是什么造就了美国的反智文化？
What explains America’s anti-intellectual culture?
译文简介
提问者认为美国有太多坚持反智主义的人，甚至有种反智文化（坚信地球是平的，打疫苗是人类灭绝），所以提问探寻出现这种反智文化的原因。
正文翻译
Nadi Subramanian Hardware Engineer
纳迪·苏布拉马尼亚尼 硬件工程师
Anti-intellectual culture is a weird phenomenon — and I look at the response to Sputnik as an interesting reflection of it. America got into a temporary panic when it realized that the Soviet unx seemed to be training more efficient scientists than the United States since it had build superior rockets despite having come out of the second world war with horrendous losses at all levels. And after Sputnik flew, suddenly resources flowed into the educational system. But it wasn’t to raise the level of civilization of the republic. It was to ward off a rising strategic competitor. There are plenty of talented people here — enough to sustain the country in its various endeavors — but the danger lies elsewhere. There is a large section of the country that really does cling to anti-intellectual values. You can see that, naturally, in the way they rush out to vote for people like Sarah Palin. That was a shock. And there were worse shocks to come. Now we discover that they would rather endanger their own lives than follow simple, basic advice from medical professionals. But at that time the question was why they would endanger their lives by putting this completely ignorant person into a position of power over them.
反智文化是一种奇特的现象——我认为美国对“斯普特尼克号”卫星事件的反应便是这一现象的有趣体现。美国意识到，尽管苏联在二战中遭受了各层面的惨重损失，却仍能制造出更先进的火箭，这意味着苏联似乎正在培养比美国更高效的科学家，这让美国陷入了短暂的恐慌。“斯普特尼克号”升空后，资源突然涌入教育系统，但这并非为了提升国家的文明水平，而是为了抵御日益崛起的战略竞争对手。美国不乏人才，足以支撑国家开展各类事业，但危险另有来源：国内有相当一部分人确实坚守着反智价值观。这一点显而易见，比如他们会踊跃投票支持萨拉·佩林这类人物，这令人震惊，而后续还有更令人瞠目的事情发生。如今我们发现，他们宁愿危及自身生命，也不愿听从医学专业人士的简单基本建议，但当时的问题是，他们为何要将这样一个完全无知的人推上权力岗位，让其掌控自己的命运，从而危及自身安全。
Other such people who have no regard for the mind live out across the planet, but seeing them up close here is disturbing. What explains it? A rather extreme version of “democracy”? That would be very sad. Democracy should encourage people to become as well qualified to act as citizens as possible. The tradition of strongly autonomous religious institutions? That has encouraged contempt for science since the 19th century, certainly. Channeling all one’s energy into material autonomy rather than taking a portion of one’s life to learn and reflect? And accept the idea that to that end it’s good to listen to other people who have expanded most of their lives in learning and reflection? Just the simple idea that an articulate person is worthy of respect? But I’m left with a question I absolutely can’t answer: who would want a person like Sarah Palin to sit in power over them? Who would find any kind of assurance in that situation? We live in a dangerous world. How could you feel safe with that mind at the center of power?
全球各地都有这种漠视知识的人，但在自己的国家近距离目睹他们的存在，仍令人不安。这背后的原因是什么？是一种极端形式的“民主”吗？如果是这样，那实在令人悲哀。民主本应鼓励人们尽可能提升自身素养，以更好地履行公民职责。是具有高度自主性的宗教机构传统吗？自19世纪以来，这一传统无疑助长了对科学的轻视。难道是人们将所有精力都投入到追求物质自主上，而不愿抽出部分人生时光去学习和思考？不愿接受“为了实现这一目标，倾听那些毕生致力于学习和思考的人的意见是有益的”这一观点？甚至不愿认可“能言善辩、学识渊博的人值得尊重”这一简单道理？但我始终有一个无法解答的问题：谁会希望萨拉·佩林这样的人执掌权力？谁会在这种情况下感到安心？我们生活在一个危险的世界里，让这样一个缺乏见识的人处于权力核心，又怎能感到安全呢？
Chrysaor Jordan has bendable knee joints
克里斯奥尔·乔丹 拥有可弯曲膝关节
Anti-intellectualism is a cultural thing in America. Here are some of the reasons why that should be the case:
Bad parenting: those who raise children to “do as you are told” and “believe what you are told” are teaching their children not to think. This lesson will be continued in school.
Bad schooling: to the extent that your teachers teach you to accept revealed cultural wisdom as opposed to thinking for yourself, the lessons above are being reinforced.
Bad schooling II: in some cases, children learn to hate school and thus to hate learning. This relates to the next point.
Peer pressure: in relation to the insecurity that comes from being graded, schoolchildren in America pressure each other not to do so well, not to be a “nerd” or a “teacher’s pet.”
Religion: Christianity encourages children to believe as opposed to knowing.
反智主义在美国是一种文化现象，其成因如下：
不良的家庭教育：那些教育孩子“听话照做”“轻信他人所言”的父母，实际上是在教孩子不要独立思考，而这一观念在学校还会得到进一步强化。
糟糕的学校教育（一）：如果老师教导学生接受既定的文化常识，而非鼓励他们独立思考，就会进一步巩固上述不良观念。
糟糕的学校教育（二）：在某些情况下，孩子会产生厌学情绪，进而厌恶学习，这一点与下一个原因相关。
同辈压力：由于考试评分带来的不安全感，美国学生之间会相互施压，避免表现过于优秀，不愿被贴上“书呆子”或“老师的宠儿”的标签。
宗教因素：基督教鼓励孩子去信仰，而非去探究真相、获取知识。
Other popular legends: stories such as the one about a UFO crash-landing in New Mexico are the better story. If that one was true, it would be so much more interesting than the truth. Some people resent “intellectuals” for ruining a good story with the facts.
All of this was present when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the Internet arrived and made it possible for anti-intellectuals to come together online and for people to form symbolic tribes. They are convinced that intellectuals have either been brainwashed or have evil intentions or both.
Now, anti-intellectuals form a voting bloc. This would not have been possible if not for the anti-intellectual attitudes that have been with us for at least the past fifty years.
