Last week, I was listening to Larry Wilmore interview Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Building on a condemnation of people who think comets are a sign of the apocalypse, America’s poppiest astrophysicist expanded the scope of criticism. “Huge swaths of the public are embarrassingly scientifically illiterate,” he said, with venom in his voice.
This is a common lament among us liberals, when we’re down on our luck, searching for reasons why our leaders are as stupid as they evidently are. Like some have been said to cling to guns and religion, many urbanites cling to the idea that most Americans are dumb, and that distrust of scientists and distaste for intellectualism is the chief expression of said dumbness. Around once a month, I see an article in my news feed from Slate or some other organ of liberal anxiety bemoaning anti-intellectualism. The writers, privileged though they are to work in a creative profession, brim with incredulity that some people don’t implicitly trust scientists and others with high degrees.
I sympathize with the urge to disdain. I grew up in Northwest DC surrounded by journalists, academics, and other people who exercised their intellect for a living. I was shocked in 2000 when Americans elected the candidate who had a limited vocabulary and constructed sentences that made no grammatical sense. The fact that there has ever been a “debate” about whether climate change is man-made has always been infuriating. Why don’t Americans seem to value intellect in the same way everyone I grew up with did?
But anti-intellectualism is a part of our society’s DNA, built into the kind of activities that our economy has always demanded that most workers perform. I started thinking about this as I’ve done research on AI and tried to figure out whether robots are going to take all of our jobs. And I’ve developed a little sympathy for people with anti-intellectual feelings.
The most infamous study of whether robots will take all our jobs concluded that 47% of US occupations were at “high risk” of automation in the next twenty years. I don’t think that figure is realistic, but that’s a debate for another time. What’s most interesting to me about the study was the way the researchers (Osborne & Frey) classified different work activities: occupations made up of routine, repetitive activities were deemed at high risk of automation, while occupations comprising activities of creation, perception, and persuasion were deemed very unlikely to be automated anytime soon.
I’ll certainly be worried if the possibility of 47% of jobs really disappearing in the near future comes true. But I’m also worried about the certainty that 47% of people have had no choice for earning a living but to perform repetitive tasks all day, every day. People in creative, perceptive, and persuasive jobs get to solve original problems and bring things into the world out of their minds that didn’t exist before. People whose jobs are made up of nothing more than repetition use those parts of their brains much less frequently.
Our economy has always needed a small number of people to use the intellectual parts of their brains, and a much larger group of people to perform the same tasks over and over; there’s only so much room at the top. Our schools and other tools of socialization haven’t conditioned most people to expect anything else. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it himself, just a few minutes before his invective against the scientifically illiterate: “You spend the first two to three years of your childhood learning to stand up and walk around. Then you spend the rest of your childhood being taught to sit down and shut up.”
If you grew up with that experience and ended up in a repetitive job, it would make sense if you came to resent the privileged few who enjoy daily cognitive challenge and satisfaction. And if that privileged few called you stupid, might it make you feel like voting for the most evidently stupid person to run for office in our history out of spite?
Rather than bemoan the lack of respect for intellectualism on the part of some citizens, we’d be better off changing the underlying conditions that make them that way. I don’t know if an all-creative/perceptive/persuasive economy is possible; it certainly hasn’t ever been before. But it’s definitely more possible today than it ever has been in the past. To the extent that we can get more people into jobs where they exercise their creativity, we’ll forestall any man vs. machine employment crisis. As a bonus, maybe we’ll reduce anti-intellectualism, and keep anti-intellectuals out of the White House.