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…
Argument by Authority (either of the credentialed individual or the madding crowd) has always been mere sophism. Wave your gnarled stick all you want, curmudgeon, you travel in bad company. I recall the editor of NYT railing against the blogosphere where they’ll print anything and have no standards; but the New York Times is also the reprint house for American Intelligence propaganda. Nobody has any standards; at least the blogosphere is right twice a day. There are no authorities we can trust, but the democratization of research means that there is at least an increased chance that the truth will be amongst the options we can see. There is nothing (*) anti-intellectual in rejecting expertise.
The typical college student 2011 studies for about eight hours a week, and spends the rest of the time drinking. The typical college graduates these inebriates. The typical college degree certifies only liver function. There is nothing (*) anti-intellectual in rejecting college.
The K-12 systems needs to be teaching the methods of Polya, not have kids mastering the recitation of propaganda. There is nothing (*) anti-intellectual in rejecting the western educational/indoctrinational system.
(*) of course the word all of those assertions is missing is “necessarily”. All those institutions are anti-intellectual and need to be reformed or destroyed. At the same time they (and you) propagandize themselves as the homes of intellectualism, so intellectually flyweight (and is there any other kind?) anti-intellectuals attack them as well (rather than rewarding them for a job well done).
We don’t live in an intellectualist world, we live in a capitalist world. Power comes not directly from knowledge, it comes directly from money. In some scenarios knowledge can lead to money, but we happen to be at a conjunction of circumstances where this is not really true. Money comes from luck, ruthlessness, opportunism, nepotism. A robust intellectual community would be able to inform our exploitation of these opportunities. Robust intellectualism is what we lack; Academia abandoned intellectualism for democracy generations ago.
There’s a catch-22 after College students cling to the label “intellectual” while rejecting all the substance. They are graduated and become un-intellectual faculty. We passed the critical mass long ago; today an actual intellectual would never get tenure. Are the people who decry them anti-intellectual or anti-unintellectual or intellectual? The word “intellectual” long ago lost the implication “possessing a highly developed intellect” and now means “demonstrating membership in an elite by affecting a learned style”. What does it mean to be anti?
I think you need to review Fashionable Nonsense. Most of modern Academia is chasing hemlines and rejecting critical thought, and until all that changes there are good reasons to reject college as a waste of time and energy.
The word elite is tossed around with abandon, with two completely opposite meanings; Shaquille is an elite athlete, by which we mean that his skills and physique are superior to others. And the other meaning of elite, someone who is privileged because of membership in some group but without special qualification, like a graduate of Harvard who is no smarter and no more able than the graduate of Texas A&M but is nonetheless treated better. Now the Harvard booster will jump in and allege that the situation does not exist; Harvard is an elite school precisely because it has standards. I call bullshit: Harvard is full of legacy students, and many of them are as dumb as sticks. Legacy doesn’t scale.
Most people are incurious; are born clerks who want only to work their eight hours a day then sit on their couch for eight hours daydreaming about their hidden importance while colored lights play across their retinas. Such people need vocational schools and not colleges, and the popular criticism that college doesn’t pay for itself is a criticism appropriate only to vocational studies. A College Education, should it still exist somewhere, enriches your experience of life: it is not there to make you rich. It is an experience for an elite surely, but it is instead reserved for members of a club. If they drive down the demand for college with their rhetoric, perhaps we will again make it affordable for those who deserve it.
The anti-intellectualism you decry is older than Derrida, it’s as old as Plato; it’s the ocean we swim in. For a brief while the exploitation of computers was intellectually stimulating and the intelligent people were doing that. But not since the mid-nineties when the bubble swelled with ambitious know-nothings have the intelligent people been visible above the crowd. I think they’re all doing biotech now.
You need to more clearly separate your concerns. Yes google is furthering the degradation of the personal memory that pen and ink started (continued?), but in the end we will simply have humans who think differently. Today the Cathedral of Memory is a parlor trick, tomorrow the ability to jot a note will be. O Tempore!
As we improve our ability to access information a la google, the ability to intelligently process, filter, analyze is what’s important. Of course tomorrow there will be an App for that, and whomever writes that app rules the world.
Oh yeah, take an hour and change and watch Desk Set (1957). You’ll see how novel your histrionic whinging really is. Google eliminates the need to memorize! Oh Noes!
Gig ’em, EF.
Class of ’04.
Apropos of nothing, perhaps, but “knuckle-dragging” is an outdated metaphor. Is the use of such a metaphor itself anti-intellectual?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-05-caveman-myths_N.htm
Given the significant accomplishments of “geeks” over the past decades, and how much these have change our world, in contrast with the silliness of “intellectuals” (read this article for a fine example “what’s the matter with these kids today” dressed up in erudite language), I have to question what “intellectuals” really have to offer. What does “intellectual” really mean? Turtlenecks and “tut-tut”?
