This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
Another disparate point:
Regarding the accumulation of knowledge, an endless curiosity is good thing, and it should be commendable to want to know and learn as much as possible, but at the same time, there’s only so much one person can learn and know. If a single person took the time to read every single work of literature ever written, to learn every historical fact in existence, and to understand every mathematical equation utilized, he or she would never have the time to accomplish anything in the world, because they were to busy learning and doing nothing else. There’s a reason you have academics who respectively specialize in modern French history, American history, Russian history, Renaissance history, 19th century French literature, etc. It isn’t humanly possible for one person to have an encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of all these fields, even if the person has an endless curiosity. At the end of the day you have to say to yourself, “If I want to accomplish what I plan to in life, I have to pick and choose what intellectual pursuits I engage in, or else I’ll never accomplish anything fruitful in my life.” Such an attitude is hardly anti-intellectual. It’s being realistic. I’m not saying intellectual pursuits are a waste of time, far from it, but if someone wants to write novels of philosophical treatises of his or her own, he or she can only spend so much time reading, in order to make time to write.
For example, do we need to feel ashamed of ourselves, because we’re not familiar with the some of the specifics American Civil War or because we haven’t read either Dostoevsky’s The Idiot of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? I don’t think so. Don’t worry, these are just random examples. What I’m saying is I’m not against learning about the Civil War or reading The Idiot. I’m against being made to feel ignorant, because I’m unfamiliar with them. Maybe said person is unfamiliar with the Civil War, because he or she was busy learning about Napoleon’s Conquests or the Bolshevik Revolution and hasn’t gotten around to learning about the Civil War, or maybe The Idiot and Chaucer have gone unread because said person was reading Great Expectations and drowning him or herself in Ulysses, just as examples. Just my thoughts.
You are clumping entirely different arguments into one point, the haphazard argument that people of the new generation do not value reading/thinking, more specifically, you go on to make the argument that this new generation is substituting the values of understanding for the mere act of memory retrieval, and that because of the influence of the Internet, this memory retrieval is able to be stored on a cloud; and thus people are becoming the mediums of data rather the creators of knowledge.
you cannot be more further from the truth, to address your many faults we must first separate your oddly-clumped argument into different points
to briefly start
it is true that college is a waste of time
it is true that books are a outdated medium- in such that they are no longer the most economic way to publish information
it is not true that books are regarded as useless, if they were we would no longer be discussing them, and you would not even be blogging about them
it is true that experts no longer have any special role in determining information, in fact, experts never had any special role in determine information, there never was a gatekeeper to information and there never will be, people will believe what they want to believe
i have read through several of your blogs but chose to respond to this one because i felt this is at the core of your own personal philosophies, which is incorrect,
do not confuse memory retrieval with passion, those who have passion will create knowledge by searching through their own truths, those who lack passion will do what the majority of mankind has always done, nothing.
Many people, like you, have claimed that I am “clumping entirely different arguments into one point.” This is a puzzling thing to say, because I am obviously making a single, general claim, that a lot of Internet geeks are becoming anti-intellectual. To support this point, I adduced five related facts about what many geeks now believe. Just because the various facts are not all mutually entailing, it does not follow that they, both individually and as a group, do not provide some support for the general conclusion. Take, for example, the quite commonly expressed view that books are “outmoded” because the future lies with collaborative works and much shorter forms of communication. Someone who says this is coming out against the source of a huge amount of the world’s history, philosophy, and so forth, as being “outmoded.” That is, of course, just the sort of thing that an anti-intellectual says. Now, you might want to defend each of these claims, as perfectly rational. If so, then perhaps the position you should take is that, in our brave new world, anti-intellectualism has become rational. I deeply disagree (for reasons that did not appear in this particular post), but that would be a prima facie coherent thing to say.
This blog post, with its main idea that many Internet geeks are becoming anti-intellectual, is most certainly not “at the core of [my] personal philosophies.” (By the way, the fact that you used the word “philosophies” in reference to my beliefs indicates to me that you have never had a course in philosophy. One never refers to the “philosophies” (plural) of a person, but the “philosophy” of the person. A philosophy, generally speaking, is a whole system of ideas, not just any one idea. You could certainly use some more exposure to philosophy and no doubt the other liberal arts, as this would greatly improve your thinking and writing.)
