From Evan Kindley's review of Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture:
(h/t Arts and Letters Daily)The transition from “long-hair” to “egghead” as a favored term of anti-intellectual abuse deserves some scrutiny. The two terms aren’t quite congruent; a decent 21st century equivalent of the former might be “hipster,” with its implication of pretense and smug self-superiority, while an equivalent to the second would be “nerd” or “geek,” connoting haplessness and myopic concentration on a single area of expertise. Both are terms of derision, but the derision is of a qualitatively different kind. ...
Oppenheimer and Elon
Most importantly—and Lecklider fails to make as much of this as he might—the passage from “long-hair” to “egghead” indexed a postwar shift from the humanities to science as the master discourse of American intellectualism (and thus, logically, anti-intellectualism as well). Long-hairs lounged around and loved classical music, fine art and literature; eggheads, meanwhile, toiled away at fearsomely difficult calculations and solved fundamental mysteries of the universe. While both were ridiculous, the former were more contemptible, because their sophistication benefited only themselves, whereas the latter produced something for the common good, even if they appeared impenetrable or insufferable in the process. ...
Furthermore, popular culture ... has today been thoroughly colonized by the egghead, and by “geek culture.” The crowd-pleasing anti-intellectualism of The Freshman and the Sophomore has given way to the cuddly eggheads of The Big Bang Theory and the startup-worship of films like The Internship. Again, these developments have much to do with the rise of the scientific and technological elite and the relative decline of the humanist one. If the paradigmatic intellectual of the 20s was the artist and of the 50s the scientist, today it’s the tech CEO.
