An uneducated society

About 25% of the U.S. population believes in a geocentric solar system (that the sun orbits the earth),[29] and in 2014 35% of Americans could not name any branch of the U.S. government.[30] The U.S. is ranked 52nd out of 139 nations in quality of educational instruction and 12th in the number of university-educated adults.[31] At universities, student anti-intellectualism has resulted in the social acceptability of cheating on schoolwork, especially in the business schools, a manifestation of ethically expedient cognitive dissonance rather than of academic critical thinking.[32]

The American Council on Science and Health said that denialism of the facts of climate science and of climate change misrepresents verifiable data and information as political opinion.[33] Anti-intellectualism puts scientists in the public view and forces them to align with either a liberal or a conservative political stance. Moreover, 53% of Republican U.S. Representatives and 74% of Republican Senators deny the scientific facts of the causes of climate change.[34]

In the rural U.S., anti-intellectualism is an essential feature of the religious culture of Christian fundamentalism.[35] Some Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church have directly published their collective support for political action to counter climate change, whereas Southern Baptists and Evangelicals have denounced belief in both evolution and climate change as a sin, and have dismissed scientists as intellectuals attempting to create "Neo-nature paganism".[36] People of fundamentalist religious belief tend to report not seeing evidence of global warming.[37]

Corporate mass media

The reportage of corporate mass-communications media appealed to societal anti-intellectualism by misrepresenting university life in the U.S., where the students' pursuit of book learning (intellectualism) was secondary to the after-school social life. That the reactionary ideology communicated in mass-media reportage misrepresented the liberal political activism and social protest of students as frivolous, social activities thematically unrelated to the academic curriculum, which is the purpose of attending university.[38] In Anti-intellectualism in American Media (2004), Dane Clausen identified the contemporary anti-intellectualist bent of manufactured consent that is inherent to commodified information:

The effects of mass media on attitudes toward intellect are certainly multiple and ambiguous. On the one hand, mass communications greatly expand the sheer volume of information available for public consumption. On the other hand, much of this information comes pre-interpreted for easy digestion and laden with hidden assumption, saving consumers the work of having to interpret it for themselves. Commodified information naturally tends to reflect the assumptions and interests of those who produce it, and its producers are not driven entirely by a passion to promote critical reflection.[39][40]

The editorial perspective of the corporate mass-media misrepresented intellectualism as a profession that is separate and apart from the jobs and occupations of regular folk. In presenting academically successful students as social failures, an undesirable social status for the average young man and young woman, corporate media established to the U.S. mainstream their opinion that the intellectualism of book-learning is a form of mental deviancy, thus, most people would shun intellectuals as friends, lest they risk social ridicule and ostracism.[41] Hence, the popular acceptance of anti-intellectualism lead to populist rejection of the intelligentsia for resolving the problems of society.[42] Moreover, in the book Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (2013), Aaron Lecklider indicated that the contemporary ideological dismissal of the intelligentsia derived from the corporate media's reactionary misrepresentations of intellectual men and women as lacking the common-sense of regular folk.[43]

Confirmation bias

In the field of psychology, confirmation bias is the mental phenomenon that confirms the validity of a person's self-accepted beliefs, ideals, and values, to create emotional hostility (anti-intellectualism) towards and mistrust of other beliefs, ideals, and value systems to which the anti-intellectual person has not been exposed; thus, confirmation bias is a symptom of anti-intellectualism.[44] The writer Isaac Asimov, speaking of this, said that "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. 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'".[45]

In Europe

Communism

In the first decade after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks suspected the Tsarist intelligentsia as potentially traitorous of the proletariat. Thus, the initial Soviet government consisted of men and women without much formal education. Moreover, the deposed propertied classes were termed Lishentsy ("the disenfranchised"), whose children were excluded from education. Eventually, some 200 Tsarist intellectuals such as writers, philosophers, scientists and engineers were deported to Germany on philosophers' ships in 1922 while others were deported to Latvia and Turkey in 1923.

During the revolutionary period, the pragmatic Bolsheviks employed "bourgeois experts" to manage the economy, industry, and agriculture and so learn from them. After the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), to achieve socialism the Soviet Union (1922–91) emphasized literacy and education in service to modernizing the country via an educated working class intelligentsia rather than an Ivory Tower intelligentsia. During the 1930s and 1950s, Joseph Stalin replaced Vladimir Lenin's intelligentsia with an intelligentsia that was loyal to him and believed in a specifically Soviet world view, thereby producing the pseudoscientific theories of Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory.