Intellectuals have to take some responsibility for the rise in anti-intellectualism. So many of them have abandoned the honest search for knowledge and have taken up an unabashed posture of political activism. In this role their most identifying characteristic is their arrogant attitude toward other people and their values and traditions.
Then, too, many intellectuals are unauthentic, posers who take on what they think are the trappings of intellect without any serious effort to acquire knowledge. Often they are not that intelligent, and they are irritating in the way they parrot what they think is intellectual orthodoxy.
And intellectuals are often messing things up. With President Obama we had a fellow who was advertised as a Brainiac with all the relevant certifications as an intellectual and yet has made a hash out of most things since being elected.
The increasing resistance to college education comes, I think, straight out of the expense of that education and the prospect faced by many potential students of going deep in debt to get it. In the face of this there is the doubtful value of that education when it comes to trying to get a job.
So some push-back against intellectualism and the need to spend all that money to acquire knowledge (or, more properly, the certification of having acquired knowledge) is to be expected.
You make some valid points here. I never said that the push-back against college and contemporary intellectuals (not intellectualism) was not understandable. Indeed, it is. I completely agree with you regarding political activism (see my replies), and you make a fair point that arrogance has become a distinctive characteristic of academics on the radical left. This is off-putting mainly to that minority of young people who are not left-leaning themselves, however! And you’re surely the resistance to college comes in large part from the expense of college. But that isn’t what I was complaining about if you look at my essay. My complaint is about those geek anti-intellectuals who pretend that college has little of value to teach them. To say so is to show that you undervalue academic knowledge itself.
[…] Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?. All content is © 2011 by vladimir moshnyager's. All rights […]
a generation reared to feel not think… and its the logical outcome of the ear/eye generation of mcluhan’s teaching and making the hand/eye generation of the video game.
whatya expect? I had hoped for generation THUNK.. but all we got was a rerun of Gilligan’s Island .
[…] title of this post is an homage to two recent essays, the first being Larry Sanger’s “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?” and the second Evgeny Morozov’s “The Internet Intellectual”, a recent scathing review of […]
[…] title of this post is an homage to two recent essays, the first being Larry Sanger’s “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?” and the second Evgeny Morozov’s “The Internet Intellectual”, a recent scathing review of […]
While reading “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism, I began to see it’s position, and it is a position that I highly agree upon. These Scientists and thinkers and computer wizzes have all together given up on intellectualism. They believe that the Internet is the future, and the fact that they see nothing wrong with this is a whole problem in itself. These people can be called anti-intellectuals because the have lost the belief of the importance of education and the importance of reading information and retaining it. In some aspect you could say why not feel this way. In thirty seconds I can find out dates of major events on the Internet, when in a book it could take me thirty seconds to find the page. But what about the detail? Its easy to Google something, skim it and think you have the knowledge and understanding of it, but it’s a whole other experience to read something and see how an author has formed thoughts, why they decided to write something a particular way, and how this information registers in your mind. A key thing that stuck out to me and rectified my position was the comment that “the internet makes learning unnecessary.” Now this comment just strikes me as absolute madness. The ability to learn is a human trait, and how could a being that has survived and learned for thousands and thousands of years without this “internet” believe that since it has come along we can through everything else out of the window. A true intellectual never stops learning, and appreciates the authenticity of a piece of literature. Besides anything that comes to you easy and without hard work isn’t worth having.
Now I do believe the Internet is good for some things, but it should not always be the first and last resort, especially when it comes to learning new information.
As far as responses go, there was one of Larry’s responses that stuck out the most to me, and further validated his opinion. “Part of the anti-intellectual mindset is to assume that the only purpose of gaining knowledge is to improve one’s employability.” For many this is the number one reason on their list of reasons for pursuing higher learning. Very rarely do you hear the enjoyment of furthering my knowledge as a reason. Another remark that struck me was by a DrDork who stated “People who argue that we don’t need to /know/ or /learn/ much of anything because we can simply access the facts via some external source (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) are missing the point: if you go down that line, you lose your frame of reference and your ability to assimilate ideas and concepts.” I believe this statement sums up my entire argument. Being able to easily access information takes away from the need to know the knowledge, the desire to retain it, because you know at any time you could easily access it again, and the want to have an opinion about the information and form your own ideas and assumptions about it. My only reply would be that the fight for intellectualism is far from over, but that there are still those who appreciate knowledge and literature and understand that we as society use the “internet” as a crutch. And if we continue to use it this way, we will never reach our fullest potentials.
Excellent thought-provoking article.
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