well-constructed arguments. The sentiment is strong, anecdotally. To the anti-intellectual computer science student, learning is only valuable if it grows the economy.
On the other side of campus, you will find the business students who have veered as far away from long-form thought as possible. Their essays are business memos. Their final exams are PowerPoint slides. Every output is expected to be a truncated version of a full thought because in real life, CEOs are reading executive summaries rather than research papers. The inconvenient truth — for both business students and business leaders — is that you cannot simultaneously have utmost convenience and complete context. Not once did I learn about the complex implications of maximizing profit in my mandatory finance classes. When we talked about electric vehicles, we talked more about how to increase our supply of natural resources than we talked about the effects pillaging has on Indigenous communities. And never, ever did we discuss what business could or does look like in alternative economic systems. I mean, why would we need to know about mixed economies in countries like China or the Netherlands — entirely insignificant areas in the global economy?
It must be said that education is not equal. Students will clearly have different experiences based upon their major. To think critically in finance classes is to recall exact formulas and categorize variables. I wouldn’t discount the majors I listed above as ones that do not think critically. Rather, it was in liberal arts classes where you were challenged to structure your logic, learn disparate theories, and make sense of the gray. Logic is certainly emphasized in all areas of study. Unfortunately, logical reasoning only pays well when dealing with 1’s and 0’s.
That is not to say the liberal arts major is absolved from blame. To study the social sciences or humanities is to engage with the institution — academic journals, well-known theories, peer-reviewed articles. Yet it is the very institution that is flawed, justifying a healthy dose of skepticism from expert opinion. For example, anthropologists have been reckoning with their participation in colonizing Indigenous spaces for many years, especially recently. Academia extracted field recordings and cultural records rather than natural resources; it then granted white scholars the title of “expert” without crediting Indigenous knowledge systems. These academics wrote about “dying” cultures, displayed artifacts in history museums, and all but told their students that Indigenous people are ancient history. Clearly, the institution should not be blindly trusted when there is much work to be done to address its role in systematizing racism and classism.
I would next point to the nursing school, an indispensable part of the healthcare and scientific community. Yet, despite their front line interaction with modern medicine, a significant amount of nurses — 27% according to the COVID States Project — refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 due to the circulation of poorly conducted studies depicting the vaccine as unsafe. The education gap between a nurse and physician is commonly cited as a driving factor, since nurses are not typically expected to master research paper literacy. I think that reason is reductive and condescending. Another thread is between the background of nurses and their various susceptibilities to misinformation on social media. Physicians, who were much more likely to be vaccinated, are also far more likely to come from affluent backgrounds. Compare that to the poorer pre-health student, who is more likely to apply to nursing school (and drop out when nursing schools inevitably ignore the effects of poverty). Clearly, identity (or lack thereof) and intellectualism are inextricably related.
But first, I would extend anti-intellectualism to our doctors. Revered for their hard-work and intelligence almost as much as their elite status, physicians are seen as a node in our communities for scientific and evidential thinking. After all, modern medicine would be nothing without the scientific method. And yet, certain specialists like surgeons or psychiatrists are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, according to a Yale study. This is despite Republican policies repeatedly demonstrating worse health outcomes and access to healthcare. Not to mention the gaslighting of women and patients of color, due to outdated practices and textbooks that state they feel less pain.
I alluded to a point earlier: there is a clear need to champion social sciences in the scientific community, especially those that serve their communities. Physicians may be more likely to be vaccinated but are they also disproportionately screening mothers of color for illicit substances and breaking up Black and brown families? After all, intellectualism cannot coexist with bigotry. Furthermore, education must be curated to a person’s historical-cultural relationship with knowledge. Perhaps that means equalizing admissions and diversifying curriculum to account for the fact that more than half of medical students come from the top 20% of household incomes. Conversely, nursing schools could address their attrition problem and take a more active role in remedial math classes at the high school and community college level.
This essay could be much longer if I were to examine corporate lawyers, teachers, or any number of other educated professions. Instead, I’ll round off my survey with the engineer — specifically transportation engineers. In recent decades, engineers have shifted away from pedestrian safety and instead focus on traffic flow. Jeff Speck, in his book Walkable City, describes the objective truth that engineers believe in more than anything else: the code. Changes in regulations have been made to prioritize drivers. Evidence from traffic studies suggest drivers should have clear, unobstructed views. They should not feel anxious. They should be able to move more often with less resistance. Sounds great for drivers, at first.
In practice, this means less street trees — classified as FHOs or Fixed and Hazardous Objects — even though they are actually known to calm traffic. It means widening a traditional 10-foot lane to a twelve, thirteen, or fourteen-foot lane so drivers feel less anxious, which encourages drivers to speed and accounts for hundreds of fatalities each year. And it means adding slip lanes for cars to avoid T-bone style crashes, even if it means drivers get to maintain their speed while turning and threaten the lives of people crossing the road. The research is clear that these changes are detrimental to both drivers and pedestrians. Yet, engineers give city planners a hard time because they believe their truth to be more truthful than the truths of urban researchers. It is, of course, the code. The law. The system.
My final suggestion is that, for some, anti-intellectualism is so deeply engrained in our legal system that it becomes an inevitability to any law-abiding citizen. Teachers have to follow state-mandated curricula and testing protocols, even if they’re in Florida. Wealth managers have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for investors. And transportation engineers have to follow the code to save the lives of drivers. For every one of these professions is plenty of evidence that says it would be wrong to continue business is usual, even if the law says it’s right.
Clearly, anti-intellectualism is a part of all of our lives, whether we want to admit it or not. No longer is the blame solely on the uneducated, nor is the responsibility reserved for the ultra-rich and powerful. It lives with the educated middle-class. It’s with the computer science student uninterested in general education classes because they forget they’re at a cultural institution, not a job fair. It’s with the old-money physician who mistakenly equates education status with equitable learnedness. And it’s with the traffic engineer who has been taught by a system of self-interested regulations and outdated standards. Perhaps anti-intellectualism is so engrained in our economy, culture, and governance that it hardly is the choice that we assume it is. We know choice doesn’t encapsulate how the uneducated and rich interact with anti-intellectualism. And I find that notion a bit comforting — that despite the seemingly irreconcilable differences we see from our echo chambers are not quite as irreconcilably different as we think. We are all — at least a little — stupid.
