I’ll play along. I’d say Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan. Societies of continuing celebration of poetic, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievement.
(That’s a short list, and a fast-thought out one that is shorter than it should be. Don’t crucify me for it. There are entire ranges of the planet I’ve skipped)
I think pro-intellectual culture is one that values thoughtful questioning, including of the status quo. Opinions are required to have a good argument; dogma (religious, political, technical, or otherwise) is not acceptable. It's G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis instead of fundamentalists; it's The Federalist Papers instead of "the free market fixes all problems"; it's original Agile instead of process-Agile; it's real Hungarian notation instead of MS-docs-"Hungarian" notation.
An important point that is being almost universally ignored here.
The history of a modern, organized US is about 150 years old at this point. Anything prior to the Civil War is a baby-level of development, hopeful, maybe, could be, nation just learning how to crawl. It's rather absurd that the US is being browbeaten in this thread against cultures that have existed for many hundreds of years or more; in some cases a thousand plus years.
The US has shifted from being ~80% white European-descendant culturally to being 55%-60% (in real terms, as the US has ~25 million illegal immigrants that are never net leaving, and they contribute culturally to the pool) in the span of 40x years, with a massive injection of Asian and Latin-American-Hispanic cultures since the early 1970s. With the point being, the US isn't even remotely close to being a settled, well established cultural structure. Who knows what it will or won't become in 200 more years.
* The US is still 70+% white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
* The number of undocumented immigrants is much lower than that: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/illegal-immigrants-pop...
Also:
* I don't see any reason to believe nobody has more than one "cultural identity."
* Race is really more about culture than biology too. Maybe less so, but if for some reason you were motivated to come up with some categorization of people based on their biological ancestry, the races that we talk about wouldn't make a ton of sense. When you hear people saying that race is "socially constructed," this is what they're talking about. The Irish weren't considered white a century ago, and it's not like the change came about due to some scientific breakthrough.
The history of the Irish is a good example of how ethnic groups change and assimilate over time.
I had a similar experience when I visited Finland for the first time after knowing of it only as a country with high achievement in schools and free university education. Most of the Finns I knew abroad came from these highly educated backgrounds. But when I visited the country, suddenly I came face to face with school dropouts mopping floors and alcoholic layabouts, just like in any other country on earth.
In Jewish religion, erudition is held in high regard, and in some Jewish communities that carries over to intellectuals as well; but - in some, it's the other way around, i.e. intellectualism is considered straying from focus on religious studies to pursuing Gentile (non-Jewish) thought and life.
... and that's not to speak about the anti-Intellectualism Israel is rife with, these days.
Could you explain your rationale here?
India absolutely has one of the longest poetic traditions and it fascinates me endlessly.
I’d have been remiss to say that’s all that qualifies in my mind. That’s why I said it was not at all the end of what I’d consider an intellectual society.
I’m hesitant to bring present-day Russia into it as I qualified with “continuing”. I say this as someone who studied Russian literature when I was younger.
Again, please don’t discount my qualifiers above. It was by no means a survey list—just meant to illustrate my main point with societies I do have experience with.
I could only conclude that reading and the intellectual life was the pursuit of only a small minority, but because of India’s huge population, even that small minority was large enough to be self-sustaining and make its impact, even if it was rather hidden away from sight.
My gut says that "any country if given the same economic opportunities could produce equal achievement". Obviously, that's in a completely idealized world.
As it stands in actual, real life across human history, I do think that India, Russia, and China are more notable than most countries if we look at those criteria across history, but with "extra weight" given to modern day (e.g. Greece would not qualify with the "extra modern day weight" scale, but would be highly ranked if we only looked historically).
All 3 belong in an "unranked top 5". Just my personal opinion.
Rough guess of share of present day intellectual production by country (I like to make stuff up):
US: 30% Western Europe: 30% China: 15% Japan: 5% India: 5% CIS countries: 5%
He had an audience - admittedly not a huge audience, but he certainly wasn't being ignored. There aren't many places that would happen.
Francophone cultures - and especially in Paris and Montreal - seem more comfortable with people who are clever, thinky, maybe creative, and a bit unusual, than Anglophone cultures.
The UK and US have their own version, but access is controlled more by class rather than raw talent. France is hardly class-free, but it seems more open to blue sky philosophy than the US, which seems to be impressed primarily by thought leadership in a corporate context, or social and academic theories with dogmatic authoritarian overtones - even among progressives - than in knock-about philosophical experimentation for the sake of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialism
The suggestion is that this is less likely to occur in an American city.