其他流行传说：像新墨西哥州不明飞行物坠毁这类故事更具吸引力，如果这些故事是真的，会比真相有趣得多。有些人因此怨恨“知识分子”，认为他们用事实毁掉了好故事。
我在20世纪70年代和80年代成长期间，上述所有现象都已存在。后来互联网出现，让反智主义者能够在网上聚集，形成象征性的群体。他们坚信知识分子要么被洗脑了，要么心怀恶意，或者两者兼具。
如今，反智主义者已形成一个投票群体。如果不是过去至少五十年来反智态度的持续存在，这一切是不可能发生的。
Frederick M. Dolan Professor, UC Berkeley
弗雷德里克·M·多兰 加州大学伯克利分校教授
I’m not sure that anti-intellectualism is especially prent and popular in the United States (more on that later), but the accusation is certainly a prominent feature of modern American life. The classic of the genre is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)
Hofstadter’s argument was that anti-intellectualism was a consequence of mass education, which entailed making a lower standard of learning available to a higher number of people. Old-fashioned liberal education was a matter of spending several years studying and uating ideas, and was considered to be intrinsically valuable. Selling the public on mass education required persuading people that its purpose was to improve one’s ability to thrive economically. In that context, intellectuals – people who are interested in ideas for their own sake – could easily be seen as divorced from reality, snobbish and aloof, unsympathetic to ordinary folk, and at times, owing to their attraction to impractical utopian visions whose implementation causes more problems than they solve, downright dangerous.
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我不确定反智主义在美国是否尤为普遍和盛行（后续会详细探讨这一点），但对反智主义的指责无疑是现代美国生活的一个显著特征。这一领域的经典著作是理查德·霍夫施塔特的《美国生活中的反智主义》（1963年）。
霍夫施塔特认为，反智主义是大众教育的产物。大众教育意味着让更多人接触到较低标准的知识学习，而传统的文科教育需要花费数年时间研究和审视各类思想，被认为具有内在价值。要让公众接受大众教育，就必须说服他们，教育的目的是提升个人的经济发展能力。在这种背景下，知识分子——那些纯粹为了探求思想而对其感兴趣的人——很容易被视为脱离现实、势利冷漠、不体恤普通人的群体，有时甚至会因为他们沉迷于不切实际的乌托邦愿景（这些愿景的实施往往会引发更多问题而非解决问题），而被认为是极具危险性的。
To make this thesis plausible, of course, Hofstadter had to explain why Americans weren’t inclined to regard education as intrinsically valuable and why they would be willing to listen to a utilitarian justification of it. A big part of his answer was that there were anti-intellectual tendencies in American Protestantism, in particular the idea that God was more impressed by hard work that benefitted the community than by book-learning. As a result, Hofstadter argued, success in the market became a more important determiner of status than how cultured or liberally educated one was.
当然，为了让这一论点更具说服力，霍夫施塔特必须解释为何美国人不倾向于将教育视为具有内在价值，以及为何他们愿意接受对教育的功利性解读。他的答案很大一部分指向美国新教中的反智倾向，尤其是认为上帝更青睐那些造福社区的辛勤劳作，而非书本知识的观点。霍夫施塔特认为，其结果是，市场上的成功取代了个人的文化素养或文科教育水平，成为决定社会地位的更重要因素。
I’d be surprised if anyone took the argument from Protestantism seriously nowadays. In fact, Puritans such as John Winthrop and Cotton Mather were anything but anti-intellectual. As for the argument from mass education, assuming there’s something to it, I can see how it could lead to non-intellectualism, but why anti-intellectualism?
It might be worth considering whether there are any good reasons to be anti-intellectual. Most discussions of it just assume that anti-intellectualism is a horrible vice that must be caused by some mental illness or character defect. But is it possible that intellectuals have earned some of the suspicion directed towards them?
如今如果还有人认真对待新教相关的论点，我会感到惊讶。事实上，约翰·温思罗普和科顿·马瑟等清教徒绝不是反智主义者。至于大众教育引发反智主义的论点，即便有一定道理，我也能理解它可能导致非智主义，但为何会演变成反智主义呢？
或许我们值得思考，是否存在支持反智主义的合理理由。大多数相关讨论都默认反智主义是一种可怕的恶习，必然源于某种精神疾病或性格缺陷，但有没有可能，知识分子自身的行为也招致了部分质疑？
The Vietnam War might be relevant. David Halberstam’s ironically-titled The Best and the Brightest (1972), on the origins of the war, expressed a common view: the policies that led to that disastrous engagement were crafted, not by old State Department hands (who typically opposed them), but rather by academics brought into government by President Kennedy. They prided themselves on their ability to offer “brilliant policies that defied common sense,” as Halberstam put it. In the aftermath of the war, intellectuals of this type were rightly denounced and ridiculed in books such as Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers (1976) and Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977). Much the same point, much earlier, was made by Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964).
越南战争或许与此相关。大卫·哈伯斯塔姆那本标题颇具讽刺意味的《出类拔萃之辈》（1972年）探讨了战争的起源，书中表达了一种普遍观点：导致这场灾难性战争的政策，并非出自美国国务院的资深官员（他们通常反对这些政策），而是由肯尼迪总统引入政府的学者们制定的。正如哈伯斯塔姆所描述的，这些学者为自己能提出“违背常识的绝妙政策”而自豪。战后，这类知识分子在格洛丽亚·爱默生的《胜者与败者》（1976年）和迈克尔·赫尔的《派遣》（1977年）等书籍中受到了应有的谴责和嘲讽。更早之前，斯坦利·库布里克的电影《奇爱博士》（1964年）也表达了类似的观点。
When intellectuals tell us that we can win conflicts by means of “forced-draft urbanization” (Samuel P. Huntington) and the proper analysis of “kill ratios” (Robert McNamara), or that nuclear war can be managed by adjusting the “choice matrix” to correctly-timed “calculation pauses” (Henry A. Kissinger), perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the public generalizes with prejudice to the class as a whole.
当知识分子告诉我们，通过“强制城市化”（塞缪尔·P·亨廷顿）和对“杀伤比”的恰当分析（罗伯特·麦克纳马拉）就能赢得冲突，或者通过调整“选择矩阵”并设置适时的“计算暂停”（亨利·A·基辛格）就能掌控核战争时，公众带着偏见对整个知识分子群体产生负面看法，或许也就不足为奇了。
Anti-intellectualism of this type is directed against intellectuals. There’s another type, though, which speaks to the non-intellectual and is inspired by the idea that the truth can be stated and acted upon without elaborate theorizing. In America this takes the form of the “village explainer,” who not only debunks the over-complications of intellectuals but also shows that our political problems and solutions are amenable to plain common sense. The village explainer is well-distributed among both the right (Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan) and the left (Joe Biden, Noam Chomsky).
