All Quotes

"Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational, because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world."

"This debate between religious conservatives and religious liberals over the relative gravity of sins was no abstract matter; it was being played out at exactly the same time between orthodox ministers and radical abolitionists over the evil of slavery. In 1836, the Reverend Lyman Beecher made a major speech in which he described the Sabbath as the “sun of the moral world” and lax Sabbath observance as the major moral issue in American society. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, in the July 1836 and August 1836 editions of The Liberator, mocked Beecher for dwelling on Sabbath observance while at the same time “giving his protecting influence to a system of slavery, which, at a single blow, annihilates not only the fourth commandment but The Whole DECALOGUE! and which effectively excludes from the benefits of the Sabbath, two millions and a half of his fellow countrymen!!”"

"For generations, the science and history taught in small towns in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was vetted by adults who believed in the innate inferiority of blacks and who also subscribed to fundamentalist creeds at odds with the growing body of secular scientific knowledge. The best educated regions of the country became better educated, and the most intellectually backward regions became more backward."

"Finally, the Enlightenment culture that had produced Jefferson, Madison, and Washington no longer existed in the South: men of learning and science like Thomas Cooper were being exiled instead of recruited to build regional educational institutions. All of this converged in a culture in which the richest and most influential members, the planters, were noted for and proud of their lack of interest in intellectual pursuits."

"In the South, what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in an effort to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

"The ideological fixations of otherwise intelligent men in America’s Gilded Age offer a recognizable precursor of the imperviousness to evidence that permeates many ideologies in our current age of unreason."

"Then as now, the public was overwhelmed by information and misinformation filtered through new technologies."

"One of the great ironies of this phase of American intellectual history is that the intellectual social Darwinists and their fundamentalist opponents shared an inability to distinguish between science and social pseudoscience, and they passed on their confusion to a public that worshipped the fruits of science but was fundamentally ignorant of the scientific method."

"In 1878, there were fewer than eight hundred public high schools in the United States; by the eve of the First World War, the number had increased to more than eleven thousand."

"The Gilded Age was also the golden age of the lecture as a source of both entertainment and instruction."

"After Darwin, the gap between contemporary scientific knowledge and southern religion grew much wider."

"Perhaps only someone trained as both a natural scientist and a philosopher could have spotted, at such an early stage in the culture wars over evolution, the bloviating arrogance of metaphysical theories that ignore inconvenient facts, as distinct from scientific theories subject to modification by the discovery of new facts."

"Regardless of political reversal of position, two critical ingredients of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism have remained largely unchanged since the 1890s. The first is the belief of a significant minority of Americans that intellectualism and secular higher learning are implacable enemies of their faith. The second is the toxin of pseudoscience, which Americans on both the left and the right continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to evidence-based challenges."

"Just as the pseudoscience of social Darwinism captivated many nineteenth-century American intellectuals, the social pseudoscience of communism exerted a powerful pull on twentieth-century American intellectuals between the world wars."

"The real importance of the sixties in American intellectual history is that they marked the beginning of the eclipse of the print culture by the culture of video."

"The only kind of politics that does not lend itself to video images is any political appeal to thoughtfulness, reason, and logic."

"Three enduring elements of twentieth-century American anti-intellectualism may be inferred from Bryan’s rhetorical melding of fundamentalist faith with opposition to the world’s first Communist state and its official atheism. First and foremost is the portrayal of experts—not just a “soviet” but a “scientific soviet”—as an alien organism within the American body politic. Bryan then expresses resentment toward an educated minority seen as a separate class, determined to impose its views on the majority. Finally, this separate class is identified as an enemy of religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has always been seen by its opponents as ideological and metaphysical rather than scientific, tapped into the vague resentment most people feel toward experts on whom they depend but whose work they do not understand."

"Another powerful element in the suspicion of intellectuals fostered by the McCarthy era was an emotional melding of religion with anti-Communist patriotism, prefigured by but even more strenuously promoted than the same linkage had been during the Red Scare after the First World War."

"The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

"What has been lost is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort."

"As long as a book had something to do with ancient Rome, I did not care whether it was written from the perspective of a Christian, an atheist, or a lion."

"The Little Blue Books, with their strong debt to and component of nineteenth-century freethought as well as twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, and sociology, represented the traditional American ideal of self-education, as distinct from the dawning era of self-help, which would place far more emphasis on improving personality and public image than on improving one’s mind."

"I am sure that I would have gotten around to doubt and atheism eventually, but reading a handy chunk of the Summa hastened the day."

"If these hefty novels often lack literary grace, their length also attests to the diminution of literate America’s attention span during the past forty years."

