Anti-intellectualism seems to have become a topic for the masses of educated navel-gazers around the time of Bush II. The phenomenon and criticisms of it go back further, though, as primetime Bob Saget and mid-90s Bob Saget jokes will attest. It’s also not just an American thing. When reality TV shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and Wife Swap washed up on the shores of the Continent (or, more accurately, when these Dutch products were reimported), Eurotrash snobs were just as distraught about what it meant about their culture(s) as they were enthusiastic about what 2003’s record temperatures would do to ‘the vintage’. There are few more bourgeois, elitist sentiments than indignation about anti-intellectualism, and the Euros might even have the Americans beat on this one. But what is anti-intellectualism? The first clue that something here is fishy is that it’s much easier to say what anti-intellectualism is than what intellectualism is. Anti-intellectualism is the condemnation you hear from Jon Stewart & co. when people don’t want to fund NPR or when they not only disagree with what your book says, they’re not even interested in reading it. Anti-intellectualism is the diagnosis when the symptom is that municipal symphony orchestras get axed. Other symptoms include preferences for swag over accessories for YOLO over carpe diem.
So this should give us a hint about intellectualism, shouldn’t it? Is NPR really intellectual? I’m no connoisseur, but on every occasion I’ve listened to it, it seemed formally just like People magazine: celebrities from different fields of activity talking about their latest project and the meta-level of people talking about those celebrities. Maybe I was tuning it at the wrong time, but there was very little discussion of anything hard, any ideas that took effort. Brain science gets reduced to metaphor, culture gets reduced to paintings of landscapes. How many of the people bemoaning the decline of municipal symphonies actually sponsor them, subscribe to their programmes or even take their kids to see Peter and the Wolf or the Nutcracker? I know it’s hard to hear, but YOLO = carpe diem. Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society was giving his students the philosophy of YOLO. (Foreshadow: that’s not exactly true because the medium is the message, and the medium of carpe diem was a private school for privileged WASP teenage boys).
They’re in front of an opera house. But if you want the rich and powerful to come, you don’t need the best artists, you need a red carpet and, most importantly, a fence to keep out the plebes.
So anti-intellectualism isn’t a matter of behaviour, because the problem isn’t that poor people aren’t going to the opera, it’s that nobody’s going to the opera. So if anti-intellectualism isn’t something that people do, what is it? It’s a matter of taste and of the capacity to discern quality. But that taste is pretty insubstantial, because everybody is sitting at home watching Wife Swap and everybody is taking their kids to Michael Bay’s latest explosofest and everybody is listening to talk radio (yes, NPR is a lot of talking). That taste is more of a system of labeling things, just like brand names can label soft drinks and cereals. Everybody drinks cola, but some people drink artisanally crafted, micro-brewed, small batch cola bean confections, and some people drink generic. Everybody’s doing the same thing, but some people do it anti-intellectually, which is like saying “Ewww! Generic!”.
Phew, that was close. Child abuse averted!
So now we can say what intellectualism is. It’s conspicuous consumption. (If you’re looking for reading tips, the name to google is Thorstein Veblen). The idea is that nobody really needs things like NPR’s fluff or for their kids to learn a language like Mandarin or for a nanny for their dog, but since nobody needs it, doing it anyway is a way of signifying status. By doing so, you’re different from those who don’t, even if you’re learning as much about the universe from the cartoon presentations of brain science as they do from an Insane Clown Posse concert. The point isn’t the quality or the benefit; it’s the exclusivity and only the exclusivity. Making flights and symphony tickets cheap killed their ability to signify status. But when you put on an exclusive classical concert somewhere exotic, the rich and famous show up.* They’ll be listening to their Ipods with earbuds up in the balcony, but that’s to be expected because they’re there for the red carpet, to which you have no access, not for the music, to which you do.
Before we get extensive, let’s go a little more intensive with a prediction: when we’re closer to the last drop of oil and everyone is driving electric cars, the NPR crowd who are now trading in their Priusses (Prii? Operator: help, I need an accusative plural. Or is that genitive? Operator!) for Teslas (NB: not electric cars, but Teslas) will start fawning over gas guzzlers, probably for their raw authenticity, even though the fumes and noise will be even more offensive in the future.
But I said above that Yerapeeyans might be even worse anti-intellectuals than Americans, contrary to popular intellectual belief. Here we go.