这类反智主义是针对知识分子的，但还有另一种反智主义，它迎合了非知识分子群体，其核心观点是：真相无需复杂的理论阐述，即可被阐明并付诸实践。在美国，这种反智主义以“乡村解说者”的形式存在，他们不仅揭露知识分子的过度复杂化表述，还主张我们的政治问题及解决方案可以通过朴素的常识来应对。“乡村解说者”在右翼（唐纳德·特朗普、帕特·布坎南）和左翼（乔·拜登、诺姆·乔姆斯基）中都有不少代表人物。
We would do well to remember that the charge of anti-intellectualism is leveled by and for intellectuals, and to ask what motivates it and what intellectuals stand to gain by it. Because the fact is that Americans seek education in droves, as I know from personal experience teaching continuing studies courses for adults.
According to a Pew Research survey, 74% of American adults are “personal learners,” i.e. “they have participated in at least one of a number of possible activities in the past 12 months to advance their knowledge about something that personally interests them.” Of these, 80% “say they pursued knowledge in an area of personal interest because they wanted to learn something that would help them make their life more interesting and full.” This gives the lie to the claim that Americans are not interested in education for its own sake.
我们应当记住，反智主义的指责是由知识分子提出、并为知识分子服务的，我们需要追问这种指责背后的动机，以及知识分子能从中获得什么。事实上，美国人踊跃追求教育，我从自己教授成人继续教育课程的亲身经历中就能感受到这一点。
皮尤研究中心的一项调查显示，74%的美国成年人是“个人学习者”，即“在过去12个月中，他们至少参与过一项活动，以提升自己在个人感兴趣领域的知识水平”。其中80%的人表示，他们追求个人感兴趣领域的知识，是因为“想学习一些能让生活更有趣、更充实的东西”。这一数据驳斥了“美国人对教育本身不感兴趣”的说法。
We are dedicated readers, and seemingly will continue to be with millennials making greater use of public libraries than other generations. “Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, [a figure that is] largely unchanged since 2011.” (For comparison, this is in line with the 10–12 books per year read by the British, though less than the French mean of 16 per year.)
美国人是热爱阅读的群体，而且这一趋势似乎还将持续——千禧一代使用公共图书馆的频率高于其他世代。“总体而言，美国人平均每年阅读12本书，这一数字自2011年以来基本保持不变。”（作为对比，英国人每年平均阅读10至12本书，与美国人相当，但低于法国人的年均16本。）
If many Americans today disapprove of intellectuals, I suspect it is part of the general alienation of rural and less-educated Americans from the coastal elite and the way we represent ourselves. It has less to do with hating intellectual life as such than with the social position of intellectuals and the views and values we tend to express.
Below, Vice President Spiro Agnew. In 1969, during a speech at the Midwestern Regional Republican Conference in Des Moines, he characterized American intellectuals as “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”
如果如今许多美国人不认可知识分子，我怀疑这是农村地区和教育程度较低的美国人与沿海精英阶层之间普遍疏离的体现，也与知识分子自身的社会地位以及我们倾向于表达的观点和价值观有关，而非源于对知识生活本身的厌恶。
以下是美国前副总统斯皮罗·阿格纽的观点。1969年，他在得梅因举行的中西部地区共和党会议上发表演讲时，将美国知识分子形容为“一群软弱无能、傲慢无礼的势利小人”。
Charles Tips USA, citizen of
查尔斯·蒂普斯 美国公民
I always did exceptionally well on tests of academic achievement, so much so that I headed off to college intent on setting the academic world on fire and climbing the steps to a cushy position in one of our ivory towers. Then, one day midway through the fall of my second year, I was crossing the inner-campus drive toward the English building when I had a funny daydream of my favorite prof exiting the building and walking smack into the concrete lamppost ahead of me.
我在学业成绩测试中一直表现优异，以至于进入大学时，我一心想在学术界崭露头角，一步步登上象牙塔中舒适的职位。然而，在大二秋季学期过半的一天，我穿过校内车道走向英语楼时，突然做了一个有趣的白日梦：我最喜欢的教授走出大楼，径直撞上了我前方的混凝土路灯柱。
It hit me in an instant, “That could be me before long. I am using my intellect the way a novice chess player uses the queen to the exclusion of developing other pieces. I am on exactly the wrong course.” What to do?
And then I ran into Bob, a major will-o-the-wisp who had been a year ahead of me in my rural Texas high school, except that he’d moved in from California with a dad who was a submarine weapons engineer… a different sort of guy.
我瞬间意识到：“不久之后，我可能也会变成那样。我运用智力的方式，就像刚学下棋的人只知道用皇后，却忽略了其他棋子的培养。我走的路完全错了。”该怎么办呢？
就在这时，我遇到了鲍勃。他是个行踪不定的人，曾在我就读的得克萨斯州乡村高中比我高一级，后来他随父亲从加利福尼亚搬来这里——他的父亲是一名潜艇武器工程师，鲍勃也是个与众不同的人。
“Hey, Bob! Long time no see. Where ya been?”
“I hopped a freight ship.”
“You can still do that!?”
After a short exchange with Bob, that was my plan… Go down to the sea in ships. See the world.
“嘿，鲍勃！好久不见，你去哪儿了？”
“我搭了一艘货船四处闯荡。”
“啊，那你现在还能这么做？！”
和鲍勃简短交谈后，我有了计划：乘船出海，环游世界。
At the end of that semester that professor I daydreamed about asked me to his office. I had completed Theory of Grammar with him… how’s that for a pinhead course? I had also destroyed our textbook with one counterexample after another. He proposed we collaborate on a book together challenging the whole transformational approach to grammar. Me, a college sophomore collaborating on a book with a full professor? That would have vaulted me up to the parapets of the ivory tower!
那个学期结束时，我白日梦中的那位教授邀请我去他的办公室。我曾修过他的《语法理论》课程——这门课简直枯燥透顶。我还曾用一个又一个反例推翻了课本中的观点。他提议我们合作写一本书，挑战整个转换生成语法理论。我，一个大学二年级学生，要和一位正教授合作写书？这简直能让我一步登上象牙塔的顶端！
I told him no. “I’m hitchhiking to New Orleans to join the Seafarer’s unx and see the world.” And I did.
