I know this was published 3 months ago, but I have been going through a bunch of papers, data, and so on, and came across a paper that might shed some light on the hostility to reflection, rumination, etc. The paper is called _Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism_ and it is by Rigney, published in 1991. There is an entire section called _Unreflective Instrumentalism_ (it is almost as if a time-traveler chose these titles). Here is a long excerpt:

A third type of anti-intellectualism implied in Hofstadter’s analysis may be termed unreflective instrumentalism, defined here as the devaluation of forms of thought that do not promise relatively immediate practical payoffs. In its narrow conception of practicality, instrumentalism suppresses questions about the ends toward which practical and efficient means are directed. Hofstadter locates this form of anti-intellectualism primarily in the economic institutions of American capitalism (1963, pp. 233-271).

Instrumentalism does not imply a hostility toward reason per se. On the contrary, technical reason and the rational calculation of reward and cost are essential to the profitable operation of a capitalist enterprise (Weber 1922). Nor is instrumentalism necessarily anti-elitist, for surely ideas that promote the interests of elites are eagerly sought in capitalist economies. Unreflective instrumentalism, then, is distinct from either of the forms of anti-intellectualism considered previously.

In the nineteenth century, the conflict between intellectuals and capitalists was largely a conflict between a class of cultivated gentlemen of inherited wealth and an emerging business class still in the process of primary capital accumulation. Many of the new captains of nineteenth-century industry, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed great fortunes without the benefit of much formal learning and were openly contemptuous of the values of liberal education. Even the more learned representatives of the new business class, such as Andrew Carnegie, regarded the classical curriculum as a waste of “precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past” (1963, p. 259). Railroad magnate Leland Stanford complained that college graduates from the East seemed to have “no definite technical knowledge of anything.” He and others who endowed universities (including Vanderbilt and Carnegie) sought to establish institutions offering “ a practical, not a theoretical edu-cation” (1963, p. 260). Hofstadter concludes that if one looks closely at the business pronouncements of the period, one finds “ a rhetoric which reveals a contempt for the reflective mind, for culture, and for the past” (1963, p. 260; see also Veblen 1918).

By the early twentieth century it was evident that universities would play a crucial role in the future of industrial development. The business class began to endow commercial, scientific and technical programs capable of producing the personnel and technological innovations needed to fuel continued industrial growth. Scientific research and development came to be more highly valued, having demonstrated their efficacy in improving agricultural and industrial productivity. Farmers during this period came to acknowledge the value of book “farming, ” and factories began to operate according to theoretical principles of technical efficiency. Even psychology and the social sciences were useful to the degree that they improved economic productivity, as in the appli-cation of the principles of scientific management to industrial production (Perrow 1979).

The rise of industrialism transformed the nature of the antagonism be-tween intellectuals and business elites. In the nineteenth century, this an-tagonism had been expressed in the aristocratic intellectual’s disdain for “crass” commerce and industrialism-essentially a feud between old money and new. By the twentieth century, however, an emerging generation of progressive and socialist intellectuals presented a challenge to the propertied classes in general. The leftist critiques of capitalism that developed in the Progressive era and the Depression, and later in the new left movements of the 1960s, questioned many of the presuppositions upon which a capitalist economy rested, intensifying ideological tensions between business and intellect.

This is not to say that American intellectuals are now uniformly left-of-center or universally critical of capitalism (see Lipset 1982), or that business interests are without their intellectual defenders. Conservative intellectuals have been well-positioned in recent years to defend capitalism against its leftist critics, typically arguing for the demonstrated practical superiority of market systems, relative to socialist systems, as efficient means of stimulating economic growth and technological innovation. The performance of capitalist systems is to be measured, they have argued, not against utopian ideals but against available alternatives (Kristol 1978). In this mode of defense there is a certain hostility toward flights of imagination that cannot be safely contained within existing economic structures.

The hostility of an instrumentalist business culture toward intellect ex-presses not only an impatience with ideas that are deemed impractical or utopian but also a disdain for purely theoretical inquiry as a valuable activity in its own right. Theoretical scientists, for example, are called upon to demon-strate practical applications of their work, and esoteric research is held up to public ridicule with the award of the Golden Fleece (Shaffer 1977). Scientists are sometimes provoked to argue for the value of their research on the grounds that it may eventually yield useful outcomes that are not immediately apparent, producing in their own behalf testimonial examples from the history of science. That such defenses are necessary in the competitive struggle for research dollars is indicative of the power of instrumental criteria to define the direction in which scientific and other kinds of knowledge will be allowed to grow.