Fascism

Active philosopher Giovanni Gentile, intellectual father of Italian Fascism

The idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile established the intellectual basis of Fascist ideology with the autoctisi (self-realisation) via concrete thinking that distinguished between the good (active) intellectual and the bad (passive) intellectual:

Fascism combats […] not intelligence, but intellectualism, […] which is […] a sickness of the intellect, […] not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much. […] [I]t derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life.

— Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925

To counter the "passive intellectual" who used his or her intellect abstractly, and was therefore "decadent", he proposed the "concrete thinking" of the active intellectual who applied intellect as praxis—a "man of action", like the Fascist Benito Mussolini, versus the decadent Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The passive intellectual stagnates intellect by objectifying ideas, thus establishing them as objects. Hence the Fascist rejection of materialist logic, because it relies upon a priori principles improperly counter-changed with a posteriori ones that are irrelevant to the matter-in-hand in deciding whether or not to act.

In the praxis of Gentile's concrete thinking criteria, such consideration of the a priori toward the properly a posteriori constitutes impractical, decadent intellectualism. Moreover, this fascist philosophy occurred parallel to Actual Idealism, his philosophic system; he opposed intellectualism for its being disconnected from the active intelligence that gets things done, i.e. thought is killed when its constituent parts are labelled, and thus rendered as discrete entities.[46][47]

Related to this, is the confrontation between the Spanish franquist General, Millán Astray, and the writer Miguel de Unamuno during the Dia de la Raza celebration at the University of Salamanca, in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The General exclaimed: ¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte! ("Death to the intelligentsia! Long live death!"); the Falangists applauded.[48]

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CHOP WATER

China

Imperial China

Qin Shi Huang (246–210 BC), the first Emperor of unified China, consolidated political thought, and power, by suppressing freedom of speech at the suggestion of Chancellor Li Si, who justified such anti-intellectualism by accusing the intelligentsia of falsely praising the emperor, and dissenting through libel. From 213 to 206 BC, it was generally thought that the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought were incinerated, especially the Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry, c. 1000 BC) and the Shujing (Classic of History, c. 6th century BC). The exceptions were books by Qin historians, and books of Legalism, an early type of totalitarianism—and the Chancellor's philosophic school (see the Burning of books and burying of scholars). However, upon further inspection of Chinese historical annals such as the Shi Ji and the Han Shu, this was found not to be the case. The Qin Empire privately kept one copy of each of these books in the Imperial Library but it publicly ordered that the books should be banned. Those who owned copies were ordered to surrender the books to be burned; those who refused were executed. This eventually led to the loss of most ancient works of literature and philosophy when Xiang Yu burned down the Qin palace in 208 BC.

People's Republic of China

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a politically violent decade which saw wide-ranging social engineering throughout the People's Republic of China by its leader Chairman Mao Zedong. After several national policy crises during which he was motivated by his desire to regain public prestige and control of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Mao announced on 16 May 1966 that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese society were permeated with liberal bourgeois elements who meant to restore capitalism to China and he also announced that people could only be removed after a post–revolutionary class struggle was waged against them. To that effect, China's youth nationally organized themselves into Red Guards and hunted the "liberal bourgeois" elements who were supposedly subverting the CCP and Chinese society. The Red Guards acted nationally, purging the country, the military, urban workers and the leaders of the CCP. The Red Guards were particularly aggressive when they attacked their teachers and professors, causing most schools and universities to be shut down once the Cultural Revolution began. Three years later in 1969, Mao declared that the Cultural Revolution was ended, yet the political intrigues continued until 1976, concluding with the arrest of the Gang of Four, the de facto end of the Cultural Revolution.

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When the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the Khmer Rouge (1951–1981) established their regime as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) in Cambodia, their anti-intellectualism which idealised the country and demonised the cities was immediately imposed on the country in order to establish agrarian socialism, thus, they emptied cities in order to purge the Khmer nation of every traitor, enemy of the state and intellectual, often symbolised by eyeglasses (see the Killing Fields).