Who in 2011 believes that “intellectual” is equivalent to “intelligent, informed critical thinker”, anyway? “Intellectual” has become a mail-order identity, all too similar to something as stupid as “goth”, but claimed by people who should be far too old to think like a high school kid.
When “geek” culture becomes anti-intelligence, and engages in magical thinking and cargo cultism like some of what “intellectuals” appear to espouse, THEN I’ll be worried… Until then, this sounds like the same old crap where some people, afraid of losing their relevance in the modern world, criticize those perceived to threaten them. Have we not seen this before, with different groups substituted for the heroes and villains?
Who in 2011 believes that degrees let you have a satisfactory and fulfilling life?
“For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated.”
This is a common attitude, but I wouldn’t blame its prevalence on geeks; I’d fault the colleges and universities who have systematically replaced “old-fashioned scholarship” and respect for intellectual tradition with fads (see Deconstruction) and politically correct indoctrination.
Why is wanting to read current prose, about your own time, anti-intellectual?
We are told that we should read Shakespeare, because it holds in it some ultimate truths that we should learn.
At the same time, Shakespeare is written in some cryptic language that is barely similar to English. In order to understand Shakespeare, you need a dictionary of Elizabethan English by your side. In order to enjoy and genuinely appreciate it, you have to have the contents of that dictionary memorized.
Surely, I thought in school, there are other, modern authors who also hold ultimate truths. Why should we stick to something hundreds of years old, extraordinarily difficult to read and understand?
Most of the institutions that exist in Shakespeare’s plays do not exist anymore. Why not learn in more detail about institutions that already exist, that we can relate to? Surely it would be better to learn, say, how Congress really works in the context of a contemporary political novel than how Kings and the Royal Court used to work.
Personally, what I really wanted to learn is how to write a good story myself, not to listen to someone’s barely translatable stuff. I did great in the one Creative Writing class I was allowed to take, but all of school seems to be about “literature” and writing boring papers nobody would ever want to read, instead of writing something that might be interesting to someone.
To me the most important thing to learn is how to get the interest of a reader, how to hold it, how to marshal arguments, and so on. Learning literature has always struck me as pointless and an enormous waste of time. Learning how to create your own literature – now that’s interesting.
A good book is easy to read, not hard. Books that are hard to read simply are not teaching their subjects well. We should learn how to write clearly, simply and in a way that’s easy for people to understand. So why should James Joyce be considered a good example?
I enjoy reading books that are well thought out, easy to follow and understand, because those books show respect for the reader. Deliberately obtuse (James Joyce) or boring (Thomas Hardy) show a lack of respect for the reader, at least as time-pressed as we are today.
Classics might be a good history lesson, but I’d prefer to learn how to write by reading current books that reflect the expectations of readers that might also want to read my stuff. I can learn nothing of that by reading Shakespeare.
Does that make me anti-intellectual, or simply pragmatic? There is an infinite amount of reading material out there. Why not find great stuff from our era and teach it instead?
D
I see some mismatch in the categories.
Being “an intellectual” or the subject of “intellectualism” is not the same as expertise, or the possession of credentials.
Being against the reign of the credentialed expert is not the same as being against the intellect or those who lead the life of it (the intellectuals); it is arguably far more a reaction against a modern tendency for people who are credentialed experts to be incompetent idiots.
As Reynolds says, “credentialed, not educated”.
(I confess, as well, that I never did finish War and Peace. But I did finish Anna Karenina, and the Bible (for fun, as I’m an atheist), and staggeringly large amounts of the Canon apart from Tolstoy.
And point 5 on that list is correct, in that college is in fact typically overpriced, and often not useful; it’s in an inflationary spiral, in fact, and often barely manages to teach at all.
A good liberal arts education is still very useful – but unless you actively seek one out you aren’t going to get it simply by “going to college”… and if you want one for itself, you can get it for less without getting a degree.
Given that the degree as a credential is increasingly useless – primarily because it doesn’t actually show that you’re educated, let alone educated in the best and most useful sense – it seems obvious that the degree is not the necessary part.)
(Disclosures: I have a useless degree in Philosophy. I’m totally a geek. I think Wikipedia is a mess, and Clay Shirky’s kinda of a dumbass.)
I get what you’re saying.
I think there’s a lot of people who are educated (to some degree), but they have insecurities that lead them to use their knowledge (or credentials) to put other people down. I know I’ve done it, and probably a lot of the people commenting here have done it.
