The anti-intellectual culture of our time

One of my favourite online columnists, Heather Mallick, wrote this note inspired by Susan Jacoby’s book, “The Age of American Unreason”.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20080225.html

This isn’t the first time an American intellectual has noted the decline in the quality of American cultural life. There’s also Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, a copy of which sits on my shelf. But Bloom’s book was written years ago – and it appears that nothing has changed.

Spiritual people are often just as much responsible, or just as much a participant, in the anti-intellectual culture described by Bloom and Jacoby, when they disparage “book-knowledge” with sayings like “The most important things in life cannot be learned in books”, or (worse) “Nothing of value at all can be learned from books, it’s all from personal vision and experience”, or (even worse still!) “Nothing of value can be spoken or put into words at all.”

Those who express such views think they are being wise, and radical, and open-minded. In fact they are being politically correct. They are actually confirming a widespread and generally accepted value-program. They are contributing to a culture that disparages knowledge, especially the sharing and improvement of knowledge by means of the written word.

But the disparagement of knowledge, and of intellectuals, is a sign of a society sliding into a very dangerous place. Although perhaps I’m getting more worked up and worried than I need to be, I cannot help but think of the “Bonfire of the Vanities”. No, I do not mean the novel by Tom Wolf. I mean the occasion when the fanatical Catholic priest Giovanni Savonarola successfully organised the destruction of books, paintings, sculptures, musical scores, instruments, fine clothes, cosmetics, and just about everything of beauty around him, lest it tempt people into sin.

If there was a photographer present that day, he might have taken a picture like this one:

Anyone recognize this? I’ll give you a hint: it was taken in the 1930’s.

Well, what’s do be done? Any suggestions?