Over the last couple of years, German politicians have been dropping like flies. First the Defence Minister resigned (full name: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg – ‘von und zu’ indicates his nobility; he’s something like a junior count). Then came the chairwoman of the German liberal party (that’s European liberal – something like a laissez-faire democrat for you Yankees), Silvana Koch-Mehrin. Then came another MEP (Member of the European Parliament) from the German liberal party, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis – yes, he’s ethnically Greek, but Queen Elizabeth II is ethnically Saxon, so there you go. Then there were two local politicians in Bavaria, both of whom were children of the former Bavarian premier, Edmund Stoiber. Then, on the 9th, the Federal Education Minister, Annette Schavan resigned. They all resigned for the same reason: it came out that they had plagiarized their PhD theses, some of which are over 30 years old.
Silvana Koch-Mehrin. Smart money says that her downfall is part of the anti-cute-blond conspiracy in western society.
And it’s not just the Germans either. The Hungarian president resigned last year for the same reason, various Greek politicians have been caught, and even Russia’s man for all seasons, Vladimir Putin has been busted.
The media discussion about all of this has focused pretty much on whether cheating on a dissertation is a resignable offence. Plenty of competent ministers around the world are able to get by without PhDs, and most of them were doing no worse than most other politicians in their roles, so why should they have to quit. Is it different for an Education Minister, who is supposed to set university policies and stuff? Is this just a tactic for people who oppose them and can’t win an election the old fashioned way? Etc.
The angle that nobody seems to have picked up is that, if these people had no academic ambition or burning curiosity in the sense of a question they feel they need to answer for the world, why did they all get PhDs in the first place? Even though most European countries don’t make you pay very much for getting a PhD, it will still delay your progress in other respects while you’re copying, pasting, and waiting for a credible interval of time to have passed. Copying also gives you a exactly the kind of open flank that your political opponents can use. It’s another skeleton in your closet, along with the hookers & blow (but without hookers & blow, the world would simply grind to a halt). You don’t need it, it’s a liability, and it’s actually costly, so why?
How many truck drivers have PhDs, whether real or faked? How many dental assistants or call centre drones can put Dr. before their names? It’s conspicuous consumption. Since everybody is crowding into higher education right now, hoping to wait out the crappy job market or not realizing that the ship of durable employment has sailed, there are going to be a ton of PhDs coming on to the market soon. Which is going to make them like hybrid cars and symphony tickets. Those who have been trying to signify their superiority via title will have to find something new. Something that you can’t get.
But is there anything more hostile to anything that could pass as ‘intellectualism’ than hijacking and embezzling the symbols of intellectual achievement? It’s just aping the original. It’s not even buying or selling the symbols, like prints of a Picasso; it’s using them for a totally different purpose, like using a Picasso as toilet paper to show you can. Anybody remember when Prince Albert of Monaco led an Olympic bobsled team? Pudgy European royal puts together a team of ringers in an expensive sport that’s impossible in his home country just to add ‘olympic athlete’ to his resume, as if a resume was something he ever needed. That’s kind of an insult to the other athletes, to the event, and to sport as a domain of human endeavour, right? Kind of degrading, isn’t it? It’s the same deal with the false PhDs. They’re fake symbols of intellect and work, but they’re still supposed to work as real symbols of status.
Yeah, the Olympics! But hard work is its own reward.
The class element is in the exclusivity, and that’s why European anti-intellectualism is probably even worse than the American variant. Anybody can assume that one book holds all truth or that books in general are crap. Ignorance is very democratic. The anti-intellectualism that degrades thinking while simultaneously serving to separate one group of people from another based on a symbol, that’s perverse.
*What’s gonna burn your noodle later is the question of whom they’re trying to impress. They hardly run across the plebes on a normal day, and they certainly don’t care what they think. The privileged also hate each other, which is why they’ll vulture on each other’s scandals and tragedies. So who’s the audience?
Very good article. In Croatia every goddamned politician is a dr. Such and such. I doubt their ‘doctorness’ very much and so does everyone else! Besides, I’d want a doctor to work as a doctor and heal people, not go into politics. Also, the ones that do get into medicine do it for prestige (I’m a doctors’ child myself so I know a lot of them), and perhaps, what, two doctors I know? got into it out of passion. And they always stayed ‘lowly’ doctors, not professors or primariuses or whatnot. And doctors of science… well they’re an endangered species as is.
It would do intellectualism best to become passe.
Capital-acquisitive setups such as ours imply a necessity of specialization (comparative advantage, in the parlance). And what is a PhD besides the least humble of social titles referencing your specialty training? That is, a signifier of your investment of capital (time/money/effort/etc) into a comparatively advantageous asset format which no one and nothing may liquidate, save a collective devaluation of the signifier itself.