This turns off a lot of other people, mostly the people who are put down. So, the result is the Sarah Palins, but especially, the people who are Palin’s fans. They just want to get back at the ‘intellectuals’ even if it means disbelieving in the evolution that forces them to immunize their kids year after year. So they act stupid, to spite the intellectuals. The intellectuals (us) put them down More, rinse repeat repeat…
I think one of the problems is that each human brain is finite. We have a finite capacity to understand, to remember, and the time we have on this earth comes to an end too quickly.
I have tried to learn French. I’ve got a half bookshelf of dictionaries, phrase books, tapes, even a picture dictionary. I took an evening class, my MOM WAS BORN IN FRANCE for godsakes. To this day, I can pick out a few words or phrases, maybe stumble thru a children’s book, but that’s it. Well, if I go to France (or ah quebec), I cannot converse with those people, even if I’m armed with a Fr-En dictionary, even an electronic one. Does not work, no how no way. (In practice, they speak En to me.)
The Fr-En dictionary is like Wikipedia. The conversation is like real life, where you have to know it. Looking it up on Wikipedia is not good enough. You, armed with a web browser and Wikipedia, will never be able to remove a person’s appendix, unless you were taught in school (or some comparably fierce experience). You will never write serious computer software, argue against a lawyer in court, or fix high-voltage power lines, unless you got some sort of serious training, more serious than breezing thru a few topics on Wikipedia.
Is it like, people don’t realize this?
(Disclosures: I’ve got a degree in Applied Physics, but I’m now doing software that requires I fully understand how to add and multiply 4-digit numbers.)
Babies are the best learners, and they don’t need schools, curricula, degrees, etc. to be great human beings.
I think that the loss of intellectualism is part of a much larger problem; Humanity seems to have trouble coming to reasonable compromises. When one thing doesn’t work, people often stampede over to the other side of things. Picture this: There is a boat filled with people, suddenly, for whatever reason, the boat begins to tip. Inevitably, one of the passengers will call “Quickly!! everyone run to THIS side!” and thus the boat tips the opposite direction and another shouts “Quickly!! everyone run to the OTHER side!”
The plain fact of the mater is that any action taken by any one human being is done because that human being thought it the correct thing to do, or, at the very least, not an incorrect thing to do which seemed to benefit a person or persons in some direct or indirect way. (I will just be sticking to “Correct” hence forth as it is much shorter.)
Let me answer the question before it is asked: Yes, even Hitler. Hitler thought he was doing the correct thing. He thought he was helping the human race evolve. One could argue his intentions were noble, but it is hard to deny that he went about it horribly, horribly wrong. Yet that can be hard to stomach for many, so we strip Hitler of any possible redeeming factor and agree that “Hitler is doubleplusungood.” But it is at this over simplified level where I feel most uncomfortable.
In George Orwell’s 1984 newspeak, which I used a little of above, is a simplified English. It was constructed by the government to control the people. It went about doing so by getting rid of the words used to form thoughts the government found undesirable. The thing is that it is not just in the book. Something similar is happening because of humanity’s “need” to think simply in a complex world. They go about classifying right and wrong and breaking the world into two piles. This is impossible to do without destroying the complex thought processes that put us on top of the food chain. Why?
Each human being does what they think is correct. Once you start dividing the world into right and wrong, it becomes difficult to see why another person did something, why that person thinks they are “right”. Which any human being can find difficult to do, even on a good day. You just simply happen to be you and that can make other people confusing.
The thing is, that it is just human nature to simplify things when they are complex. Which makes it difficult to NOT think in terms of “Right” and “Wrong”, when the world is rarely as easily defined. This causes the cycle to feed its self and humanity, or even just large groups of humans, to have difficulty resolving things.
Think whatever you want to think, but please do not think simply.
Intelletual -> Authority.
Each appeal to “intellectualism” is actually an appeal to authority. It’s not that we don’t value knowledge, it’s that we don’t respect their pedigree.
We don’t respect their pedigree because they have devalued it.
We ask for their data, and they tell us “trust us, we are the experts”. We question their results, and rather than point out a flaw, they attack our credentials.
We would like schools, if they taught actual knowledge. These days, it’s a form of institutional group-think.
Liberal arts as taught at college today resemble nothing so much as the medievel church, where the pursuit of real knowledge is discouraged in favor of imposing doctrine.
No, it’s not that we don’t value knowledge. It’s that the ones calling themselves “intellectuals” are nothing of the sort. They are credentialists.
The reason for their dismay is that we aren’t buying it anymore.
Realizing that formal education isn’t worth the money isn’t anti-intellectualism, it’s economics.
