Dumb America? You cannot be serious

FT.com

More than four decades ago, historian Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer prize for his seminal study of anti-intellectualism in American life. Troubled by a political culture in which Adlai Stevenson was successfully taunted as an "egghead" in the 1952 presidential race by Richard Nixon, Hofstadter looked into America's history and discovered "our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity".
As early as 1642, the Puritan John Cotton warned: "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you bee." Two centuries later, reflecting on the politics of the Indiana frontier, Baynard R Hall observed: "We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one . . . since smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled."
In the era of an unintellectual and famously inarticulate US president, Hofstadter's thesis has fresh resonance, particularly outside the US. For a world threatened by the unilateralist inclinations of the globe's sole superpower, it can be comforting to imagine that all that might is wielded by vulgar rubes who, for all their omnipotence, must subsist on a wretched diet of fast food and faster pop culture.
But any European snobs travelling to America this summer, please beware. For alongside its tradition of anti-intellectualism, Americaalso boasts a long-standing streak of earnestness. De Tocqueville called it "gravity" and observed that, in contrast to the "tumultuous and boisterous gaiety" of leisurely pursuits in aristocratic societies, the democratic Americans "prefer those more serious and silent amusements which are like business".
Based on my own highly unrepresentative and personal experience of the past few months, I can report that America's serious side is alive, well and at a dinner party near me. In London, dinner party guests can expect good wine, variable food and tumultuous and boisterous banter about mortgages, schools and, if they are lucky, as the evening wears on, increasingly lewd gossip.
But in New York dinner parties aren't just like business - they are business. A good hostess distributes biographies of her guests in advance - and a reading list. That is because at the best tables in town, the evening is about serious discussion of serious issues.
At the Park Avenue home of a publishing executive, when the three small tables of guests finished their main course the hostess introduced everyone present with the fluency of a talk-show anchor and then kicked off a 45-minute group discussion of Africa, based on a Council on Foreign Relations report and focusing mainly on Darfur and economic development. At the Upper East Side townhouse of a hedge fund pioneer, we started talking with the first course. The subjects were US global competitiveness, public schools and lower-income savings rates, and only students - sorry, guests! - who had read three policy papers were likely to keep up with the debate. Russian democracy was the theme at the Central Park pad of a legendary financier and philanthropist; Chinese economic development at a lawyer's place near the East River. My favourite was the evening devoted to brainstorming ways of raising the - collectively agreed to be lamentably lower than Europe's - level of public discourse in America.
The evenings end promptly - it is generally quite easy to be home by 10:30 - and while wine is served, only the foreign hacks seem to drink much. It is all done in a spirit I think de Tocqueville would recognise. "I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth," he observed. "But I have since seen the Americans and have changed my mind."
It may sound grim, but to my mind, what makes this modern-day, American gravity rather charming is that, perhaps thanks to a consciousness of the rival anti-intellectual national current, it is utterly unpretentious. These are conversations where statistics trump sound-bites; facts are prized over flair. One evening, a European investment banker, speaking beautifully with a slight accent, began to illustrate a point with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Sensing his faux pas in mid-flow, he hastened to explain that he wasn't trying to parade his own learning, just that he happened to be reading a Jefferson biography at the moment.
Park Avenue is admittedly quite a long way from Main Street, but the high seriousness of the east coast establishment does have a few echoes in the popular culture at the moment. The country's arch-egghead, Al Gore, is enjoying a rare moment of popular acclaim, making the cover of Vanity Fair and packing cinemas with his drippingly earnest environmental documentary. And many of nation's favourite celebrities - from George Clooney to Angelina Jolie - are going to great lengths to work on, and associate themselves with, serious issues.
This is the face of America which so enchants some of Europe's own nerdish Americanophiles, such as UK chancellor Gordon Brown. But Americans themselves don't generally see their own society as being particularly cerebral or serious. More than two centuries after the American Revolution, genuflection before the altar of European culture is still routine, as in a recent book review in the Mother Jones magazine which praised the British authors for their "dry wit, which seems the birthright of every Oxford graduate".
The rising economies of India and China, with their perceived iron work ethics and scientific prowess, provoke an even more profound sense of inferiority. The governor of a mid-western state with whom I shared a Washington panel a few weeks ago spoke with some awe of the mathematical and linguistic gifts of teenagers he had recently met at a Chinese middle school. Over dinner in a New York club, a private wealth manager unfavourably contrasted his own, indolent children with the young girl who gave him a tour of Beijing for free on a recent Saturday afternoon, as a way to practise her English.
Geekishness, it seems, has been an important part of America's greatness for some time. That may be why Asia's emerging nerds feel like such a threat. But, at least on the evidence of the country's dining rooms, the eggheads are not yet vanquished.