December 8, 2003
GAPING:
Examining the U.S.-Europe Cultural Gap (JULIE SALAMON, December 6, 2003, NY Times)
[J]ane Kramer, who writes about Europe for The New Yorker, spoke wistfully of the seriousness with which she perceives her colleagues abroad are taken, in comparison to the indifference or even gentle disdain with which most Americans regard their intellectuals. When Europeans write an essay that is strongly political, she said, it becomes a political force. By contrast, in the United States, she said, "I don't' think we make much of a difference in what we write here."
If you were going to pick one reason--besides the persistence of religious belief, but related to it--that America avoided the self-destructive forces that annihilated Europe in the 20th Century, it would be our salutary anti-intellectualism. Maybe the Europeans and intellectuals should learn from it rather than bemoan it? Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2003 8:07 AM
The USSR took its dissident writers very seriously, their precious dog-eared samizadat being passed from hand to hand with the fervor of holy writ.
Ah, to have been a dissident writer living behind the iron curtain.
(By the way, are there any dissident writers left today in Europe? And if so, how are they valued?)
Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Houllebecq, Bernard Lewis and Orianna Fallacci were all put on trial weren't they?
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2003 8:28 AMOJ
Exactly! I doubt that those off key in the choir are given much ink ... or attention. Homogenuity works. But demographics will be changing things.
Posted by: genecis at December 8, 2003 9:04 AMThere hasn't been a significant political manifesto written in Europe that Kramer would endorse since the 1860s.
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 8, 2003 11:13 AMI wasn't aware Lomborg was put on trial.
It occurs to me, contra Hofstadter and Judd, that American antiintellectualism has been overstated. What you mean is the early weakness of left intellectualism. There was no American Comte.
But Americans did not consider themselves antiintellectual. The thinkers of the 19th and early 20th century were dogmatic religionists, mostly, and racists, who gave us the Fundamentals and the Plattsburg Movement.
I doubt one living "conservative" in a hundred has even heard of the Plattsburg Movement or could name any of its publicists.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 8, 2003 5:18 PMHarry:
No, the intellectuals of that era were the Pragmatists, who were rightly reviled.
Posted by: oj at December 8, 2003 7:27 PM