More Money Than Brains (2 page)

Obama has made admirable statements about education and his own good old-fashioned liberal arts degree. This is, admittedly, pretty sweet after nearly a decade of presidential pissing in the general direction of fancy book-learnin’. But I think it is way too hasty and optimistic to assume that Obama’s election means smarts are cool again, and that America resolves henceforth to be kinder and gentler to its oft-mocked eggheads.

Saying that Obama’s win marks the end of anti-intellectualism is a lot like saying it means the end of racism. Sure, it’s a good sign, but it’s not like the guy is six feet of antidote. Moreover, Obama’s presidency has inspired a seething
right-wing backlash and stupefying coverage of his every snooty foible and flash of hauteur. Jeez, President College can’t even eat right like regular people! When he visited a greasy burger joint for the express purpose of supping with slovenly commoners, he had the audacity to request Dijon, a notoriously French mustard. A sign of Eurosocialist allegiances?
Bien sûr
.

The post-electoral Republican leadership vacuum was promptly filled by some of the right’s most gleefully proficient nerd-bashers, figures such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. All present themselves as mavericks, the only ones brave enough to speak emotive truth to factual power, outsiders marginalized by the uppity chattering classes in Hollywood, New York, and Washington.

These pseudo-populists insist that intellectuals are the real idiots. Ivy League city types think they are so smart, but that only goes to show how deluded and distant from common sense they are. As St. Ronald Reagan said in one of his most famous speeches – 1964‘s “A Time for Choosing” – “it’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” The right-wing message is loud and clear: complex matters like climate change and foreign relations and the economy are complex because the elitists and the bureaucrats make them that way, to serve their own agendas and exclude just plain folks from the political process. Have any of these brainiacs ever done something
really
complicated, like run a Podunk town or make payroll? Didn’t think so!

The most rudimentary business skills or beavering one’s
way to bosshood beat teaching or studying at some of the world’s finest universities. Once we’ve established that universities are a joke, a fiendishly elaborate scheme to overcharge people for beer, it is easy to discount any body of facts or ostensible expertise that emanates from them. If expertise in general is fake, a self-serving liberal chimera, then it stands to reason that experts are the biggest frauds of all: empty suits who have nothing to offer but words and dipsy-doodle ideas they expect working people to pay for. The people and the pols become fact-proof, and those who huck information at them align themselves with the patronizing pedants of Team Pantywaist.

This sort of anti-intellectualism is not new. It has been part of American political life ever since Andrew Jackson played the role of Old Hickory. Canadians like to fancy themselves above this sort of pseudo-populist politicking and think that it is the neighbours’ problem. But the Conservative Party’s campaigns against Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were just as anti-intellectual, in their own stolid Canadian way, as the invective of the red-meat, redstate crowds at McCain-Palin rallies or anti-tax tea parties.

Professors like Romano, and the mainstream press, have covered Obama’s cosmopolitanism approvingly. They hope it will help ameliorate American relations with the rest of the world. Of course, this is also one of the things that drives Obama’s detractors wild. Drawing huge crowds in Europe, pronouncing Middle Eastern place names correctly, and nabbing a Nobel for nothing are all suspect. Being far’n-friendly is an un-American affectation.

Stephen Harper and company appealed to the Canadian version of this provincial small-mindedness when they ran negative ads that sneered at Ignatieff for describing himself as “horribly cosmopolitan.” His success in and familiarity with foreign lands was not an asset. No, instead he was cheating on Canada, whoring around with the likes of the
BBC
and Harvard.

I am not a fan of the man, but the Con campaign against him is so frigging brutal it makes me want to like Count Iggy. Consider this gem from their website, Ignatieff.me:

I love that they lead their shit list with abstract poetry, like Ignatieff is Björk or the ghost of Ezra Pound. The only thing worse than poetry?
Abstract
poetry, which exists solely to make students feel stupid and professors feel smug. Then there’s nationalism. Nope, can’t see how that relates to governing a nation. (Silly Libs, always thinking this is a country instead of an economy!) The gratuitous monarch-bashing is odd, given that
HRH
is still smiling gravely from our legal tender; perhaps a right-wing plan is in the works to replace
her visage with the image of an oil derrick – our one true queen and head of state.

The Cons and their ad hacks sloppily conflate two kinds of elitism. They mock Ignatieff for living in chi-chi digs in downtown Toronto instead of in the sticks or the burbs, the real Canada. He sips espresso and dips biscotti rather than sucking back double-doubles and Boston creams at the coffee dispensary of the people. Then they attack him for being a brain and a bore, for his sojourns in Yerp and at Harvard. To slam Ignatieff as “cosmopolitan” is typical right-wing nativism, divvying up the citizenry with criteria such as their proximity to livestock and dirt roads and their distance from gay bars and a decent latte. What is hilarious is seeing them mock Ignatieff’s wealth and privilege. This from
Conservatives?
They love money, and the people who make lots of it.

Efforts to paint Ignatieff as a tourist, a mere visitor in his own land, play on the idea that intellectuals are always foreigners, outsiders from some theoretical fairyland. We see an even more extreme version of this notion in the Birther conspiracies that allege Obama was not born in America.

The small-town values message – on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel – is clear. Real patriots stay wherever Jesus and their mama’s cooter drop ‘em.

