Re: Right-Wingers and Anti-Intellectualism

Posted by tallman at 1:24pm Aug 12 '05
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It depends on what you mean by intellectualism. From your post, I gather that when you refer to someone as an intellectual, you mean someone with intelligence or with a certain level of education.

But most anti-intellectuals don't use that definition. Intellectualism isn't just seeking out knowledge, it's seeking to derive knowledge from reason alone, and if you practice intellectualism too long, you get pretty far from reality pretty quickly. Evidence doesn't matter as much as the cleverness of your idea. I tend to associate intellectualism with postmodern literary writing - the people who claim that Jesus was actually a woman, or that JFK was gay, or people who use the term "deconstruct" a lot. Most of those claims are forwarded because they are clever, and they have clever justifications. Truth is regarded as maleable, and this is especially frustrating when these intellectuals turn their focus on science or mathematics.

Indeed, there are a couple of great examples of scientists who studied the phenomenon. This one was written by a physicist:

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

He wrote his nonsense article ("Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity") and it actually got published.

This engineer went to a conference mixed with techies and pomo lit-crits, and rewrote his presentation in the nonsense terms he heard throught the conference. He opened his presentation with:

The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

The only reason the English professors caught on was because he couldn't keep a straight face while delivering the line (and the techies in the audience started laughing as well). Both articles are excellent, and might give you a good idea of why regular people tend not to think too much of intellectuals. Another couple quotes:

The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.

Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risqu� as to be newsworthy.

What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time.

Particularly notable is his observation that most people are required to achieve some sort of results, whereas intellectuals just have to produce something clever (which, incidentally, can't be measured). In the end, he concludes that there is value there:

So, what are we to make of all this? I earlier stated that my quest was to learn if there was any content to this stuff and if it was or was not bogus. Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity.

In the end, I think people are anti-intellectual because they've heard way too many bogus statements from self-important intellectuals who make statements like "E=MC^2 is a sexed equation because it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us." That's a clever statement and sounds nice, but is it any wonder that the feminist who made this statement isn't taken very seriously by most people? The same goes for the claim that the Big Bang theory is sexist and a million other absurd claims made by intellectuals.

I seem to have veered off track and I haven't really answered your questions, but I wanted to post those articles because they're really funny and they genuinely do make an attempt at explaining why intellectuals don't get much credit these days...

~[private]