I remain very glad I did. Life at sea attracts very interesting characters, some quite unsavory but others quite worthy of respect, even for their smarts. These were not the sort of men who walk into lampposts; they were the sort of men who can improvise a working lamppost out of spare parts lying around… practical intelligence.
I ended up spending three of my next five and a half years working at sea as I used that income to put myself through college. It was very debatable which was the better education. I am satisfied to have had both.
但我拒绝了。“我要搭便车去新奥尔良，加入海员工会，环游世界。”我确实这么做了。
我至今仍为这个决定感到庆幸。海上生活吸引着各种各样有趣的人，有些人品行不端，但也有一些人非常值得尊重，尤其是他们的智慧。他们不是那种会撞到路灯柱的书呆子，而是能利用身边的备件临时组装出可用路灯柱的人——他们拥有实用的智慧。
在接下来的五年半里，我有三年时间在海上工作，用挣来的钱完成了大学学业。很难说哪种教育更有价值，但我很庆幸自己两者都体验过。
A doctor of philosophy degree does not make one an intellectual, but it is a pretty good proxy for rough comparison. Have you ever looked at the profiles of Quorans with PhDs? There are a few I can think of who are stellar contributors here who reap plenty of upvotes whenever they post. Four out of five struggle to get any upvotes.
Well, by the time I graduated, the siren call of the ivory tower was in my head again, and I headed to UCLA for a doctoral program, only I headed out in the early summer to get settled and the LA smog proved near-lethal. I bagged it and headed back to Texas where I soon ended up as an acquisitions editor at the University of Texas Press.
哲学博士学位并不等同于知识分子，但它可以作为一个粗略比较的不错参考。你有没有看过问答平台Quora上拥有博士学位用户的资料？我能想到有几位杰出的贡献者，他们每次发帖都能获得大量点赞，但五分之四的博士用户却很难获得任何点赞。
然而，毕业时，象牙塔的诱惑再次袭来，我前往加州大学洛杉矶分校攻读博士学位。但我在初夏就出发去安顿，洛杉矶的雾霾却严重到近乎致命，我只好放弃，回到了得克萨斯州。不久后，我在得克萨斯大学出版社担任了选题编辑。
Two of the first authors I worked with, Janet Spence and Bob Helmreich, were “optimum personality theorists.” I published their monograph on their research into gender. Virtually all gender studies before them had a breakout of male, female and androgynous. They broke “androgynous” in two, with “neuter” referring to those who scored low in both male and female skill sets. That revealed interesting new patterns.
As they explained to me, we do not judge people on grades. We do not judge people on IQ. We judge people, and do so amazingly quickly, on one criterion only—do they have useful skills?
我合作的首批作者中有两位是“最优人格理论家”——珍妮特·斯彭斯和鲍勃·赫尔姆赖希。我出版了他们关于性别研究的专著。在他们之前，几乎所有的性别研究都将性别分为男性、女性和双性人三类，而他们将“双性人”进一步细分为两类，其中“中性人”指的是在男性和女性技能维度上得分都较低的人，这一划分揭示了有趣的新规律。
正如他们向我解释的那样，我们评判一个人，不会看他的成绩，也不会看他的智商，而是会以惊人的速度基于一个唯一标准来判断——他们是否拥有实用的技能？
I’ll give you an example.
Years later, I had a middle-aged man making a purchase at my retail business in Palo Alto. A four-year-old boy looked through the sunglasses on a spinner rack near the cash register. In attempting to remove a pair, the lanyard caught and he pulled the whole rack down on the floor with glasses spilled everywhere.
In an instant, the man was squatted at eye level with the boy, whose mother behind him looked to be on the verge of a panic attack. “May I help you?” he quietly asked. They sat the rack upright and began rounding up and reloading the glasses.
我来给你举个例子。
（假设）多年后，我在帕洛阿尔托经营一家零售店，有一位中年男士来店里购物。当时，一个四岁的小男孩在收银台附近的旋转货架上翻看太阳镜，他试图取下一副眼镜时，挂绳被卡住，结果他把整个货架拉倒在地，眼镜散落一地。
就在那一刻，那位男士蹲下身，与小男孩平视——小男孩的母亲站在后面，看起来快要惊慌失措了。男士轻声问道：“我能帮你吗？”随后，他们一起将货架扶正，开始捡拾并重新摆放眼镜。
“Did we get them all?” The boy looked around and nodded.
“Help me set it back up on the counter.” And they did. The man turned to me, “Did we do an okay job?”
He thanked the boy, shook his hand and exited.
The mother, now beaming, approached me, “Do you know who that man was?”
“Yes, ma’am. That was Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University.”
And it made sense… in that brief thirty-second encounter the interpersonal skills were in evidence to suggest he would have a positive impact on thousands of young lives.
“我们都捡完了吗？”小男孩环顾四周，点了点头。
“帮我把货架放回柜台吧。”他们照做了。男士转向我问道：“我们做得还不错吧？”
“先生们，如果你们俩中有谁想尝试零售陈列工作，我很荣幸能雇用你们。”
他向小男孩道谢并握了握手，然后离开了商店。
小男孩的母亲此时笑容满面地走近我，问道：“你知道刚才那位男士是谁吗？”
“知道，夫人。他是斯坦福大学校长唐纳德·肯尼迪。”
这一切都说得通了——在那短暂的三十秒互动中，他展现出的人际交往能力，足以说明他会对成千上万年轻人的生活产生积极影响。
Are we wrong to care much more about evident skills over evident intellect?
So, I look at who is considered an intellectual in the US these days:
Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Thomas fucking Friedman!!! (and it goes downhill from there).
比起显而易见的智力，我们更看重实际技能，这难道错了吗？
正如斯彭斯和赫尔姆赖希向我指出的那样，对于那些智力出众但缺乏相关实用技能的人，这个世界会格外残酷。
如今，我来看看在美国被视为知识分子的都是些什么人：诺姆·乔姆斯基、理查德·道金斯、保罗·克鲁格曼、托马斯·该死的·弗里德曼！！！（接下来的人更是等而下之）。
That’s just a bunch of lefty opinion mongers. As my old shipmates might’ve pointed out, “Your opinion and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.”
Personally, I think we in the US are in a particularly healthy place with regard to intellectuals.
