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…
I agree with much that is said here. The anti-intellectualism you describe is worrisome. However, its very easy to blame the internet, but the roots of what you perceive could be laid at the feet of universities and intellectuals who, in pursuit of equality on every level, decided to wage war upon against the “western old white man canon.” I believe much of the anti-intellectualism of today can be laid at the feet of those who attempted to enforce a moral equivalence upon all actions and teachings. When everything has the same moral authority and worth, then nothing has any authority or worth.
There truly is an educational bubble. At some point, universities moved from the business of teaching to the business of enriching their endowments. The anti-intellectualism
Wikipedia is extremely useful and has immense breadth. But like all encyclopedia’s, it lacks depth. And I’ve found that that fact, which seems so obvious to me, is not clear to some sober commentators. You get that depth by study at universitites.
Hi,
To the anti-intellectual ‘geeks’: not knowing what to look for, or being unable to spell it on Google, can make you look stupid some day.
As a half-geek, half-intellectual (among many other things), I’m glad you wrote this article. Unfortunately too long for a common internet user, especially twitter-addict, as I agree with you; and unfortunately too redundant in the argumentation for intellectuals. I also avoided part of the comments for TL:DR; sorry if I’m now redundant with some.
I agree with your observation of geek community harboring a noticeable anti-intellectual current. This occured to me years ago, especially by observing americans (so would you please excuse my sometimes awkward phraseology, for this is not my native language; note I love you, too 🙂 ).
But as some said, it seems to me that at it’s less the geek subculture that is becoming anti-intellectual, than the fact that ‘people’, that are mostly and already anti-intellectual, are now on the web, as using internet became mainstream. There is also the evolution of the ‘geek’ representation in both the medias and masses. Still, as a woman, I still don’t fit the label and common definition in my own country (for geek and intellectual. I hate labels).
I would have liked you to dig more on the causes, and state more about the consequences of what you point. Because this may be a remarkable avatar of a deep societal problem. I would have loved to read your opinion. Let me make a try with mine.
What I would like to say is that, especially in the US, there seems to be a widespread will of simplification at all levels. Just look at any blockbuster made in the last 5 years if you need an example. More and more beautiful, but hollower and hollower. Frustrating.
There may be an explaination to this: ultra-liberal-capitalism. Don’t scream, people. But the will to get more money quicker makes companies hire lesser skilled people and make them work faster. This can be useful, I love it, but kills quality and optimism on the long run. The same occurs for scenarists, programmers, construction workers…
At the political level, it seems governance needs people to think less about system flaws, in order to stay in place. Better to stay focused on shiny entertainment and consumerism than to think about the limitations of it and the alternatives. There also seems to be a widespread idea that people are not fit to think, decide, and govern by themselves. I disagree. If knowledge was free and education was about responsabilisation, tolerance and the ability to think and learn by ourselves instead of memorizing norms… there would be a revolution (bloodshed is not mandatory).
Making money and leading the world are intertwinned. Paradoxically, belief is intellectual knowledge is not useful for the first, but specialists are wanted for the second. I think both statements are false.
On the other hand, it seems we are approaching a turn of times in several countries. You know about the middle east events; but things are moving in europe too. More and more people are rejecting the system, seeing the wall it’s leading us to. Question is, will something really change, or will fear of the unknown and ourselves prevent us humans to go further?
For some countries, for exemple France where diplomas are so important, the fact that school is mandatory may be an explanation of the common reject of intellectuals. People there feel more and more unsecure in their homes, in their jobs, and do not trust ‘school is the social ladder’ anymore. The French also say the problem of public school is it’s dumbing down view.
Partly because both are true, and it’s not working so good; partly because of the ‘american dream of the self-uneducated-made man’ (which is more and more a myth, too). Leads many to communautarism, instead of making them seek information and learn more on their own, with this great tool internet. (GPL licence for all!)
Social control, based on morality, is strong everywhere. I discovered very young that being viewed as an intellectual was a social flaw. I dropped classic studies and became a geek. Then started to learn on my own, and became a kind of autodidact. And years later, all my fellow uneducated friends are on facebook making small talks and know very few about science, history, etc. That would be funny, except that I’m fed up at correcting false statements when they are manipulated, and they are. My country, as the US and France and many others, is going through a social, financial and political crisis. Everybody knows (at least in mine), but most still expect politics and experts to find solutions. It should be all of us as citizens to do it together, not only a few old men with biased motivations.
To end preaching for my own beliefs, I would like to point out that knowing the past (including books about long dead cultures and how they saw the world) is as useful to build the future, as the new current phenomenons like internet communities providing new social interactions and way of living.
End of brain upload for today. 🙂
This is just the pendulum swinging the other way. We can find truth(s) if we stop evaluating ideas in terms of their opposites, and start evaluating them in terms of reality.
If you’ve not read John Gatto, you’ve missed the critical mass of the issue. What you call “academic” or “intellectual” is not. It’s Victorian; what is not overt transplanted Prussian institutional elitism is “victorian affect” of Hegelianism and it’s domestic sponsor, Big Coal.