I can apply your statement to other celebrity academics: scientists, astromoners, physicists, etc. And for all of those professions I have a hard time believing that any "celebrity" (i.e. Steven Hawking, Brian Cox, Noam Chomsky) that emerges from them produces a "toxic atmosphere of fraud" or undermines the work of other professionals in the field. But it may depend on who you consider a "celebrity".
That aside Latour was infamously an originator of the "Post Truth" and his support for utter nonsense. It is true that social aspects affecting what science is considered, achieves mindahare, is funded, and catches on and progresses. It is undeniable as seen by the derth of statistics and genetics papers from the USSR when both were declared bourgeoisie pseudosciences. It affecting what is actually right? Hell no. Although at least to his credit he realized what a monster he had created.
Philosophy isn't neccessarily bad but it isn't neccessarily good either. Given that it is often defined via its independence from the real world there are many spaces to explore. Which includes the potential to be absolute pseudouintellectual or antiintellectual nonsense. That makes it different from the other examples - they are verifiable and it is possible to call bullshit and outright prove them wrong.
"Celebrity philisopher" may just mean that it flatters preconceptions without the ability to be countered via hard proof that "no the moon is not and cannot be made of cheese".
The CCP leadership is intellectual and is pro intellectual for its own cadres. But are they pro populace intellectualism?
Same for the Bolsheviks.
And to be honest, I think GWB's anti-intellectualism is as much a problem as is disconnected intellectualism who take it upon themselves to do what's "right" for the population at large.
While if we're giving more credit to historical influence than modern day, Germany would make the list, I think they fall off if you give weight to the modern day. Nothing wrong with them, they're simply no longer a remarkable, intellectual nation on 2019's leaderboard.
Russia, China, and Japan I'd agree with, although I am not a big fan of the "brand" of intellectualism the first two adhere to.
Korean culture definitely venerates academic achievement, even if those achievements shouldn't include upheavals in social philosophy, and even if there is a strict social order for determining who is allowed to have creative license. Simply learning the lessons of the past, and skillfully transmitting them to future generations, is a more important social function than making new advances.
I would go so far as to say that one of the causes of American anti-intellectualism is the fetishization of groundbreaking discovery to the extent that being a skilled teacher is looked down on. An intellectual community can't survive across multiple generations without a respected class of specialized teachers who also deeply understand the topics they are tasked with passing on to children. The dominant attitude in America is that teaching is for failures; the saying goes, "those who can't do, teach."
what about success within traditional academic institutions?
In fact, your point about academic intellectualism only gives more credence to the point I was making in the first place.
While under the Soviet Union intellectual pursuits were more appreciated among the general population than in other countries (though naturally there were significant restrictions on what topics could be breached in art and literature), a lot of that culture disappeared in Russia after 1991. You don’t see many commuters reading belles lettres on the metro any more, chess still has its fans but nowhere near like in the socialist era, and Russian television today is as garish and sensationalistic as anywhere else.
One of the reasons that there was such a book culture across the Eastern Bloc is because books were extremely cheap by local standards, but there was little other media to consume or few other products to spend one’s money on. After the fall of Communism, books were no longer as cheap because the state no longer artificially set their prices at low levels, and there was an explosion of new, free television, radio, and magazine media that the population could consume instead, and there were new consumer goods to spend money on (when one had money, as there were some rocky times).
Personally I think intellectualism consists of a few components. The first is pure, raw "intelligence" or "brilliance", neither of which is particularly well defined, but it is my main criteria. For a nation, this is is essentially the power of science, invention, technology, etc.
Next would be something like "diversity of thought" and "beauty of art". This includes both how "free" the people are, as well as how meaningful the creative, artistic, philosophical works of the nation are. This includes art, poetry, scripture, books, TV, music, theater, etc.
Finally, I use a "modern day weighting" system. This means, if there was some hypothetical country that was historically a powerhouse, but was not remarkable in modern day, they'd be ranked equally to a country which was a world leader today, but inconsequential historically (or didn't exist until recently).
With these criteria, I believe a country like China has sheer intellectual power and the artistic contributions which outweigh the (quite terrible) conformity of thought; Korea, on the other hand, is "too conformist" given the weight of its contributions.