他们不过是一群左翼舆论贩子。就像我以前的船员伙伴可能会说的：“你的观点值不了多少钱，加一块钱才能买杯咖啡。”
就我个人而言，我认为美国在对待知识分子的态度上处于一种特别健康的状态。
纳迪·苏布拉马尼亚尼 硬件工程师
Anti-intellectual culture is a weird phenomenon — and I look at the response to Sputnik as an interesting reflection of it. America got into a temporary panic when it realized that the Soviet unx seemed to be training more efficient scientists than the United States since it had build superior rockets despite having come out of the second world war with horrendous losses at all levels. And after Sputnik flew, suddenly resources flowed into the educational system. But it wasn’t to raise the level of civilization of the republic. It was to ward off a rising strategic competitor. There are plenty of talented people here — enough to sustain the country in its various endeavors — but the danger lies elsewhere. There is a large section of the country that really does cling to anti-intellectual values. You can see that, naturally, in the way they rush out to vote for people like Sarah Palin. That was a shock. And there were worse shocks to come. Now we discover that they would rather endanger their own lives than follow simple, basic advice from medical professionals. But at that time the question was why they would endanger their lives by putting this completely ignorant person into a position of power over them.
反智文化是一种奇特的现象——我认为美国对“斯普特尼克号”卫星事件的反应便是这一现象的有趣体现。美国意识到，尽管苏联在二战中遭受了各层面的惨重损失，却仍能制造出更先进的火箭，这意味着苏联似乎正在培养比美国更高效的科学家，这让美国陷入了短暂的恐慌。“斯普特尼克号”升空后，资源突然涌入教育系统，但这并非为了提升国家的文明水平，而是为了抵御日益崛起的战略竞争对手。美国不乏人才，足以支撑国家开展各类事业，但危险另有来源：国内有相当一部分人确实坚守着反智价值观。这一点显而易见，比如他们会踊跃投票支持萨拉·佩林这类人物，这令人震惊，而后续还有更令人瞠目的事情发生。如今我们发现，他们宁愿危及自身生命，也不愿听从医学专业人士的简单基本建议，但当时的问题是，他们为何要将这样一个完全无知的人推上权力岗位，让其掌控自己的命运，从而危及自身安全。
Other such people who have no regard for the mind live out across the planet, but seeing them up close here is disturbing. What explains it? A rather extreme version of “democracy”? That would be very sad. Democracy should encourage people to become as well qualified to act as citizens as possible. The tradition of strongly autonomous religious institutions? That has encouraged contempt for science since the 19th century, certainly. Channeling all one’s energy into material autonomy rather than taking a portion of one’s life to learn and reflect? And accept the idea that to that end it’s good to listen to other people who have expanded most of their lives in learning and reflection? Just the simple idea that an articulate person is worthy of respect? But I’m left with a question I absolutely can’t answer: who would want a person like Sarah Palin to sit in power over them? Who would find any kind of assurance in that situation? We live in a dangerous world. How could you feel safe with that mind at the center of power?
全球各地都有这种漠视知识的人，但在自己的国家近距离目睹他们的存在，仍令人不安。这背后的原因是什么？是一种极端形式的“民主”吗？如果是这样，那实在令人悲哀。民主本应鼓励人们尽可能提升自身素养，以更好地履行公民职责。是具有高度自主性的宗教机构传统吗？自19世纪以来，这一传统无疑助长了对科学的轻视。难道是人们将所有精力都投入到追求物质自主上，而不愿抽出部分人生时光去学习和思考？不愿接受“为了实现这一目标，倾听那些毕生致力于学习和思考的人的意见是有益的”这一观点？甚至不愿认可“能言善辩、学识渊博的人值得尊重”这一简单道理？但我始终有一个无法解答的问题：谁会希望萨拉·佩林这样的人执掌权力？谁会在这种情况下感到安心？我们生活在一个危险的世界里，让这样一个缺乏见识的人处于权力核心，又怎能感到安全呢？
Chrysaor Jordan has bendable knee joints
克里斯奥尔·乔丹 拥有可弯曲膝关节
Anti-intellectualism is a cultural thing in America. Here are some of the reasons why that should be the case:
Bad parenting: those who raise children to “do as you are told” and “believe what you are told” are teaching their children not to think. This lesson will be continued in school.
Bad schooling: to the extent that your teachers teach you to accept revealed cultural wisdom as opposed to thinking for yourself, the lessons above are being reinforced.
Bad schooling II: in some cases, children learn to hate school and thus to hate learning. This relates to the next point.
Peer pressure: in relation to the insecurity that comes from being graded, schoolchildren in America pressure each other not to do so well, not to be a “nerd” or a “teacher’s pet.”
Religion: Christianity encourages children to believe as opposed to knowing.
反智主义在美国是一种文化现象，其成因如下：
不良的家庭教育：那些教育孩子“听话照做”“轻信他人所言”的父母，实际上是在教孩子不要独立思考，而这一观念在学校还会得到进一步强化。
糟糕的学校教育（一）：如果老师教导学生接受既定的文化常识，而非鼓励他们独立思考，就会进一步巩固上述不良观念。
糟糕的学校教育（二）：在某些情况下，孩子会产生厌学情绪，进而厌恶学习，这一点与下一个原因相关。
同辈压力：由于考试评分带来的不安全感，美国学生之间会相互施压，避免表现过于优秀，不愿被贴上“书呆子”或“老师的宠儿”的标签。
宗教因素：基督教鼓励孩子去信仰，而非去探究真相、获取知识。
Other popular legends: stories such as the one about a UFO crash-landing in New Mexico are the better story. If that one was true, it would be so much more interesting than the truth. Some people resent “intellectuals” for ruining a good story with the facts.
All of this was present when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the Internet arrived and made it possible for anti-intellectuals to come together online and for people to form symbolic tribes. They are convinced that intellectuals have either been brainwashed or have evil intentions or both.
Now, anti-intellectuals form a voting bloc. This would not have been possible if not for the anti-intellectual attitudes that have been with us for at least the past fifty years.
