WE SHALL HAVE A GREAT SIMPLIFICATION: The virtues of anti-intellectualism.
Btw, Tilting at Windmills is having a sale for instapundit readers.
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TO BE FAIR, THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE OUR “INTELLECTUALS” ARE SO AWFUL: Study: Anti-intellectualism has become an identity for some rural Americans.
AS TAXPAYERS TIRE OF PAYING FOR THIS STUFF, WE’LL BE TOLD IT’S BECAUSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM.” Mandatory U. Pittsburgh anti-racism course: will ‘inspire scholarly activism.’
PROF. JACOBSON: Anti-intellectualism at Cornell Law School: Student groups organize boycott of my course. Their loss.
WHEN PEOPLE GET TIRED OF SUBSIDIZING THIS STUFF, WE’LL BE TOLD IT’S BECAUSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:” Princeton prof: Covington HS kids symbol of ‘white privilege,’ a yearning for 1950s.
He’s not really wrong, though. When you’re a racist hater, the race you hate — in this case, white Catholic high schoolers — is a symbol of other things you hate. That’s how bigotry works. Sad that our universities are such centers of such hatred today.
BUT REMEMBER, WHEN PEOPLE DON’T TRUST THE PRESS, IT’S BECAUSE OF ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND STUFF: The New York Times Editorial Board Just Hired An Insanely Racist Writer.
WHEN TAXPAYERS GET TIRED OF FUNDING THIS STUFF, WE’LL BE TOLD IT’S BECAUSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:” Professors claim farmers’ markets cultivate racism: ‘Habits of white people are normalized.’
FRANK J. FLEMING: Anti-Intellectualism:
The main problem may be confusing “simple” with “dumb.”
If something is simple, then dumb people will believe it. And if dumb people believe something, then soon some conclude that smart people should believe something else. There’s a flaw in that philosophy.
Why shouldn’t you touch a hot stove? There’s no complex, smart answer to that. You’ll get roughly the same answer from Stephen Hawking that you’d get from Forrest Gump: It’s hot, and it will hurt.
But say you were going to argue that you should touch a hot stove. That would have to be a very complex answer, since it defies basic logic. And some people could run with that, talking in detail about pain receptors and the brain’s reaction to stimulus, and come up with a very smart-sounding argument on why touching a hot stove is a great idea.
Others will go further and mock all those ignorant people in the flyover states for their irrational fear of hot stoves and announce, “The most enlightened thing to do is to press one’s face against a hot stove.” Those people are what we call intellectuals.
Similarly, when someone comes up with a well-reasoned argument backed by top economists that two plus two equals five, there’s no brilliant way to refute it. The only response is: “No, you’re an idiot; it’s four.” But if you say that, you’ll be called anti-smart people.
Well, when the wave of anti-intellectualism sweeps America, Frank’s probably safe.
A DEFENSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:”
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.
If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.
(Thanks to reader Jonathan Stafford for the link.) This is much like what Neal Stephenson said in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:
The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.
Indeed.
UPDATE: It seems I have the above Stephenson quote wrong. A reader emails:
You’ve several times quoted Stephenson as writing:
“The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”
But every copy of “In the Beginning was the Command Line” I’ve been able to find does not contain this quote anywhere. I fact, the phrase “state power” does not appear anywhere in the text, not even once.
Following the link you provide (to Amazon.com), and using their ‘look inside the book feature’ turns up the following, and it’s the same in every version I’ve examined:
“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.”
I’m confident you’ll want to correct this error, as it seems somewhere along the line someone’s twisted Stephenson’s words somewhat, and accuracy in quotations and references are important.
My copy of Command Line is at the office, but looking inside the book on Amazon this seems to be right. Further research reveals that the opening bit about state power is an introductory phrase from a law review article that somehow got put inside the quote, which is probably my error, though since I originally posted this in 2002, I’m not positive where I got it from then. But I’ll go back and correct the earlier posts as well. I don’t think the sense of the quote is wrong, but nonetheless I apologize for the error, and thank the reader (whose name isn’t in his/her email address) for the correction. To err is human, but to be corrected by anonymous readers is blogging!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Santiago Valenzuela writes:
Thoughtful article, but I am always disturbed by conservative anti-intellectualism.
Particularly, what disturbs me, is that it equivocates intellectualism per se with a specific species of intellectualism (statism of various stripes.) Why have conservatives ceded the title of intellectual to their opponents, instead confidently putting their faith in their gut instincts, “common sense,” and other decidedly “non-intellectual” ways of deciding? While it may be superior to statism in this case, it doesn’t make it good.