Agreed. It’s definitely all about economics, but the problem is that there is more to economics than mere measurable financial incentives. To think otherwise is oversimplification. What about the lost character development and relationship building that occurs during the college years? Peter Thiel is quite well formally educated himself and his critique of formal education downplays the role it may have had in his success.
What about the lost character development and relationship building that occurs during the college years?
What about it? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Somebody who doesn’t go to college will still exist “during the college years”, will still have what he/she later considers “formative years” and will still have character development and relationship building experiences during some stage of life, no? Where do you get the idea that something of importance is being “lost”? The economic concept of “opportunity cost” isn’t just monetary but applies equally to the character development and relationship building experiences somebody could have had were they not wasting quite so much time and money on college.
Peter Thiel is quite well formally educated himself and his critique of formal education downplays the role it may have had in his success.
Peter Thiel is running the necessary experiment; in a few years we’ll be able to determine whether the kids he bribed into avoiding school are, in fact, losing valuable “formative experiences” or merely experiencing different ones. I suspect you won’t like the result.
Can you honestly not imagine any other way people might get the good parts you see in a college experience, than to go to college?
This isn’t one of Chesterson’s fences – trying to make college universal is a quite recent innovation. People who didn’t go to college in the past (ie, most people) still managed somehow to have character and build relationships, so I suspect they could do so again.
Of course they will still exist. And of course they may still find value in their experiences outside the walls of academe. You may in fact be right, but you might also be wrong. My point was that we have no way of quantifying which type of experience is more valuable. We could argue all day long about what whether a traditional college vs. a non-traditional college experience adds more subjective value, but that would be a futile exercise. The following statement, however, implies that we should use economic thinking in a purely monetary sense when it comes to education, which is what I was arguing against. “Realizing that formal education isn’t worth the money isn’t anti-intellectualism, it’s economics.”
As for Peter Thiel’s so-called “experiment”, even if the kids are wildly successful, how could you possibly draw any intellectually honest conclusions from his “experiment”? No econometric study could possibly control for all variables that would need to be accounted for.
Can you honestly not imagine any other way people might get the good parts you see in a college experience, than to go to college?
No, I can. I never said you couldn’t, but what I will say is that you can’t get the exact same experience. Again, it comes back to the subjective value I mentioned earlier.
I think we probably agree on more than we realize. I DON’T think that college should be universal. In fact, many people shouldn’t go to college. Check out my essay I linked to above if you’re interested in reading why. I completely understand the financial argument for not going, but to oversimplify the situation by discounting the other factors I hastily mentioned in my first comment is not accurately assessing the situation surrounding the college decision.
Glen, I just realized the link to the essay I mentioned is actually in a comment I made below. Here’s the link: “Is Higher Education Worth It?” Sorry about the confusion.
Sure, the *first round* of Thiel’s experiment required quite a large payment in order to overcome the social pressure to conform. But if it works, the next time around it’ll be an easier case to make; the size of the necessary payments will tend to decline and the applicant pool will both grow in size and become generally less exceptional. Eventually that econometrics study *will* be possible. The way to do it will be to compare *marginal* students – compare the ones who just make it into Thiel’s program to the ones who just miss making it. With a broad enough set of metrics it should eventually be possible to say something useful about the expected outcome.
If you intend to claim that “character development and relationship building” justifies the time/money/effort investment of college, it would be nice to see an argument for that assertion. Preferably one which recognizes the degree to which nostalgia over one’s college year (or high school years, for that matter) is largely about age and life situation. You’re right that there exist non-monetary benefits to college, but there also exist non-monetary costs to it – largely the time investment but also the cost of options forgone and the risk of *negative* intellectual impacts. I get the sense that’s part of Thiel’s concern – that attending college might harm creativity or productivity compared to reasonable alternatives, much as grade school and high school do versus unschooling for those suited to it.)
Who would prove your expertise?
The learning COMMUNITY on the field will prove your expertise, this community is integrated for people with and without degrees, children or adults, indigenous or urban, etc, etc. The most important is their practical and applicable knowledge they have on the field.
How you will prove your expertise?
In a practical and concrete way: helping your community with your expertise, with a free and volontaire work.
You’re confusing anti-intellectualism with anti-credentialism. Colleges have done a poor job recently of ensuring the people they are giving degrees to actually have any useful knowledge or intellectual skills. You can no longer assume a PhD indicates the holder is competent or intelligent. It certainly doesn’t indicate they are open-minded or intellecutally curious. Nor intellectually honest.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t any of those things, but it’s no guarantee. And it’s an awfully expensive institution for producing such a mediocre result.
In the original text:
“Altogether too many geeks seemed to be assume”
Drop ‘be’.
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