Ottoman Empire

Some of the Armenian intellectuals who were detained, deported, and killed in the Armenian Genocide of 1915

In the early stages of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, around 2,300 Armenian intellectuals were deported from Constantinople (Istanbul) and most of them were subsequently murdered by the Ottoman government.[49] The event has been described by historians as a decapitation strike,[50][51] the purpose of which was intended to deprive the Armenian population of an intellectual leadership and a chance to resist.[52]

The first documented appearance of the word nerd is as the name of a creature in Dr. Seuss's book If I Ran the Zoo (1950), in which the narrator Gerald McGrew claims that he would collect "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too" for his imaginary zoo.[3][6][7] The slang meaning of the term dates to 1951.[8] That year, Newsweek magazine reported on its popular use as a synonym for drip or square in Detroit, Michigan.[9] By the early 1960s, usage of the term had spread throughout the United States, and even as far as Scotland.[10][11][non-primary source needed] At some point, the word took on connotations of bookishness and social ineptitude.[6]

An alternate spelling,[12] as nurd or gnurd, also began to appear in the mid-1960s or early 1970s.[13] Author Philip K. Dick claimed to have coined the "nurd" spelling in 1973, but its first recorded use appeared in a 1965 student publication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).[14][15] Oral tradition there holds that the word is derived from knurd (drunk spelled backward), which was used to describe people who studied rather than partied. The term gnurd (spelled with the "g") was in use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by 1965.[16] The term "nurd" was also in use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as early as 1971.[17][non-primary source needed]

According to Online Etymology Dictionary, the word is an alteration of the 1940s term "nert" (meaning "stupid or crazy person"), which is itself an alteration of "nut" (nutcase).[8]

The term was popularized in the 1970s by its heavy use in the sitcom Happy Days.[18]

Dumbing down is the deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content in education, literature, and cinema, news, video games and culture. The term "dumbing down" originated in 1933, as movie-business slang used by screenplay writers, meaning: "[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence".[1] Dumbing-down varies according to subject matter, and usually involves the diminishment of critical thought, by undermining intellectual standards within language and learning; thus trivializing meaningful information, culture, and academic standards, as in the case of popular culture.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) proposed that, in a society in which the cultural practices of the ruling class are rendered and established as the legitimate culture of that society, that action then devalues the cultural capital of the subordinate social classes, and thus limits their social mobility within their own society.

A compilation of essays by philosophers, politicians, artists and thinkers titled Dumbing Down was published by Imprint Academic in 2000, edited by Ivo Mosley and included essays by Jaron Lanier, Claire Fox, Ravi Shankar, Robert Brustein, Michael Oakshott, Roger Deakin and Peter Randall-Page among others. [2]

Individuals who are labeled as "nerds" are often the target of bullying due to a range of reasons that may include physical appearance or social background.[21] Paul Graham has suggested that the reason nerds are frequently singled out for bullying is their indifference to popularity or social context, in the face of a youth culture that views popularity as paramount.[20] However, research findings suggest that bullies are often as socially inept as their academically better-performing victims,[41] and that popularity fails to confer protection from bullying.[42] Other commentators have pointed out that pervasive harassment of intellectually-oriented youth began only in the mid-twentieth century[43][44] and some have suggested that its cause involves jealousy over future employment opportunities and earning potential.[45]

Socrates sought to convince his debaters to turn from the superficiality of a worldview based on the acceptance of convention to the examined life of philosophy,[3] founded (as Plato at least considered) upon the underlying Ideas. For more than two millennia, there was in the Platonic wake a general valorisation of critical thought over the superficial subjectivity that refused deep analysis.[4] The salon style of the Précieuses might for a time affect superficiality, and play with the possibility of treating serious topics in a light-hearted fashion;[5] but the prevailing western consensus firmly rejected elements such as everyday chatter[6] or the changing vagaries of fashion[7] as superficial distractions from a deeper reality.

