University of Birmingham Anti-Intellectualism and Israeli Politics

University of Birmingham Anti-Intellectualism and Israeli Politics Siniver, Asaf DOI: 10.1080/13530194.2016.1166936 License: Other (please specify with Rights Statement) Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Siniver, A 2016, 'Anti-Intellectualism and Israeli Politics', British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 630-643. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2016.1166936 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies on 09/04/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13530194.2016.1166936 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 Anti-Intellectualism and Israeli Politics Abstract Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries. While it defies a restrictive definition, it is commonly understood as a populist disdain of individuals who speak of certain universal values and engage in the pursuit of knowledge from reason; conversely, an anti-intellectual is a person who is not a ‘dealer in ideas’ and is not committed to the ‘life of the mind’. This article focuses on anti- intellectualism as a defining characteristic of the Israeli ethos which predates the establishment of the Jewish state. The article begins with a terminological discussion and a brief historical survey of the prevalence of anti-intellectualism in contemporary societies. It then traces the roots of Israeli anti-intellectualism and examines their manifestations in the case of Abba Eban, Israel’s most quintessential diplomat, an orientalist scholar, a Cambridge don, a polyglot and a public intellectual. The article concludes by pointing to the uneasy fit between the political and intellectual spheres in Israeli politics and the challenges posed by the former to the latter. 1 Defining anti-intellectualism Anti-intellectualism is a pervasive social phenomenon which transcends temporal and spatial boundaries, however authoritative definitions of the term are few and far between. As Richard Hofstadter pointed in his 1962 seminal study of anti-intellectualism in American life, the term “does not yield very readily to definition... I can see little advantage in a logically defensible but historically arbitrary act of definition, which would demand singling out one trait among a complex of traits.” 1 It may be easier to begin with a definition of what intellectualism is not – it is not the same as intelligence or intellect. It is not enough to be a ‘man of letters’ or to possess formal education to be deemed an intellectual. According to Antonio Gramsci, there is a degree of minimum creative intellectual activity in even the most menial physical work, and therefore all men are intellectuals, but not all men in society perform this function in society to its maximum limits.2 According to Sowell’s powerful critique of the intellectual class, “the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment… Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all – the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.” Intellectuals are essentially “dealers in ideas” which is why brain surgeons or engineers are not thought of as intellectuals.3 An anti-intellectual can thus be described either as a person who mistrusts and derides intellectuals, or a person who does not possess the mental facilities to engage in intellectual activities, namely the pursuit of knowledge from reason and the dedication to the ‘life of the mind’. Whereas the investigation of anti-intellectualism ought to eschew universal generalizations, there seems to be a common thread, which for Hofstadter entails “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.”4 Morton White also points 2 to the ambiguity of the term, but proceeds to make a useful distinction between an ‘anti- intellectual’ who is hostile to intellectuals, and an ‘anti-intellectualist’ who is critical of rational claims to knowledge.5 Similarly, Shogan distinguishes between ‘anti-intellectualism’ which denotes “the attainment of knowledge through instincts, character, moral sensibilities, and emotions”, and a person who displays ‘anti-intellectual’ qualities, and therefore “disparage the rational complexity associated with intellectual pursuits” – this is often described as anti-elitism (i.e. anti-smugness and anti-pretentiousness) rather than sheer dismissiveness of ‘smart people’.6 This paper follows these terminological distinctions, and focuses on anti-intellectualism as a socio-political phenomenon rather than a philosophical doctrine which is critical of rationalism. In crude terms, it adopts White’s definition of the anti-intellectual: this person is usually “an ordinary man, non-intellectual, to whom an egghead is an egg-head, whether scientist, historian or philosopher, rationalist or empiricist, hard-boiled or scrambled. For the anti-intellectual, the important contrast is that between the pursuits of the professor, artist, scholar, and scientist, on the one hand, and those of the business man, plumber, secretary, barber, and politician, on the other.”7 A cursory survey of anti-intellectualism Intellectuals have been ridiculed and chastised since ancient times. Aristophanes’ The Clouds (423 BC) caricatured ‘Socrates the philosopher’ as a tedious sophist, the master of the esoteric who indulges in overly-intellectual nonsense such as measuring the distance of a flea’s jump.8 Almost three centuries later, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder demanded the expulsion of three Athenian philosophers who visited Roma to give public lectures on the Platonist, Aristotelian and Stoic schools, for fear of corrupting the youth. 9 The Catholic Church’s censorship of scholarship and learning in the Middle Ages has been well documented, whereas the Russian anarchists of the early twentieth century displayed an 3 innate distrust of intellectuals and their so-called scientific theories of history and society.10 Anti-intellectualism is also a running thread in British society, from the Puritan revolution of the 1640s and Edmund Burke’s construct of conservatism a century later, which was based on mistrust of ‘theory’ and universal values, to the Victorian ethos of hard work and common-sense. In the 1997 general elections Tony Blair appealed to ‘Mondeo Man’ as the archetypical everyday voter who drove Ford’s best-selling mid-range car, while more recently David Cameron has voiced his disdain for think tanks and abstract principles.11 However the majority of studies of anti-intellectualism are based on the American experience. Hofstadter argues that anti-intellectualism is part of the fabric of American society, a product of evangelism, primitivism, business activism, and egalitarianism. Some potent examples of this pervasive tradition include the nineteenth century’s cult of the self- made man and hostility to formal education, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and General Dwight Eisenhower’s victory over the quintessentially intellectual Adlai Stevenson (dubbed ‘egghead’ by Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon) in the 1952 presidential elections – a result which led Time magazine to lament about “the wide and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the people.” 12 Hofstadter’s incisive study did not appear in a cultural vacuum, but followed the footsteps of other academics who alerted to a perceived rise in anti-intellectualism in America. In 1954 Merle Curti, president of the American Historical Association, pointed to the early evangelists’ opposition to scholarly knowledge and the utilitarianism of the early frontier experience as the bedrocks of America’s prevalent anti-intellectualism, while in 1955 the Journal of Social Issues dedicated a special issue to anti-intellectualism. Its general conclusion was that the distrust and dislike of learned men was as old as the nation itself and could be found in all walks of life, from the family and schools, to the media and business world, the academia and government.13 More recently, in response to the resurgence of republican evangelism and the emergence of social media since 4 in the past decade, a new wave of studies have tried to deal with the perceived decline of reason in contemporary America.14 The denigration of the intellectual is a particularly acute feature in presidential campaigns. Five decades after the Eisenhower-Stevenson elections, the “brainiac” Al Gore was pitted against “everyman” George W.

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