The Hegelians and their “scientisms” were of such concern in the classical intellectual community during the mid-20th Century that groups such as the Mont Pellerin Society (which brought Karl Popper and Hayak together) were formed in reaction and alarm regarding the collapse of intellectual and academic quality under the degrading fabulisms of Victorian scientism and the reverberations of Hegelian condescension and the horrific scientisms: “socialism” and “phrenology”. Ironically, these two pillars of the Victorian academy which are not only still practiced today, but operate in part as formal federal policy.
Go back to Karl Popper. Read Gatto’s watershed works on dumbing down education. Read Rudy Rummel’s extraordinary life’s work of the serial murder of innocents by Victorian governments operating the utopianism of Hegelian elites seeking the perfection of mankind via the scientism of socialism to create the new progressive man — a doctrine which led to the murder of citizens by their progressive governments in peacetime at a rate 6 times higher that were killed in all wars of the 20th Century. There has been no more murderous or tragic doctrine in the history of man than the Victorian affect and its pretensions of progressivism pursuing the perfection of man.
The emerging postmodern Americans are no so much “anti-intellectual” as anti-Victorian. Most have not yet put the terms and the history together. American’s who bother to look can see our nation’s frontier and pioneer roots held many classical virtues not found in the present day Victorian conceit, their foundations, their syndicate institutions, their politics and the major political parties which they now entirely control.
Peel back those things in American society you like least and you will likely find Victorian conceit or Hegelian corruption at the root of it.
Start with Gatto. Look at what was done with the Peabody money and why. Look at the day prisons called compulsory schooling today and you we see this through different eyes. The same Hegelian movement that brought us compulsory schooling also created and ramrodded the Jim Crow laws of the 1800s as the British banks bankrolled the monopolistic rollup of the American cotton export market and the plantations that grew it. They brought in the sciences of socialism and phrenology to “improve” the slaves whose transit they also bankrolled.
That same disgusting mentality is dominating our institutions and corporations today.
There is way more here than meets the eye.
The “geek” has never been the problem.
College can definitely be a bad financial investment for many people. That doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being a valuable life experience though. I, however, think the pro-education argument that everyone needs a college degree is a bogus. I wrote an essay about this subject myself titled “Is Higher Education Worth It?”. Just because not everyone needs formal higher education experience doesn’t mean that no one does. The geeks foolishly believe otherwise just as the pro-higher education folks are dimwitted enough to think that everyone needs a degree. It’s just not that cut and dry.
You should be open mind and don’t focus too much on money, which is only a symbol. You are worth more than you think. A college degree is not an imperative to be a great professional, society will value you according at how much you can share and help people surrounding you.
My old friend Dr. Hardy is correct. Ironically, for depth, one can begin with the old Encyclopedia Brittanica – precisely the sort of “knowledge source dissed only a half dozen years ago.
This post was way too long.
Actually, for most people, college IS a waste of time.
Much like anything else, giving the masses access invariably leads to the dumbing down of pretty much anything. In fact, it couldn’t be any other way. The majority of the population is in the average intelligence range, and members of that group make average decisions, which are invariably detrimental to themselves long term. The demands they make are also long-term detrimental, but once the floodgates have been opened, everyone in that particular business, be it printing, transport (wheeled, air, naval), or education, must “dumb down” their business to cater to the less intelligent, or risk going out of business.
Think of the number of people who die every year on Mt. Everest because they’re too bloody stupid to respect the mountain they climb! The per-capita death toll rises with every passing year, as more and more people who shouldn’t even be there are given access.
And so now you have in the hallowed halls of education the equivalent of loud hawaiian shirts and tweed hats where there was once only the gentry.
I’ve spoken to a number of professors over the years, and one common theme has been their lament of how they can no longer use the same books as they used to because the students simply would not pass the course if they did. Deans exert incredible pressure upon the faculty to “just give them a pass” so that problem students won’t cause trouble. And of course the inevitable outcome of this is that students become even MORE belligerent, even MORE lazy, and college becomes accessible to even LESS intelligent people than ever before.
And so you end up with the situation today, where the intelligent see the fraud of contemporary college for what it is, and conclude that there is nothing they could learn there (or at least, nothing that would justify the cost).
“Once upon a time, anti-intellectualism was said to be the mark of knuckle-dragging conservatives, and especially American Protestants.”
Who told us that? Intellectuals!
Obama said his favorite theologian was Reinhold Niebuhr. Has Obama had any public theological discussions? No.
Wendy Doniger, a theologian at the U. of Chicago, wrote in Newsweek of Sarah Palin that “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” That’s a ridiculous statement on the face of it. If there’s a context in which that makes sense, the context is ridiculous. At the very least, this theologian should have realized she was writing for the mass media and explained what she meant. But no.
Sorry, the intellectuals are showing how divorced they are from the reality of the average person. They are Mr. Spock to the average person’s Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk. And unlike Spock, who simply does not comprehend humans, the intellectuals think they’re superior in most ways. In their field, they probably are. But that’s a very small area.
And let’s not even get into how American intellectuals admire French and German intellectuals, from whom they absorb their snobbery.
The situation is much like that of journalists, whose reputations have dropped precipitously when the Internet has fact-checked their asses and show how nonsense has been reported as fact and how important facts have been simply not reported.
And the disproved “hockey stick” of global warming has damaged the reputation of all scientists, especially after we’ve seen how they just circle the wagons and say “nothing to see here, move on.”
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