Summary Of Mugambi Jouet's Exceptional America

In the book Exceptional America, Mugambi Jouet, an author and human rights lawyer who writes books about law, politics, and international affairs, writes in his second chapter about Anti-Intellectualism. He starts the chapter by talking about the belittling of education. How a “uncultured billionaire turned reality star” had won the election. He then states that people are not thirsty for knowledge and then brings in the word Anti-Intellectualism. He then explains this concept in depth. If you wonder what it is, it is the belief that intellect and reason are less important than actions and emotions in solving practical problems and understanding reality. To understand today’s America, we must first understand that our nation has gone

What Jouet states about this is that a student named Greg had feigned his interest about the subject they were studying, to receive a good grade from his professor or perhaps he was bluffing to his friends because he didn’t want to seem like an intellectual or a nerd (48). What Jouet means by this statement is that his friend was acting in a way that made others think he was an intellectual or a nerd, but what he did to escape this title was to pretend that he was doing it to receive a grade. What is sad today is the fact that we are scared to be an intellectual or a nerd. It seems that we reward those who are average and those who seek knowledge are labeled. This is what anti-intellectualism is, we see those who are educated as the elite and feel threatened by them. But during the beginning “The founding of the United States coincided with the American Enlightenment, an age of intellectual vitality” (49). In the beginning the thirst for knowledge drove the founding father into believing that every human being had the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, but now this knowledge has become useless. If we don’t use it why, do we need