Years of Poems and Spirits

NYT introduced a couple of recent books (“Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge”)on America’s anti-intellectual tradition.

Quotes:
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

The article also cited Ms. Jacoby (started as a Washington Post reporter) as saying the problem was with the flawed educational system and religious foundamentalism.

I disagree. This is just another manifestation of the knowledge-power relationship. Or the ontology of knowledge: if people already feeling empowered, why do they still need knowledge?

This may seem obvious, but my contention is: this is NOT an abnormly, nor a unique phenomenon.