This hostility to all things foreign or urban rides shotgun with anti-intellectualism; it’s all part of the same virulent reverse snobbery. Canadians and Americans express their reverse snobbery in slightly different ways, which I will return to later on when we look more closely at politics, in
Chapter Five
. I’ll also look at some of the differences between righty and lefty anti-intellectualism in that chapter. Republicans and the Alberta wing of Canadian politics have made exceptional contributions in the field of reverse snobbery, but they certainly do not have a monopoly on pseudo-populist poses and ideas. Democrats, Liberals, and the
NDP
also drop their G’s, chug brewskis, and sing the praises of Joe Six-Pack. They can’t attain high office without pandering to the lowest common denominator, especially when their opponents are spending so much money trying to convince the public that educated candidates are supercilious snobs.

Before we get into different flavours of anti-intellectual invective, let us look at some of the assumptions that disparate nerd-bashers share. Here is a short list of some of the most frequent allegations against the brainy.

Nerds do not think they are better than you. Nerds
are
better than you, in their particular fields, unless you happen to be an even more devoted nerd. This is a fact. However, I must admit, as a good Canadian, that I felt quite dickish typing the phrase “better than you.” North America’s shared egalitarian ideals are admirable, but pseudo-populism exploits those noble notions to level the culture, to raze evidence and argument, to belittle learning so that legitimate scientific research and the myths of creationists represent “both sides of the story.” A pediatrician and
Playboy
pin-up Jenny McCarthy are equally entitled to pontificate about the potential risks of vaccines. Any chump can go online and tell the world that Shakespeare
blows and those dopey books about the sparkly vampire who won’t put out are the BEST EVAR!!1!!.

We have really put the duh in democracy, creating a perverse equality that entitles everyone to speak to every issue, regardless of how much they know about it. We see this on the news all the time. Ask celebrities about foreign policy, quiz the man on the street about the recession, read tweets and emails from the viewers. When a news show does invite experts to speak, producers make sure to get a batch representing “both sides” of the issue and have them squawk over each other for five barely intelligible minutes.

At the same time as the masses were being endowed with the inalienable right to rate everything on the Web or have their 140-character
pensées
voiced by
CNN
‘s Rick Sanchez, economic inequality increased and social mobility declined. The moneyed elite became more so and the cultural elite became increasingly obsolete, drowned out and washed away by a tsunami of tweets.

Becoming a nerd is hardly a viable route to the top of the social food chain when nerds are the butt of jokes, the official spokespeople for imaginary things and superannuated crud. Anyone taking classics or history for the prestige is either at Oxford or stuck in 1909. The idea that someone would get a liberal arts education to secure a perch above the lowly hordes is a misreading of current cultural conditions, given the well-worn “D’ya want fries with that?” jokes that are your reward for completing a B.A.

Conversely, people constantly use money as a form of social display. Obese
SUVS
, blinged-out watches, brand-name
clothing, and monster homes are more flagrant and effective signifiers of one’s worldly success and status than a head full of Hume or haikus. Several fields of human endeavour do a much better job of cultivating our feelings of better-than-you-ness than the long, humbling slog of study – marketing, advertising, cosmetic dentistry, and a goodly chunk of the rap industry, to name but a few.

Are there lazy professors? Of course. Every occupation has its drag-ass dregs. What I take issue with is the caricature of professors as a slack species, a class of sluggards who teach a few hours a week and then get the whole summer off. Schoolteachers suffer from the same summers-off
PR
problem.

Education frequently bears the brunt of anti-public-sector sentiment. Those in the learning professions are painted as the most feckless wing of the ever-expanding civil service. This is one of the reasons why, in debates about public education, charter schools are now touted as the solution. We’ll talk about them in
Chapter Three
, “Is Our Schools Sucking?” For the time being, suffice it to say that the appeal of charter schools is their claim to cut three things that the more-money-than-brains mindset cannot abide: government, unions, and bureaucracy.

At least schoolteachers get some sympathy for coping with your junior snot-noses and teenage hoodlums. Profs don’t even get points for being glorified babysitters. And the hours we spend doing the rest of the gig – committee meetings, research, presenting conference papers, and attending
university schmoozefests – are not always visible or legible to the general public, so they do not quite count as work either.

The idea that mental work is not really work is a hangover from old economies, from our days of hewing wood, drawing water, and making cars. But North America’s economies are increasingly dependent on service work and office work, on the kind of labour that makes more memos, meetings, and minutes than old-fangled objects. The dematerialization of labour and the deindustrializing of the North American economy are anxiety-making social changes that have cast many workers to the winds. It’s little wonder that many cling to mythic mid-twentieth-century notions about who really works for a living.

For example, shortly after Dubya began bailing out big banks and businesses, sales of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
surged. The right-wing press read this as a sign of the Silent Majority’s resistance to creeping socialism. Government growth was going to make productive people go Galt! But all of Rand’s heroic capitalists triumph in industries that are now dead or bleeding. It’s easy to write potboilers that posit sharp moral distinctions between the makers and the takers when you live in a big-shouldered factory world where people still make things.

The collapse of the old manufacturing economy and the growth of the new service and financial economy make Rand’s ideology not just simplistic but downright nostalgic, a fantasia of a capitalism that never really was, and one that is highly unlikely to “return” soon. The producer/consumer distinction that drives her work is tough to sustain when our
biggest product is consumption. It’s hard to guess what that shameless elitist Howard Roark would hate more: the socialist bank bailout, the skeevy second-handing mortgage peddlers, or the miles and miles of tacky abandoned McMansions.

The Rand revival is also weird considering what happened to the world’s most prominent Randian, Alan Greenspan. After years of being hailed as a guru for his outstanding achievements in the field of low, low interest rates as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Greenspan was hauled before Congress to explain why the markets had gone sour. He seemed unpleasantly surprised that the banking system could not rely on the virtue of selfishness as a regulatory restraint. When he was asked if his “ideology” had influenced his decisions, he admitted, “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”