Anti-Intellectualism (Mental Hedonism)

     Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind. Living in a sensuous culture and an increasingly emotional democracy, American evangelicals in the last generation have simultaneously toned up their bodies and dumbed down their minds. The result? Many suffer from a modern form of what the ancient stoics called “mental hedonism”―having fit bodies but fat minds.

     This contemporary form of anti-intellectualism fits perfectly with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s prediction of the arrival of “the last man” (and woman). Secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus because of “the death of God” they would confuse heaven with happiness and happiness with health.

     Nietzsche’s description in Thus Spake Zarathustra is the perfect parody of the joggers and dieters’ America of the late twentieth century. Health has replaced both heaven and ethics. Athleticism is the new form of asceticism. Positive thinking is prized above reflection and meditation. Human experience, with its rich, tragic, and ironic complexities, is scaled down to the glow of physical well-being. And self-knowledge, self-mastery, and self-fulfillment are promised through exercise and eating right. “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night,” Nietzsche commented. “But one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

(Os Guinness, Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994, 9-10)