Psychology Today published a piece in June that argued anti-intellectualism was the cause of social dysfunction in the United States. To wit, mass shootings, black shootings, climate change denial and the rise of Donald Trump. It was a sneering and over-reaching piece and the response to it was loudly divided. When boiled down, the intellectual is simply someone – trakky daks and a paucity of teeth are no barrier – who applies critical thinking to a problem. It takes patience and practice but it's not rocket science. Yet the view of the intellectual as an airy pontificator remains, and one has to wonder to what extent this serves to discourage people from putting on their thinking caps. Sure, we may be a clever country as far as scientific and medical innovation go, but we're not fostering generous, creative thinkers who can lead us out of the moral swamp (asylum seekers, Indigenous history and identity, radicalisation of unhappy youth).

Reaction sucks up vastly more oxygen in the public sphere than reflection. And for reflection to do its work, raw-scab opinions must be put aside, at least for the moment, while other possibilities are considered. Not happening. How come? Five years ago, former Labor MP and bright boy Lindsay Tanner wrote about the value of intellectual life: "Perhaps it's one of those things that should be restricted to consenting adults in private. Few politicians would own up to being an intellectual. In the present age of vacuous populism, intellectual means elitist, theoretical and out of touch. I suspect a new version of Barry Jones would struggle to win community support." Indeed, 20 years ago, Barry Jones was asked to name the nation's top intellectuals but only managed 17 names. Joy Damousi​ is professor of history in the University of Melbourne's School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, whose research includes the history of intellectual life in Australia, which has flowered periodically. "During the post-war reconstruction, Australia led the world in social reforms ... and there was a lot of debate around those issues," she says. "Those enduring policies didn't make political or economic sense, but they made social and cultural sense ... there was a commitment to a set of principles and values in terms of what kind of society you wanted to make for the next generation."

For evidence of intellectual decline, Damousi points to the current level of political debate. "Compared to that in France and the US, it's arguably fairly undeveloped, unsophisticated" – a consequence of politicians "electioneering most of the time rather than leading. The whole political landscape has changed". The complaint that politicians are held captive by a 24-hour news cycle and the tyranny of the sound bite, is old hat. So too the complaint that our leaders lack vision. Jeff Kennett recently declared Australia has been leaderless for a decade. There's a tendency to shrug and say "way it goes". Not good. The reliance on knee-jerk slogans – "you're either with us or you're against us," to quote our Prime Minister – is papering over looming issues that desperately need to be addressed. For example, Associate Professor Christopher Cordner​, a philosopher with the University of Melbourne, paints a scenario that would cause a flame-out on talkback radio. "This kind of divisiveness is increasingly prominent, not just in our political culture but everywhere. If you take a broad enough perspective, you can see it as an index of our sense that the days of the nation state are numbered.

"It's not something that happens overnight. Issues of climate change, mass movement of refugees, the interlocked global economy put pressure on this unit of self understanding ... the influx of Africans into Europe is an index of the issue ... it's not going to stop." The short version: there are big changes happening in the world, and the rhetoric of protecting our borders plays to people's sense of their own identity being under threat. That's not a discussion I can see happening any time soon. The response instead is to put the walls up, by way of towing back the boats and closing down discussion. "There has always been nationalism, a certain kind of rallying together," Cordner says. "It can be healthy and productive ... or a kind of bunkering that leads to a ratcheting up of problems, rather than a creative plan in dealing with them." An impediment to making a creative plan is the oppositional nature of debate in Australia, both at the political level and at the footy ground. "Your position tends to be defined by your opposition to something rather than a creative articulation of possibility. Look at the history wars, the culture wars: it's all about being against what the other stands for." Deakin University anthropologist Rohan Bastin suggests anti-intellectualism in Australia "is a result of a value we hold very dear: a deep sense of equality. But how can a racist be egalitarian? Well, it's easy when they confuse equality with sameness and immediately create an in-group."

In other words, our famed egalitarianism relies on assimilation, a flattening out of identity and a failure to recognise, value or simply cope with difference. Professor Bastin says anybody "who refuses to assimilate for reasons of their history of suffering at our hands or because they subscribe to their own sense of identity and, within that, their own concepts of equality," is on the outer. All of which limits the scope of the national conversation as to who we really are and what we can aspire to. But surely professional thinkers such as Bastin – a member of the academy – should be taking up the slack? If they had the time, sure. The problem there, he says, is that universities, ever on the scrounge for funding, put a lot of pressure on their faculty to publish papers at a great volume, but without much concern for quality. "Which means that a lot of what is being published, to satisfy your KPIs (key performance indicators) is drivel," he says. Michael Pusey is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales. He is also author of Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind. He introduced the term into public usage. His book was published in 1991 and all but predicted the social cost of neo-liberal, free-market reform.

Part of that fallout is a diminished public intellectual conversation: economics dominates all policy deliberations. In an email Pusey writes: "Even 40 years ago we were clear that economics was nothing more than a tool kit for improving the quality of life of a national population. Today it is an ideology that reduces and limits all intelligent discussion to an economic calculus that is discredited and which is for the most part inimical to both good governance and its proper aim, which is to serve the larger interests of a national population." For Pusey, it is the quality of life for a national population that ought to set the terms of all political debate and policy. "But this, with all other discussion, has been hollowed out." In a phone interview, Pusey notes that a rigorous national conversation "about the things that matter" – notably climate change and the environment – can only flower in a society that values critical thinking. "The very notion of criticism has been radically devalued," Pusey says. "Today criticism, for the government, just means you're knocking us, you're the enemy – when true criticism serves in the quest for a better argument."

If we're not seeing it happen among our leaders, what example do we have to follow at home?