其他流行传说：像新墨西哥州不明飞行物坠毁这类故事更具吸引力，如果这些故事是真的，会比真相有趣得多。有些人因此怨恨“知识分子”，认为他们用事实毁掉了好故事。
我在20世纪70年代和80年代成长期间，上述所有现象都已存在。后来互联网出现，让反智主义者能够在网上聚集，形成象征性的群体。他们坚信知识分子要么被洗脑了，要么心怀恶意，或者两者兼具。
如今，反智主义者已形成一个投票群体。如果不是过去至少五十年来反智态度的持续存在，这一切是不可能发生的。
Frederick M. Dolan Professor, UC Berkeley
弗雷德里克·M·多兰 加州大学伯克利分校教授
I’m not sure that anti-intellectualism is especially prent and popular in the United States (more on that later), but the accusation is certainly a prominent feature of modern American life. The classic of the genre is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)
Hofstadter’s argument was that anti-intellectualism was a consequence of mass education, which entailed making a lower standard of learning available to a higher number of people. Old-fashioned liberal education was a matter of spending several years studying and uating ideas, and was considered to be intrinsically valuable. Selling the public on mass education required persuading people that its purpose was to improve one’s ability to thrive economically. In that context, intellectuals – people who are interested in ideas for their own sake – could easily be seen as divorced from reality, snobbish and aloof, unsympathetic to ordinary folk, and at times, owing to their attraction to impractical utopian visions whose implementation causes more problems than they solve, downright dangerous.
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我不确定反智主义在美国是否尤为普遍和盛行（后续会详细探讨这一点），但对反智主义的指责无疑是现代美国生活的一个显著特征。这一领域的经典著作是理查德·霍夫施塔特的《美国生活中的反智主义》（1963年）。
霍夫施塔特认为，反智主义是大众教育的产物。大众教育意味着让更多人接触到较低标准的知识学习，而传统的文科教育需要花费数年时间研究和审视各类思想，被认为具有内在价值。要让公众接受大众教育，就必须说服他们，教育的目的是提升个人的经济发展能力。在这种背景下，知识分子——那些纯粹为了探求思想而对其感兴趣的人——很容易被视为脱离现实、势利冷漠、不体恤普通人的群体，有时甚至会因为他们沉迷于不切实际的乌托邦愿景（这些愿景的实施往往会引发更多问题而非解决问题），而被认为是极具危险性的。
To make this thesis plausible, of course, Hofstadter had to explain why Americans weren’t inclined to regard education as intrinsically valuable and why they would be willing to listen to a utilitarian justification of it. A big part of his answer was that there were anti-intellectual tendencies in American Protestantism, in particular the idea that God was more impressed by hard work that benefitted the community than by book-learning. As a result, Hofstadter argued, success in the market became a more important determiner of status than how cultured or liberally educated one was.
当然，为了让这一论点更具说服力，霍夫施塔特必须解释为何美国人不倾向于将教育视为具有内在价值，以及为何他们愿意接受对教育的功利性解读。他的答案很大一部分指向美国新教中的反智倾向，尤其是认为上帝更青睐那些造福社区的辛勤劳作，而非书本知识的观点。霍夫施塔特认为，其结果是，市场上的成功取代了个人的文化素养或文科教育水平，成为决定社会地位的更重要因素。
I’d be surprised if anyone took the argument from Protestantism seriously nowadays. In fact, Puritans such as John Winthrop and Cotton Mather were anything but anti-intellectual. As for the argument from mass education, assuming there’s something to it, I can see how it could lead to non-intellectualism, but why anti-intellectualism?
It might be worth considering whether there are any good reasons to be anti-intellectual. Most discussions of it just assume that anti-intellectualism is a horrible vice that must be caused by some mental illness or character defect. But is it possible that intellectuals have earned some of the suspicion directed towards them?
如今如果还有人认真对待新教相关的论点，我会感到惊讶。事实上，约翰·温思罗普和科顿·马瑟等清教徒绝不是反智主义者。至于大众教育引发反智主义的论点，即便有一定道理，我也能理解它可能导致非智主义，但为何会演变成反智主义呢？
或许我们值得思考，是否存在支持反智主义的合理理由。大多数相关讨论都默认反智主义是一种可怕的恶习，必然源于某种精神疾病或性格缺陷，但有没有可能，知识分子自身的行为也招致了部分质疑？
The Vietnam War might be relevant. David Halberstam’s ironically-titled The Best and the Brightest (1972), on the origins of the war, expressed a common view: the policies that led to that disastrous engagement were crafted, not by old State Department hands (who typically opposed them), but rather by academics brought into government by President Kennedy. They prided themselves on their ability to offer “brilliant policies that defied common sense,” as Halberstam put it. In the aftermath of the war, intellectuals of this type were rightly denounced and ridiculed in books such as Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers (1976) and Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977). Much the same point, much earlier, was made by Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964).
越南战争或许与此相关。大卫·哈伯斯塔姆那本标题颇具讽刺意味的《出类拔萃之辈》（1972年）探讨了战争的起源，书中表达了一种普遍观点：导致这场灾难性战争的政策，并非出自美国国务院的资深官员（他们通常反对这些政策），而是由肯尼迪总统引入政府的学者们制定的。正如哈伯斯塔姆所描述的，这些学者为自己能提出“违背常识的绝妙政策”而自豪。战后，这类知识分子在格洛丽亚·爱默生的《胜者与败者》（1976年）和迈克尔·赫尔的《派遣》（1977年）等书籍中受到了应有的谴责和嘲讽。更早之前，斯坦利·库布里克的电影《奇爱博士》（1964年）也表达了类似的观点。
When intellectuals tell us that we can win conflicts by means of “forced-draft urbanization” (Samuel P. Huntington) and the proper analysis of “kill ratios” (Robert McNamara), or that nuclear war can be managed by adjusting the “choice matrix” to correctly-timed “calculation pauses” (Henry A. Kissinger), perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the public generalizes with prejudice to the class as a whole.
当知识分子告诉我们，通过“强制城市化”（塞缪尔·P·亨廷顿）和对“杀伤比”的恰当分析（罗伯特·麦克纳马拉）就能赢得冲突，或者通过调整“选择矩阵”并设置适时的“计算暂停”（亨利·A·基辛格）就能掌控核战争时，公众带着偏见对整个知识分子群体产生负面看法，或许也就不足为奇了。
Anti-intellectualism of this type is directed against intellectuals. There’s another type, though, which speaks to the non-intellectual and is inspired by the idea that the truth can be stated and acted upon without elaborate theorizing. In America this takes the form of the “village explainer,” who not only debunks the over-complications of intellectuals but also shows that our political problems and solutions are amenable to plain common sense. The village explainer is well-distributed among both the right (Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan) and the left (Joe Biden, Noam Chomsky).
