My day was slightly marred by yet another interaction with someone whose opinion of history is that it's slightly more useful than moss. There is a broad and deep well of anti-intellectual sentiment in the modern US (less in the rest of the world, as I understand). It is present, prevalent and deeply disturbing. Why does this culture care so little for educated opinions? Surely not every scientist and academic is a sinister conspiracy theorist.
The distrust of intellectuals affects historians, but we get something even worse that the scientists get...the hard science types might be mistrusted by society at large, but most people don't go so far as to suggest that science itself is useless and that nobody should be a scientist. Unfortunately, my fellow historians and I are not so lucky.
Today someone commented on a discussion posting of mine with something along the lines of "You actually paid for a Ph.D. in ancient history?! LOL! There's a moron born every minute." I'm paraphrasing, but you get the general drift. That was pretty good, but the crown has to go to the guy who once told me that (again, paraphrasing) "I wasn't as smart as I thought, instead of graduate school I should have gotten (quote) 'street smarts' and started a hot dog stand instead." I am not, unfortunately, kidding.
I don't consider myself a snob. I don't have "Dr." written on my checks, and I don't constantly interject where or how I got my Ph.D. into conversations (I know people who do do this, but I don't). If I mention it at all, its usually in the form of lending some weight to my opinions, as in, "take my word for it, I spent ten years learning about this stuff." I mention, for example, on the history group that I belong to on this site, that I'm a Ph.D. with knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean...noting that I'd be happy to suggest books or opinions if anyone so desires.
While this is frustrating for me (and probably other academics and most non-academics on this site) its really dangerous for our society as a whole. Even for history. The old trope that you'll be doomed to repeat history if you don't learn from it is largely a false promise...simply because humans are so terrible at learning from their mistakes and have incredibly short memories. But our complete lack of respect for people who study stuff is appalling and dangerous. It essentially ensures that we'll repeat the mistakes of the past, since we don't bother to learn about it at all. The Romans would have been shocked, I think. Read the introduction to Livy and you'll find a beautiful summary of why history is a vital subject of study.
And it goes without saying that anti-intellectual forces in our society are dangerous beyond the simple repetition of past mistakes. We don't like scientists much more than we do historians or philosophers, and so climate change is dismissed as a hoax or a conspiracy. We can't have green energy, because it "isn't feasible."
Those of us who study owe it to ourselves and the well-being of everyone else to do what little we can to try and reverse this trend. Make sure your kids read as much as they can. Recommend good books to your friends (Wealth and Democracy, Working-War, Technowar, The Omnivore's Dilemma). We can't let ignorance hold sway. There's too much at stake in a world with a changing climate and an increasingly unsupportable human population.
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