Good call, Peter. Though I wasn’t thinking about Hofstadter’s book when I started writing my post, I was by the time I finished it. The book explains so very much about why so many things involving America and Americans are the way they are.

Morris Berman’s impassioned observations on the same phenomenon in The Twilight of American Culture have resonated with me for many years now (though I’m a confirmed fan of Forrest Gump, which he includes in his polemic). Drawing heavily on several sources, Berman identifies four factors involved in civilizational collapse, with the third being “rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness.” After discussing the first two, he turns to intellectual collapse in America, and though his angle is not so much on the intrinsic, longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the American character, but instead on the phenomenon of intellectual collapse in recent decades, it still resonates:

“If the redistribution of wealth . . . reflects a “seismic shift” in American society, a similar kind of shift can be seen in the tenor of American attitudes and intellectual abilities (nor are the two trends unrelated). Thus, for example, in an interview with Peter Coyote on National Public Radio (circa 1995), the actor matter-of-factly alluded to the great “hostility toward intelligence” that was now a part of American culture. Or consider the repeated, and accurate, use of the phrase “dumbing down” in everyday discussions and in the press. The celebration of ignorance that characterizes America today can be seen in the enormous success of a film like Forrest Gump, in which a good-natured idiot is made into a hero; or in the immensely popular TV sitcom Cheers, in which intellectual interest of any sort is portrayed as phony and pretentious, whereas outright stupidity is equated with what is warm-hearted and authentic. If my colleague at Midwest U now has a student who never read a novel, how long before he has a student who asks him, “What’s a novel?” (In fact, millions of Americans already don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction.) If the students don’t recognize Browning now, how long before they have never heard of Shakespeare? How long before the New York Times and the Washington Post fold for lack of subscribers, or until the English language becomes as inaccessible to the majority of Americans as Chaucer’s Middle English is to them now? How long before intellectual excitement is regarded as a historical phenomenon, or a bizarre frame of mind, or just — not regarded?