这类反智主义是针对知识分子的，但还有另一种反智主义，它迎合了非知识分子群体，其核心观点是：真相无需复杂的理论阐述，即可被阐明并付诸实践。在美国，这种反智主义以“乡村解说者”的形式存在，他们不仅揭露知识分子的过度复杂化表述，还主张我们的政治问题及解决方案可以通过朴素的常识来应对。“乡村解说者”在右翼（唐纳德·特朗普、帕特·布坎南）和左翼（乔·拜登、诺姆·乔姆斯基）中都有不少代表人物。
We would do well to remember that the charge of anti-intellectualism is leveled by and for intellectuals, and to ask what motivates it and what intellectuals stand to gain by it. Because the fact is that Americans seek education in droves, as I know from personal experience teaching continuing studies courses for adults.
According to a Pew Research survey, 74% of American adults are “personal learners,” i.e. “they have participated in at least one of a number of possible activities in the past 12 months to advance their knowledge about something that personally interests them.” Of these, 80% “say they pursued knowledge in an area of personal interest because they wanted to learn something that would help them make their life more interesting and full.” This gives the lie to the claim that Americans are not interested in education for its own sake.
我们应当记住，反智主义的指责是由知识分子提出、并为知识分子服务的，我们需要追问这种指责背后的动机，以及知识分子能从中获得什么。事实上，美国人踊跃追求教育，我从自己教授成人继续教育课程的亲身经历中就能感受到这一点。
皮尤研究中心的一项调查显示，74%的美国成年人是“个人学习者”，即“在过去12个月中，他们至少参与过一项活动，以提升自己在个人感兴趣领域的知识水平”。其中80%的人表示，他们追求个人感兴趣领域的知识，是因为“想学习一些能让生活更有趣、更充实的东西”。这一数据驳斥了“美国人对教育本身不感兴趣”的说法。
We are dedicated readers, and seemingly will continue to be with millennials making greater use of public libraries than other generations. “Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, [a figure that is] largely unchanged since 2011.” (For comparison, this is in line with the 10–12 books per year read by the British, though less than the French mean of 16 per year.)
美国人是热爱阅读的群体，而且这一趋势似乎还将持续——千禧一代使用公共图书馆的频率高于其他世代。“总体而言，美国人平均每年阅读12本书，这一数字自2011年以来基本保持不变。”（作为对比，英国人每年平均阅读10至12本书，与美国人相当，但低于法国人的年均16本。）
If many Americans today disapprove of intellectuals, I suspect it is part of the general alienation of rural and less-educated Americans from the coastal elite and the way we represent ourselves. It has less to do with hating intellectual life as such than with the social position of intellectuals and the views and values we tend to express.
Below, Vice President Spiro Agnew. In 1969, during a speech at the Midwestern Regional Republican Conference in Des Moines, he characterized American intellectuals as “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”
如果如今许多美国人不认可知识分子，我怀疑这是农村地区和教育程度较低的美国人与沿海精英阶层之间普遍疏离的体现，也与知识分子自身的社会地位以及我们倾向于表达的观点和价值观有关，而非源于对知识生活本身的厌恶。
以下是美国前副总统斯皮罗·阿格纽的观点。1969年，他在得梅因举行的中西部地区共和党会议上发表演讲时，将美国知识分子形容为“一群软弱无能、傲慢无礼的势利小人”。
Charles Tips USA, citizen of
查尔斯·蒂普斯 美国公民
I always did exceptionally well on tests of academic achievement, so much so that I headed off to college intent on setting the academic world on fire and climbing the steps to a cushy position in one of our ivory towers. Then, one day midway through the fall of my second year, I was crossing the inner-campus drive toward the English building when I had a funny daydream of my favorite prof exiting the building and walking smack into the concrete lamppost ahead of me.
我在学业成绩测试中一直表现优异，以至于进入大学时，我一心想在学术界崭露头角，一步步登上象牙塔中舒适的职位。然而，在大二秋季学期过半的一天，我穿过校内车道走向英语楼时，突然做了一个有趣的白日梦：我最喜欢的教授走出大楼，径直撞上了我前方的混凝土路灯柱。
It hit me in an instant, “That could be me before long. I am using my intellect the way a novice chess player uses the queen to the exclusion of developing other pieces. I am on exactly the wrong course.” What to do?
And then I ran into Bob, a major will-o-the-wisp who had been a year ahead of me in my rural Texas high school, except that he’d moved in from California with a dad who was a submarine weapons engineer… a different sort of guy.
我瞬间意识到：“不久之后，我可能也会变成那样。我运用智力的方式，就像刚学下棋的人只知道用皇后，却忽略了其他棋子的培养。我走的路完全错了。”该怎么办呢？
就在这时，我遇到了鲍勃。他是个行踪不定的人，曾在我就读的得克萨斯州乡村高中比我高一级，后来他随父亲从加利福尼亚搬来这里——他的父亲是一名潜艇武器工程师，鲍勃也是个与众不同的人。
“Hey, Bob! Long time no see. Where ya been?”
“I hopped a freight ship.”
“You can still do that!?”
After a short exchange with Bob, that was my plan… Go down to the sea in ships. See the world.
“嘿，鲍勃！好久不见，你去哪儿了？”
“我搭了一艘货船四处闯荡。”
“啊，那你现在还能这么做？！”
和鲍勃简短交谈后，我有了计划：乘船出海，环游世界。
At the end of that semester that professor I daydreamed about asked me to his office. I had completed Theory of Grammar with him… how’s that for a pinhead course? I had also destroyed our textbook with one counterexample after another. He proposed we collaborate on a book together challenging the whole transformational approach to grammar. Me, a college sophomore collaborating on a book with a full professor? That would have vaulted me up to the parapets of the ivory tower!
那个学期结束时，我白日梦中的那位教授邀请我去他的办公室。我曾修过他的《语法理论》课程——这门课简直枯燥透顶。我还曾用一个又一个反例推翻了课本中的观点。他提议我们合作写一本书，挑战整个转换生成语法理论。我，一个大学二年级学生，要和一位正教授合作写书？这简直能让我一步登上象牙塔的顶端！
I told him no. “I’m hitchhiking to New Orleans to join the Seafarer’s unx and see the world.” And I did.
I remain very glad I did. Life at sea attracts very interesting characters, some quite unsavory but others quite worthy of respect, even for their smarts. These were not the sort of men who walk into lampposts; they were the sort of men who can improvise a working lamppost out of spare parts lying around… practical intelligence.