So why not instead say “These intellectuals have failed. Our intellectuals have a better grasp of reality and how men must live in it”? Why a rejection of intellectualism per se? It troubles me, because I have a profound respect for rational thought and a systematic approach to the troubles humanity faces, and seeing people mock that because one crop of intellectuals chose their theoretical models over reality can’t bode well.
Well, anti-intellectualism can mean two things. One is opposition to intellectualism, but the other is opposition to self-described “intellectuals” — who, often as not, are more credentialed than educated, and frequently not particularly intellectual at all except in mannerisms and self-description. We should, I think, be more explicit about distinguishing between intellectuals, and activists who mimic the mannerisms of intellectuals.
MORE: Hanah Volokh emails:
I found your recent blog post on anti-intellectualism interesting, particularly the last comments from Santiago Valenzuela and your response to them. I also find conservative anti-intellectualism troubling, and I think it’s important to separate it into three separate points:
1. Left-wing intellectuals are wrong substantively.
2. Many people who claim to be intellectuals are actually not intellectuals at all, but activists.
3. Central planning is not the best way to run a government or economy, so intellectuals do not need to be running things.
Still, to understand why central planning is a bad idea, and what we should have instead, and to get at the answers to numerous substantive policy issues, intellectuals are crucially important.
You may also be interested in this recent Stanley Fish column that attempts to describe academic intellectualism to laymen. It is particularly helpful at identifying the difference between an intellectual and an activist (full disclosure: I was an attendee at the conference he describes).
Thanks!
FINAL UPDATE: The Stephenson quote comes from the original online version of the book, which is here.
MATT WELCH RESPONDS to claims that America is facing a tide of anti-intellectualism. Excerpt:
But I suspect that, to the contrary, Noam Chomsky’s never had a wider audience. It’s just that many of his new readers don’t agree with him, and aren’t shy about saying so, despite his “five decades” of comment compared to their five months. I would go as far as suggesting that what we are witnessing is a further democratization of political/intellectual debate, rather than some kind of grunting Cossack putsch.
Indeed. But I think that that may be what’s really bothering some people.
DISCRIMINATION: Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?
Higher education is rendering itself irrelevant and sectarian, and will then complain that the inevitable loss of public support stems from “anti-intellectualism.” But there is nothing intellectual about organizations that are organized around the promotion of political dogma. Or about people who are so organized.
LOL, DO THE LETTERS “F.O.” MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU? ‘Slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan,’ professor says. “Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State University Los Angeles who is a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement and once argued Jussie Smollet was framed, recently stated she thinks Taylor Swift fans are kinda racist.”
And when taxpayers tire of paying for this, as they are, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
THIS IS THE WAY: Josh Hawley just spewed nuclear fire on the candidate for U.S. Archivist, who once wrote about the “anti-intellectualism” of Republicans.
Watch this all the way. This is how it’s done. Excellent work by @HawleyMO 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/c0R5I3C45H
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 21, 2022
HIGHER EDUCATION AS TOTALITARIAN INDOCTRINATION: University assignment has students record themselves accusing someone of racism or homophobia. “An assignment shows an instructor directing students to locate someone that they can accuse of ‘racism,’ ‘ableist racist or homophobic use of language,’ or ‘micro-aggressions.'”
As taxpayers tire of funding things like this, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
ROGER SIMON: Yale Is Dead—and That’s a Good Thing.
I, frankly, had enough at the top. I was more concerned with what had happened to Yale, an institution I attended in the sixties as a playwriting student in the drama school.
In those days we had the likes of Marc Chagall as speaker (exceptional, I admit) who spoke of the necessity of love in the creation of his art. Now the “learning objective” on the poster advertising Dr. Khilanani’s talk is to “understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”
On that same announcement it reads: “It is the policy of Yale School of Medicine, Continuing Medical Education, to ensure balance, independence, objectivity and scientific rigor in all its educational programs.”
Like “five holes in the brain”?
What a farce Yale has become.
And of course it’s not alone. The entire Ivy League is sinking under a lava flow of endless, mind-rotting woke drivel.
Just the other day the Princeton classics department announced it would no longer require Latin and Greek for classics majors. What are they supposed to study then? Classic comics? I remember reading one of the Iliad when I was kid. It must still be around.
What motivates this and similar decisions (they’re being made across the country) is racism pure and simple, the assumption being—though they would of course vigorously deny it—that minorities don’t have the intelligence or the rigor to learn anything difficult. How insulting and how despicable.
The Ivies are obviously not alone in the onslaught of woke that has destroyed American higher education with only a very few exceptions. It’s everywhere, in part because Ivy graduates—starting in traditional “woke” areas (humanities, social studies) that have metastasized to virtually everything now, including the sciences—go out to spread these noxious doctrines as if it were the Gospel in supposedly lesser colleges and universities.