And moreover, the pursuit of doctorates stands as a symptom of what TLP calls our culture of individual narcissism – where else would a bunch of narcissists invest disposable capital besides themselves? And where else would a bunch of narcissists tell a bunch of other narcissists real value lay but in a process of self-enrichment, if only as an unconsciously defensive posture to prevent their own self-enriching social signifiers from losing value?
So long as there exists the mere ability for some to pursue a doctorate (which if I recall requires bare minimum 3 years or so, but more like 6 for the sciences), there will of necessity exist others who will never have the disposable time/income/energy, but whose existence and work the PhD earners are dependent upon for their relative leisure.
Even the poorest of doctoral candidates still must eat (let’s be honest, the agar plates they’re cultivating in the lab are hardly filling enough). So someone else is left to work to fill their bellies, while they go about filling their heads with specialized knowledge.
And the real pisser is that at some point down the road, the farmer is likely to run into Dr. suchandsuch or someone of their same ilk, and the good Doctor will likely expect recognition/respect for how hard they worked to earn their PhD (and all of the knowledge and good breeding it signifies). And you know what the farmer will feel? Inadequacy. Then the farmer will go home and tell his kids that because of his shame, they must go to college.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat. That is, until everyone’s got their doctorate… then you find the next yacht to buy, because at that point the S.S. Doctorate has sailed.
I’m not too sure about the greed-specialization link. The higher someone climbs in the ivory tower, the less bound they seem to be by parochial disciplinary boundaries. Habermas writes about religion, public administration, law, philosophy, etc. Ditto Amartya Sen. Not that it’s always a good idea in either case. Physicists (Sagan, Weinberg) and biologists (Dawkins, Gould) also write on social/political topics. On a more mortal level, many different undergrad degrees can lead to law school, neurology/astrophysics intersect with philosophy – as does social science.
But yeah, the elitism, exclusivity, and self-directedness of the System are problems.
Two things:
“Brain science gets reduced to metaphor”
- Brain science already is a metaphor. Science is always only a representation. I’d favor “to an absurdly simplified metaphor”. :)
“he’s something like a junior count”
- one ‘o’ too much. :D
“The media discussion about all of this has focused pretty much on whether cheating on a dissertation is a resignable offence. ”
I would disagree with that notion. The majority of the media discussion, to my memory, (rightfully) mostly focused on how the politicians REACTED to their failure.
More importantly, I’m not sure what this text is trying to tell me, sorry. I’m almost afraid that this blog is turning into exactly what the text opposes – a self-perpetuating system that just keeps on spinning, spinning, spinning…
I suppose in using the word specialization, I’m attempting to convey something a little bit broader than disciplinary rigidity – more of an approach that influences lifestyle. Specialization in a ‘generalized’ sense; that is, spending your efforts on something(s) at quite some remove from the general realities and necessities of maintaining a day-to-day human existence.
In an academic context, this often looks like either a lab-rat stuck in the process of perfecting some hopelessly technical arcana with extremely limited or no general applicability, or a tweed-jacketed savant stuck in the circumlocutions of hopelessly removed intellectual abstractions, with equally limited or no general applicability. Though the latter may touch on many subjects and thus not be specialized in the sense of disciplines, they are specialized in their academic abstraction from human reality.
Faced with the challenges of subsistence, your PhD becomes useless. And in a social structure geared toward subsistence, it becomes meaningless. So a conspicuously consumptive society (that is, one that has gotten most people sufficient means to no longer concern themselves with their daily bread, and thus has them trolling the resultant void for what to do with all of their spare time/energy – hence the existence of such un-ironically delivered phrases as, “I’m trying to find myself”) is the necessary preconditon to A. give people the ability to get a PhD, and B. to make it a reasonable calculation to get one.
But enough rambling… I’m gonna go harvest me crops and firewood for the evening meal.
Science is always only a representation.
Good point, but there are different qualities of representation. Some are better, some are worse. If such value judgements get my postie membership card revoked, so be it.
one ‘o’ too much.
One internet for you, sir. (Lol’d)
My point was that degrading signs of intellectual achievement by using them just as signs of status and cheating to get them is a worse form of anti-intellectualism than accusing people of not reading enough books, and the latter form is generally just used as a means to reinforce status anyway, so anti-intellectualism is always more about class and signification than intellect. Other interpretations are possible, I suppose. Maybe the writing sucked.
I take feedback seriously, but I’m not sure what to make of “I’m almost afraid that this blog is turning into exactly what the text opposes – a self-perpetuating system”. To me, this translates into “This thing I am consuming for free does not meet my implicit expectations”. If there’s something you’d like to see more of or some trajectory you think we should follow, please make it explicit, and I suppose we could consider it. You’re also welcome to produce the type of content you’d like to see more of. You certainly have the brains for it. I’m not sure how else to react to a criticism that seems to imply we/I have failed to live up to some sort of obligation, when I can’t remember committing to anything.
