Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1980, sci­en­tist and writer Isaac Asi­mov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of igno­rance in the Unit­ed States, and there always has been.” That year, the Repub­li­can Par­ty stood at the dawn of the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion, which ini­ti­at­ed a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive groundswell. Polit­i­cal strate­gist Steve Schmidt (who has been regret­ful about choos­ing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s run­ning mate in 2008) once point­ed to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al rot” as a pri­ma­ry cul­prit, and a cult-like devo­tion to irra­tional­i­ty among a cer­tain seg­ment of the elec­torate.

It’s a famil­iar con­tention. There have been cri­tiques of Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism since the country’s found­ing, though whether or not that phe­nom­e­non has inten­si­fied, as Susan Jaco­by alleged in The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son, may be a sub­ject of debate. Not all of the unrea­son is par­ti­san, as fail­ures to chal­lenge human- and AI-gen­er­at­ed mis­in­for­ma­tion in polit­i­cal news sources and social media out­lets over recent years have shown. But “the strain of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism,” writes Asi­mov, “has been a con­stant thread wind­ing its way through our polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al life, nur­tured by the false notion that democ­ra­cy means that ‘my igno­rance is just as good as your knowl­edge.’”

Asimov’s pri­ma­ry exam­ples hap­pen to come from the polit­i­cal world. How­ev­er, he doesn’t name con­tem­po­rary names but reach­es back to take a swipe at Eisen­how­er (“who invent­ed a ver­sion of the Eng­lish lan­guage that was all his own”) and George Wal­lace. Par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing is Asimov’s take on the “slo­gan on the part of the obscu­ran­tists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This lan­guage, along with charges of “elit­ism,” Asi­mov wry­ly notes, is so often used by peo­ple who are them­selves experts and elites, “feel­ing guilty about hav­ing gone to school.” So many of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal class’ wounds are self-inflict­ed, he sug­gests, but that’s because they are behold­en to a large­ly igno­rant elec­torate:

To be sure, the aver­age Amer­i­can can sign his name more or less leg­i­bly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelit­ist Amer­i­cans can, with­out undue dif­fi­cul­ty, read as many as a thou­sand con­sec­u­tive words of small print, some of which may be tri­syl­lab­ic?

Asimov’s exam­ples are less than con­vinc­ing: road signs “steadi­ly being replaced by lit­tle pic­tures to make them inter­na­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble” has more to do with lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty than illit­er­a­cy, and accus­ing tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials of speak­ing their mes­sages out loud instead of using print­ed text on the screen seems to fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand the nature of the medi­um. Jaco­by in her book-length study of the prob­lem looks at edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy in the Unit­ed States, and the resis­tance to nation­al stan­dards that vir­tu­al­ly ensures wide­spread pock­ets of igno­rance all over the coun­try. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has nei­ther the space nor the incli­na­tion to con­duct such analy­sis.

Instead he is con­cerned with atti­tudes. Not only are many Amer­i­cans bad­ly edu­cat­ed, he writes, but the broad igno­rance of the pop­u­la­tion in mat­ters of “sci­ence… math­e­mat­ics… eco­nom­ics… for­eign lan­guages…” has as much to do with Amer­i­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to read as their inabil­i­ty.

There are 200 mil­lion Amer­i­cans who have inhab­it­ed school­rooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent peri­od­i­cals believe they are doing amaz­ing­ly well if they have cir­cu­la­tion of half a mil­lion. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Amer­i­cans make a stab at exer­cis­ing their right to know. And if they try to do any­thing on that basis they are quite like­ly to be accused of being elit­ists.

One might in some respects charge Asi­mov him­self of elit­ism when he con­cludes, “We can all be mem­bers of the intel­lec­tu­al elite.” Such a blithe­ly opti­mistic state­ment ignores the ways in which eco­nom­ic elites active­ly manip­u­late edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy to suit their inter­ests, crip­ple edu­ca­tion fund­ing, and oppose efforts at free or low cost high­er edu­ca­tion. Many efforts at spread­ing knowledge—like the Chau­tauquas of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the edu­ca­tion­al radio pro­grams of the 40s and 50s, and the pub­lic tele­vi­sion rev­o­lu­tion of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and near­ly always imper­iled by fund­ing crises and the designs of prof­i­teers.

Nonethe­less, the wide­spread (though hard­ly uni­ver­sal) avail­abil­i­ty of free resources on the inter­net has made self-edu­ca­tion a real­i­ty for many peo­ple, and cer­tain­ly for most Amer­i­cans. But per­haps not even Isaac Asi­mov could have fore­seen the bit­ter polar­iza­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that tech­nol­o­gy has also enabled. Need­less to say, “A Cult of Igno­rance” was not one of Asimov’s most pop­u­lar pieces of writ­ing. First pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 21, 1980 in Newsweek, the short essay has nev­er been reprint­ed in any of Asimov’s col­lec­tions.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Reviews George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Sci­ence Fic­tion, But a Dis­tort­ed Nos­tal­gia for a Past that Nev­er Was”

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

Isaac Asi­mov on How Libraries Can Rad­i­cal­ly Change Your Life (1971)

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.