"Yet even as middle-brow culture, bolstered by highbrow contributions, seemed at its most robust, it was entering a period of gradual enfeeblement fostered by social forces that first manifested themselves in the mid-fifties and became more dominant in the sixties. The most important of these was of course television, a luxury that, in the course of just one decade, came to be considered a necessity. The new medium could not corrupt highbrow culture, because there basically was no highbrow culture on the air, but it could indeed help to corrupt middlebrow culture."

"Even the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination did not truly shake the sense of optimism that permeated those years before America’s involvement in Vietnam changed everything."

"Many Americans who lived through the sixties have forgotten that the nation’s education in the irrational, which often included attacks on rationality itself, was being conducted from both the right and the left."

"More often than not, those who tried to mediate were attacked from all sides."

"What is clear, however, is that liberals and conservatives were no more interested in talking to one another on campuses during the sixties than they are today."

"Even more important for the future of what would come to be known as the Christian right, Dallas’s First Baptist Church organized an entire system of private schools, originally designed to avoid desegregation but ultimately serving the much larger purpose of educating Christian children without secular influences like the teaching of evolution."

"The resurgent fundamentalists were saying no to more than the counterculture of the sixties; like William Jennings Bryan and his followers in the first three decades of the century, the new fundamentalist generation was also saying no to intellectualism and modernism."

"Although many grassroots Catholic social conservatives were as anti-intellectual as southern fundamentalist Protestants, their anti-intellectualism was rooted not in biblical literalism but in a longing for the pre-Vatican II church of their youth. These disillusioned right-wing Catholics would, in the years after the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, form a previously unimaginable alliance with fundamentalist Protestants."

"By 1968, Richard Nixon already understood that conservative religious believers, including fundamentalist Protestants and right-wing Catholics, could form a new base for the Republican party."

"Of course, every generation has its beloved music, rituals, drugs, and sentimental history."

"In the long run, nothing dumbs down culture more effectively than the ripping of popular art—good, bad, or indifferent in quality—from its specific cultural antecedents."

"The culture of celebrity, defined by the media’s circular capacity to create stars who shine not because of specific deeds but mainly because they are the objects of media attention, was a true child of the sixties."

"The image became the message."

"Regardless of how fundamentalists fine-tune their beliefs, there is unquestionably a powerful correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education."

"In politics, the nexus between fundamentalism and lack of education has enabled right-wing Christian candidates to tap into suspicion of educated “elites.”"

"Modern fundamentalist have forgotten, if they ever knew, that they owe their liberty of conscience to the demonized enlightenment rationalism that gave birth to the secular Constitution."

"At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists like my great-uncle made the entirely reasonable assumption that the expansion of knowledge about every aspect of the natural world would produce a less credulous American public. They assumed that the growing availability of scientific, historical, and anthropological evidence would deter the spread of both religious and nonreligious beliefs that not only lacked a basis in reality but frequently contradicted reality. That assumption, reasonable as it seemed at the time, was wrong."

"Although cloaked in scientific language…the leaden heart of pseudoscience is its imperviousness to evidentiary challenge."

"But junk science also has a politicized meaning, diametrically opposed to what genuine scientists mean by the phrase. It has been appropriated by right-wing politicians and journalists to describe any scientific consensus that contradicts their political, economic, or cultural agenda."

"The right-wing distortion and politicization of junk science is nothing more than a branch of a more pervasive phenomenon best described as junk thought. The defining characteristics of junk thought, which manifests itself in the humanities and social sciences as well as the physical sciences, are anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion."

"It cannot be stressed enough that junk thought emanates from both the left and the right, even though each group—in academia, politics, and cultural institutions—thrives on accusing the other of being the sole source of irrationality."

"For ordinary Americans, including those not naturally disposed toward the irrational, the national menu of junk thought is as broad and accessible as its offerings of junk food. Junk thought is a state of mind that is hard to avoid. Press the remote, point and click the mouse, open the newspaper, and worlds of anti-rationalism open up."

"What can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that anti-rational junk thought has gained social respectability in the United States during the past half century, that it interacts toxically with the most credulous elements in both secular and religious ideologies, and that it has proved resistant to the vast expansion of scientific knowledge that has taken place during the same period."

"Finally, the virulent outbreak of anti-rationalism in late twentieth-century America is also rooted in a much older, nonpolitical tendency in American thought—a chronic suspicion of experts that dovetails with the folk belief in the superior wisdom of ordinary people."

"Had anyone told me, in 1969, that an anti-vaccination movement—embodying both junk science and junk thought—would emerge in the 1990s and be treated by the news media with respectful attention, I would have considered the prediction sheer lunacy."

"The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation—a basic requirement for scientific literacy."