I ended up spending three of my next five and a half years working at sea as I used that income to put myself through college. It was very debatable which was the better education. I am satisfied to have had both.
但我拒绝了。“我要搭便车去新奥尔良，加入海员工会，环游世界。”我确实这么做了。
我至今仍为这个决定感到庆幸。海上生活吸引着各种各样有趣的人，有些人品行不端，但也有一些人非常值得尊重，尤其是他们的智慧。他们不是那种会撞到路灯柱的书呆子，而是能利用身边的备件临时组装出可用路灯柱的人——他们拥有实用的智慧。
在接下来的五年半里，我有三年时间在海上工作，用挣来的钱完成了大学学业。很难说哪种教育更有价值，但我很庆幸自己两者都体验过。
A doctor of philosophy degree does not make one an intellectual, but it is a pretty good proxy for rough comparison. Have you ever looked at the profiles of Quorans with PhDs? There are a few I can think of who are stellar contributors here who reap plenty of upvotes whenever they post. Four out of five struggle to get any upvotes.
Well, by the time I graduated, the siren call of the ivory tower was in my head again, and I headed to UCLA for a doctoral program, only I headed out in the early summer to get settled and the LA smog proved near-lethal. I bagged it and headed back to Texas where I soon ended up as an acquisitions editor at the University of Texas Press.
哲学博士学位并不等同于知识分子，但它可以作为一个粗略比较的不错参考。你有没有看过问答平台Quora上拥有博士学位用户的资料？我能想到有几位杰出的贡献者，他们每次发帖都能获得大量点赞，但五分之四的博士用户却很难获得任何点赞。
然而，毕业时，象牙塔的诱惑再次袭来，我前往加州大学洛杉矶分校攻读博士学位。但我在初夏就出发去安顿，洛杉矶的雾霾却严重到近乎致命，我只好放弃，回到了得克萨斯州。不久后，我在得克萨斯大学出版社担任了选题编辑。
Two of the first authors I worked with, Janet Spence and Bob Helmreich, were “optimum personality theorists.” I published their monograph on their research into gender. Virtually all gender studies before them had a breakout of male, female and androgynous. They broke “androgynous” in two, with “neuter” referring to those who scored low in both male and female skill sets. That revealed interesting new patterns.
As they explained to me, we do not judge people on grades. We do not judge people on IQ. We judge people, and do so amazingly quickly, on one criterion only—do they have useful skills?
我合作的首批作者中有两位是“最优人格理论家”——珍妮特·斯彭斯和鲍勃·赫尔姆赖希。我出版了他们关于性别研究的专著。在他们之前，几乎所有的性别研究都将性别分为男性、女性和双性人三类，而他们将“双性人”进一步细分为两类，其中“中性人”指的是在男性和女性技能维度上得分都较低的人，这一划分揭示了有趣的新规律。
正如他们向我解释的那样，我们评判一个人，不会看他的成绩，也不会看他的智商，而是会以惊人的速度基于一个唯一标准来判断——他们是否拥有实用的技能？
I’ll give you an example.
Years later, I had a middle-aged man making a purchase at my retail business in Palo Alto. A four-year-old boy looked through the sunglasses on a spinner rack near the cash register. In attempting to remove a pair, the lanyard caught and he pulled the whole rack down on the floor with glasses spilled everywhere.
In an instant, the man was squatted at eye level with the boy, whose mother behind him looked to be on the verge of a panic attack. “May I help you?” he quietly asked. They sat the rack upright and began rounding up and reloading the glasses.
我来给你举个例子。
（假设）多年后，我在帕洛阿尔托经营一家零售店，有一位中年男士来店里购物。当时，一个四岁的小男孩在收银台附近的旋转货架上翻看太阳镜，他试图取下一副眼镜时，挂绳被卡住，结果他把整个货架拉倒在地，眼镜散落一地。
就在那一刻，那位男士蹲下身，与小男孩平视——小男孩的母亲站在后面，看起来快要惊慌失措了。男士轻声问道：“我能帮你吗？”随后，他们一起将货架扶正，开始捡拾并重新摆放眼镜。
“Did we get them all?” The boy looked around and nodded.
“Help me set it back up on the counter.” And they did. The man turned to me, “Did we do an okay job?”
He thanked the boy, shook his hand and exited.
The mother, now beaming, approached me, “Do you know who that man was?”
“Yes, ma’am. That was Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University.”
And it made sense… in that brief thirty-second encounter the interpersonal skills were in evidence to suggest he would have a positive impact on thousands of young lives.
“我们都捡完了吗？”小男孩环顾四周，点了点头。
“帮我把货架放回柜台吧。”他们照做了。男士转向我问道：“我们做得还不错吧？”
“先生们，如果你们俩中有谁想尝试零售陈列工作，我很荣幸能雇用你们。”
他向小男孩道谢并握了握手，然后离开了商店。
小男孩的母亲此时笑容满面地走近我，问道：“你知道刚才那位男士是谁吗？”
“知道，夫人。他是斯坦福大学校长唐纳德·肯尼迪。”
这一切都说得通了——在那短暂的三十秒互动中，他展现出的人际交往能力，足以说明他会对成千上万年轻人的生活产生积极影响。
Are we wrong to care much more about evident skills over evident intellect?
So, I look at who is considered an intellectual in the US these days:
Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Thomas fucking Friedman!!! (and it goes downhill from there).
比起显而易见的智力，我们更看重实际技能，这难道错了吗？
正如斯彭斯和赫尔姆赖希向我指出的那样，对于那些智力出众但缺乏相关实用技能的人，这个世界会格外残酷。
如今，我来看看在美国被视为知识分子的都是些什么人：诺姆·乔姆斯基、理查德·道金斯、保罗·克鲁格曼、托马斯·该死的·弗里德曼！！！（接下来的人更是等而下之）。
That’s just a bunch of lefty opinion mongers. As my old shipmates might’ve pointed out, “Your opinion and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.”
Personally, I think we in the US are in a particularly healthy place with regard to intellectuals.
他们不过是一群左翼舆论贩子。就像我以前的船员伙伴可能会说的：“你的观点值不了多少钱，加一块钱才能买杯咖啡。”
就我个人而言，我认为美国在对待知识分子的态度上处于一种特别健康的状态。
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