I'm givin' you a piece of my mind
there no charge of any kind
try a very simple test
you should just retrace your steps
and think back, back a little bit baby...
~ stones ~


Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction

In a chapter titled "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology," Hofstadter writes:

Protestantism at an early point got rid of the bulk of religious ritual, and in the course of its development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went very far to minimize doctrine. The inspirational cult has completed this process, for it has largely eliminated doctrine -- at least it has eliminated most doctrine that could be called Christian. Nothing, then, is left but the subjective experience of the individual, and even this is reduced in the main to an assertion of his will. What the inspirational writers mean when they say you can accomplish whatever you wish by taking thought is that you can will your goals and mobilize God to help you release fabulous energies. Fabulous indeed they are: "There is enough power in you," says Norman Vincent Peale in an alarming passage, "to blow the city of New York to rubble."

I'm sure the above result wasn't quite what the good Reverend had in mind, though the actual perpetrators were operating on pretty much the same principle.

Sociologist, journalist and culture critic Todd Gitlin comments on Anti-Intellectualism in American Life 37 years later...

A central force boosting anti-intellectualism since Hofstadter published his book has been the bulking up of popular culture and, in particular, the rise of a new form of faux cerebration: punditry. Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect -- the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions -- has the look of retardation....

There is a seeming paradox that Hofstadter did not anticipate, but would have appreciated. In the torrent of popular culture, there emerges more talk about public affairs than ever before -- virtually nonstop talk about political concerns, debate on burning questions available at all hours of the day and night. But the talk that fills the channels amounts mainly to signals, gestures, and stances -- not reasoning.

Todd Gitlin
The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Hofstadter's first book was Social Darwinism in American Thought. Here, the guy who wrote the intro to the latest edition, talks about some of the ramifications.

By the turn of the century, Social Darwinism was in full retreat. But even as Darwinian individualism waned, Darwinian ideas continued to influence social thinking in other ways. Rather than individuals striving for advancement, the struggling units of the analogy with nature became collectives -- especially nations and races. With the United States emerging as a world power after the Spanish-American War, writers like John Fiske and Albert Beveridge marshaled Darwinian ideas in the service of imperialism, to legitimate the worldwide subordination of "inferior" races to Anglo-saxon hegemony. In the eugenics movement that flourished in the early years of this century, Darwinism helped to underwrite the idea that immigration of less "fit" peoples was lowering the standard of American intelligence. Fortunately, the "racist-military" phase of Social Darwinism was as thoroughly discredited by World War I, when it seemed uncomfortably akin to German militarism, as conservative individualism had been by the attacks of progressive social scientists.

from: The education of Richard Hofstadter by Eric Foner
source: The Nation, 4 May 1992
via: HighBeam Research

~ stones ~