By contrast, Nietzsche opened the modernist era with a self-conscious praise of superficiality: "What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity!".[8]

His (still) preference for superficiality was however over-shadowed for most of the 20th century by modernism's full subscription to the depth/surface model, and to the privileging of the former over the latter. Frederic Jameson has highlighted four main modernist versions of the belief in a deeper reality - Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and semiotic - in each of which reality is understood to be concealed behind an inauthentic surface or façade.[9] Jameson contrast these models sharply with the lack of depth, the ahistoricity, the surface-focus and flatness of the postmodern consciousness, with its new cult of the image and the simulacrum.[10]

Postmodernism

In the last third of the 20th century, Lyotard began challenging the Platonic view of a true meaning hidden behind surface as a theatrical world-view, insisting instead that sense manifestations had their own reality which necessarily impacted upon the purely verbal order of intelligibility.[11] Similarly, deconstruction has increasingly sought to undo the depth/surface hierarchy, proposing in ironic style that superficiality is as deep as depth.[12] The result has been the call to abandon the idea that behind appearances there is any ultimate truth to be found;[13] and in consequence the growing postmodern replacement of depth by surface, or by multiple surfaces.[14]

That process of substitution was well under way by the 1990s, when notoriously "surface was depth",[15] and in the new millennium has led to a state of what has been called hypervisibility: everything is on view.[16] In this new era of exposure[17] we are all submerged in what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons has called "the totalist world where there is a horror of inwardness; everything must be revealed".[18]

If postmodernism's proponents welcomed the way a new transcendence of the surface /depth dichotomy allowed a fuller appreciation of the possibilities of the superficial[19] - the surface consciousness of the now, as opposed to the depths of historical time[20] - critics like J. G. Ballard object that the end-product is a world of "laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows":[21] of surface without depth. They see postmodern superficiality as a by-product of the false consciousness of global capitalism, where surface distractions, news, and entertainment supersaturate the zapping mind in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of envisioning any critical alternative.[22]

Crocodile tears (or superficial sympathy) is a false, insincere display of emotion such as a hypocrite crying fake tears of grief.

The phrase derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey, and as such is present in many modern languages, especially in Europe where it was introduced through Latin. While crocodiles do have tear ducts, they weep to lubricate their eyes, typically when they have been out of water for a long time and their eyes begin to dry out. However, evidence suggests this could also be triggered by feeding.

Bogorad's syndrome is a condition which causes sufferers to shed tears while consuming food, so has been labelled "crocodile tears syndrome" with reference to the legend.

The expression comes from an ancient anecdote that crocodiles weep for the victims they are eating. A collection of proverbs attributed to Plutarch suggests that the phrase "crocodile tears" was well known in antiquity: comparing the crocodile's behaviour to people who desire or cause the death of someone, but then publicly lament for them.[1] The story is given a Christian gloss in the Bibliotheca by early medieval theologian Photios.[2] Photios uses the story to illustrate the Christian concept of repentance.[1] The story is repeated in bestiaries such as De bestiis et aliis rebus.

This tale was first spread widely in English in the stories of the travels of Sir John Mandeville in the 14th century.[3]

In that country and by all Inde be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.

— Curious creatures in zoology

A later writer, Edward Topsell, provided a different explanation for the tears, saying "There are not many brute beasts that can weep, but such is the nature of the crocodile that, to get a man within his danger, he will sob, sigh, and weep as though he were in extremity, but suddenly he destroyeth him."[4] In this version, the crocodile pretends to be in distress to lure prey into a false sense of security. However, Topsell also refers to the older story that crocodiles wept during and after eating a man, repeating the standard Christian moral that this signified a kind of fake repentance like Judas weeping after betraying Jesus.[4]

In literature

"Crocodile tears for Syria", cartoon by Carlos Latuff illustrating the concept

Shakespeare regularly refers to the concept. He uses both of Topsell's versions of the motive, as a trick and as fake repentance. A prominent example is in Othello, Act IV, Scene i, in which Othello convinces himself that his wife is cheating on him.

If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,

Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.

He also refers to the version about tricking prey in Henry VI, Part 2, Act III, Scene i, in which a character refers to the faked emotions of the Duke of Gloucester: "Gloucester's show / Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile / With sorrow, snares relenting passengers." In Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene vii, Mark Antony chides Lepidus, who has asked him what crocodiles are like, with a meaningless description ending with the words "And the tears of it are wet".

Shakespeare's contemporary Edmund Spenser also refers to the story in The Faerie Queene, writing of the "cruel crafty" creature "which, in false grief, hiding his harmful guile / Doth weep full sore, and sheddeth tender tears.[5]

In Henry Purcell's 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas, (librettist Nahum Tate), when Aeneas tells Dido he must abandon her to found Rome on the Italian Peninsula, she proclaims, "Thus on the fatal banks of Nile, / Weeps the deceitful crocodile."[6]