It was the Ivies, as much or more than any other institutions, that during the eighties and nineties nurtured Marxist critical theory (deconstruction and the like) and its spawn critical race theory that is currently driving apart the citizens of this country, accusing practically everyone of being a racist, especially those who aren’t.
So, at least to this Yale MFA, Yale is dead. And that’s a good thing. And a liberating thing.
Earlier: A Defense of “Anti-Intellectualism.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Admirable Evasions and the ‘Psychopathic Problem’ at Yale.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.”
Will that be on the exam?
Yale, like most of the best and most prestigious educational institutions today, is a bastion of woke identity politics.
Increasingly, it substitutes the new “planetary influences” of race, the “spherical predominance” of exotic sexuality for the more pedestrian talismans of learning, intellectual rigor, and civic responsibility.
In this sense, Dr. Khilanani is more a symptom than a cause of the disease.
She embodies, to be sure, an ugly and repellent expression of the sickness that is ravaging our elite institutions.
But the cause is in the spirit that would not only allow but actually celebrate such disgusting performances as “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”
Remember, this was not at some wacko fringe grotto but at Yale University, operating in this instance as an agent for the State of Connecticut.
People like Dr. Khilanani should be watched closely but, after being ostracized from any contact with the vulnerable, ignored.
It’s institutions like Yale and the regulatory apparatus of the state that need to be exposed and then dismantled.
Granted, it is a tall order.
Prudent people will give Dr. Khilanani a wide berth. But she has done us all a service by showing us the alternative.
Why are Democrat Party monopoly institutions such cesspits of racism?
Flashback: A Defense of “Anti-Intellectualism.”
DECOLONIZE HIGHER EDUCATION: Reclaiming American higher education: Idaho is cutting off social justice universities. “In one general education class at BSU a social work professor taught what he called the ‘solid viewpoint’ that ‘white people should be slaves.’ Social justice fanatics at BSU even bullied a small business off campus for supporting the police.”
As taxpayers tire of subsidizing this sort of thing, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
Plus:
The House of Representatives decisively rejected (13-57) Senate Bill 1179, which would have imposed a minor fiscal reduction on Idaho’s public universities as a consequence for their social justice agenda. In its place the legislature passed a bill cutting an additional $2.5 million from university budgets as a penalty for misusing public funds on social justice activism.
At the same time, a bill banning public universities from compelling students to adopt the divisive tenets of critical race theory and using public money to do so became law.
Expect more of this.
OUR RISIBLE ACADEMIC SECTOR: Academics: Biden administration will have to undo US’s ‘history of hate.’
As taxpayers tire of paying for this, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
PAUL JOHNSON ON WHY WE SHOULD BEWARE OF ‘INTELLECTUALS.’
I think I detect today a certain public skepticism when intellectuals stand up to preach to us, a growing tendency among ordinary people to dispute the right of academics, writers and philosophers, eminent though they may be, to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs. The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that skepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.
Indeed. Related:
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.
If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.
Plus:
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
Indeed. Their pronouncements should be viewed with deep suspicion, especially when — as is almost always the case — they have no skin in the game.
As taxpayers tire of funding this stuff, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
IN THE TRUMP ERA, ONE “INDEPENDENT” INSTITUTION AFTER ANOTHER HAS EXPOSED ITSELF AS FAITHLESS, CORRUPT, AND UTTERLY PARTISAN: ACLU Official Attacks University For Admitting Nick Sandmann While Professor Denounces His “Anti-Intellectual” Views.
Given the way those who describe themselves as intellectuals are behaving, I’d say “anti-intellectualism” is likely to be a growth area. To be fair, this is a pretty low-level ACLU guy, but sadly it’s pretty consistent with their general behavior lately.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INSTITUTIONAL RACE-HATE EDITION: A University of North Carolina professor claimed that all Whites have been “deputized” to kill Black people. She then claimed that those criticizing that statement were racist.
As taxpayers tire of funding this sort of thing, we’re told it’s due to “anti-intellectualism.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College director: ‘Every white person in this country is racist.’ As taxpayers tire of supporting this kind of thing, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
CONCLUSIONS FIRST, RESEARCH AFTER — IF AT ALL: Academic journal seeks evidence of ‘structural racism’ in policing, won’t promise to accept contrary evidence. As taxpayers tire of funding this kind of thing, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY: Iowa State English Professor To Class: If You Don’t Support BLM, Abortion, Etc., I’m Tossing You Out.
As Glenn has noted, “When taxpayers tire of funding of this sort of thing, we’ll be told it’s because of anti-intellectualism. But maybe it’s just that there’s not much actual intellectualism going on in higher education anymore.”