The ironic comment of harvesting crops and firewood is more apt than it seems, in that you’d be right if it weren’t ironic. Subsistence is no longer a concern for anybody in a society where a PhD is currency. That status is an indicator that the society is fuelled by excess and consumption, and in that world everything is about some abstraction or other, so being able to play with them (like we do here) is definitely worth something. It’s a world where sommeliers exist because people are worried about bouquet as much as about alc/vol (if not more). If liberal arts PhDs are like the sommeliers of postmodern society (making STEM PhDs and ad men the vintners), they’re not worthless. They’re worth something in that kind of market. There are also people who play with abstractions without PhDs, but it’s harder to get ahead with on-the-job experience instead of a journeyman’s ticket.
I can’t help answering these little quizzes you put at the end. The real audience is always the self. When great unearned privilege is given, there are two options with two approaches each.
1. Justify it to yourself through rationalization or (better) Good works. In your example, they went the rationalization route utilizing branding (oops).
2. Reject it through substance abuse/suicide or (better) giving it up and living a “simple life.”
The Lacanian answer is a little different. The audience would be the big Other, which is kind of the big, supposedly external Authority that maintains the system of meanings (the Symbolic). So the red carpeteers are watching themselves perform in their heads (the performer is the little other), and the purpose of the performance is basically to say ‘Am I doing it right?’ to the big Other, who can issue approval/reprobation. The tricky part is locating that Symbolic/big Other, because it has to be inside the red carpeteer’s head (where else would it be?), but it’s not something that person can change at will. As a wise old man once told me: be born with gills, fins, and scales; contest your existence as a fish!; but walk and you will suffer.
Yolo does not = Carpe Diem.
Not merely shifts of signifiers. Will explain in a post soon.
I’d like to think a part of this ‘anti-intellectualism’, which exists in both the Bush II conservatives and the kids who like to talk a lot about philosophy, but don’t like to read too much, is a part of a ‘New Sincerity’ (a term others have used that I’m reappropriating now).
The idea is that people are sick of the pseudo-ironic, interreferential nightmare that ‘postmodern thought’ (in quotes because it refers more to the ideas and superstitions that surround that term than actual postmodern thought, which, no matter how legitimate, is just too much effort for most) (was/is) permeates a lot of our culture, especially after the culture wars (hard sciences vs. everything else in academia) of the last few decades. An escape from all this perceived bullshit became a political necessity, where ‘pragmatists’ fought all the ‘non-pragmatists’ as an other, as if those people were trying to undermine our values and traditions. The fact that nobody was clear enough to say that they weren’t actually, helped mess that up too.
Whatever, that’s in the past. But the consequences are still here. We have Rick Scott in Florida here trying to make Humanities kids pay more for tuition. We have those fake Ph.D’s out there, the ones who will get one for whatever. Honorary Ph. D’s have also become a currency, where both a university and an individual get to gain some fame for it.
I suppose the only thing we, specifically ‘we’ here, can do is what we’re doing right now. Talking about it. At least with blogs like this open, the problem is out there to consider. It’s nice that we live in a time where these sorts of things can be considered, but it’s also a problem of how much noise blocks us from saying what we want to say.
And maybe some of us will get to the point where we too can talk about these issues on a big screen, try to acknowledge these problems.
And if that happens, I wonder who we’ll end up drowning out next.
I don’t buy this. This piece seems to be a really long way of saying, “whatevs”.
Anti-intellectualism seems very easily defined in terms of ideology: anti-intellectualism is the state in which one actively eschews critical thinking in deference to an ideological approach to knowledge.
Hence, it is very easy to identify the anti-intellectual basis in thinking like that of contemporary American conservative politics: willful ignorance of and lack of concern as to why something might be right or wrong in the world, because one already knows what is right or wrong. So why bother?
And while you might define intellectualism as some form of conspicuous consumption, I will continue to define it as the state in which one cares to rise above one’s base instincts and consider thoughtfully the logical viability and consequences of one’s beliefs. Whether one prefers opera to reality TV is wholly irrelevant. You’re the one saying that those preferences somehow matter.
Really, this isn’t rocket science. It’s not about class, or Germans, or fake PhD’s. Its about whether one believes that there is something out there to know.
So if you want to hate on Eurotrash powerbrokers or faux academics or NPR narcissists, please, be my guest. But don’t tell me that they define “intellectualism” in a way that anyone should care about.