One of the saddest things about America at this point in history is how so many people are ignorant and damn proud of it.
Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem Children Zone) had an interesting comment during an economic competitiveness summit on a similar trend:
"There is a sense in this country that in my belief is anti-intellectual. There is almost a case to be made against smart people and that has penetrated I think from the top leadership in this country right through the ‘hood’ where people look down on folk who are academically prepared gifted and we’ve gotta change this culture, America is fascinated by whether you can drink a beer. That’s not, that should not be the qualification for a president. A president ought to be able to lead the nation in a direction where young people aspire for the kind of genius that’s around this table."
"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things and deserve some of the disdain they get, but I'm just disappointed how much social value is placed on silly things like excessive beer drinking which leads to popularity and thus what some young people aspire to do because intellectuals are seen as irrelevant and dull.
I think there is some connection between this perception and lower desire by students to want to enter into math and computer science... right at the point in history where such skills are in demand.
(p.s. video of summit where Canada made the comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )
But some of the biggest prescriptivist assholes are incredibly stupid people. My favorite example is the Westboro Baptist Cult. These people actively eschew any kind of real education, history, science, or even causality. And yet they protest everyone's activities ceaselessly with offensive signs. Surely the WBC members think "they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences." But are they "smart"? Surely not.
edit: jerf13 is making this point better than I am.
How is that any different from cloaking the prescriptions (or proscriptions, I suppose) in biblical claptrap? Or historical or cultural nonsense? A lot of people believe things are in the bible that are actually not there, at best. Why? Their minister told them. I was one of these people in my youth; I assure you it happens.
Personally, I think this is a classic example of anti-intellectualism. A lot of people get angry arguing with "smart" people because they seem to have "an answer for everything." This is far more infuriating to deal with than the relatively static arguments of Wu Proponents or Creationists, who simply reiterate the same tired nonsense over and over until you can simply ignore it the way you do any droning, repetitious sound.
You left out the part after "well that's what we believe" where they say "because...". Usually that's what gets people. And I grew up around people from whom the existence of math and statistics for something almost guarantee'd they dispute it.
Perhaps you find the scientific claptrap more ugly because you understand it better, but science and pseudoscience are far from the biggest masters of people's lives in the wide world.
> how many crap medical studies come out each year due to bad statistical methods combined with FDA corruption? this has a much bigger impact on the average person's life than religious nuts spouting off.
There are these countries–incredibly populous countries–where one dude spouting off religious nonsense is the literal law of the land. You disagree? You die or are imprisoned indefinitely.
Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots.
That's just one example of the problem, I could go on. But those examples alone are sufficient to establish my point.
While it's true that America's distrust of intellectuals has blurred into a distrust of learning, there is a kernel of truth there. Intellectuals have a great failing that has cost millions their lives and caused misery for billions more, which is trusting their beautiful theories too much, even when reality is smacking them across the face with the fact that the theories are wrong or not working. (For the love of Pete, some "intellectuals" still study Marxist economics as if it has some sort of bearing on reality! Studying it for historical reasons is one thing, but not as if it's real.) Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position. If the 20th century taught us anything it is that reality is irreducibly complex and the beautiful-but-invariably-oversimplified theories beloved of intellectuals can not possible capture reality, but this lesson doesn't seem to have filtered out of the mathematical domain very well.
The problem is that to really understand what's going on you have to detach "learning" from "intellectualism". I like learning, I distrust intellectualism and still see no overwhelming reason to start trusting it.
We're in the middle of one failure of intellectualism even as we speak, as the global warming consensus falls apart; I don't know what truth will replace it but I feel very confident it will be much more nuanced. That came close to beggaring the entire world in the service of an intellectual theory. And more quietly, IMNSHO we're in the middle of the intellectual dietary consensus falling apart. And if I'm right about that, you can chalk up tens of millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of people in unnecessary fat misery into intellectualism's column, in the service of the simple-but-wrong theory that the body can be modeled as just a passive rubber bag.
That's hard to get across to a large mass of people, of course, and easy for it to get blurred. But if you don't understand this, you won't understand the real reasons for the anti-intellectual strain of American thought. It isn't just "we hate dem dare learnin' folk", which is just an excuse for not understanding.
With that said, I don't know what your operating definition of "intellectualism" is. Mine is just one who values and seeks out learning for its own sake.
Further followup, it is obvious that "intellectualism" can have many definitions. My primary point is to demonstrate that for a large set of definitions, mistrust is rational. Playing with the definitions as so many of my repliers do makes it easy to lose the point in a flurry of words as we redefine "intellectualism" to something harmless by definition, which proves nothing about what's out there in the real world. All this is a way of obscuring and hiding from my point, though, which is that there is a kernel of truth here. That there are definitions of "intellectualism" that are not scary does not prove that there isn't a rather large, scary line of "intellectualism" that has proved very dangerous in the real world, seductive academic ideas and theories trusted over empirical evidence to dangerous effect.
I was referring more to the high-school-like effect where people interested in exploring "intellectual" topics like math tend to be treated as "uncool" because of how our education system tends to focus on how to perform a calculation rather fostering its real applications as Devlin mentions here.
If math was just boring calculation, I would also say it's "uncool."
I think this mistrust of intellectuals is misplaced. Any kind of person, no matter education level, is susceptible this. Any person who is single-mindedly perusing his crazy view of the world and does not care of consequences is dangerous. Historically, intellectuals have had more means and knowledge to pursue their crazy ideas and I guess that is why they are more prominent.
It's certainly true that non-intellectual theories of the world can be very destructive if society places too much trust in them. That would be "superstition", I think. But it hasn't been the problem in the 20th or 21st century in most places.
Superstition does rack up its own respectable death toll though; a number of the other slaughterings that can't be credited to intellectualism of any kind can be credited to some large degree to superstitions, especially if you're willing to call racism a sort of superstition, which is at least debatable.
Good catch. I was trying to give a reason for this misattribution and not justify it.
But back to the larger point. It strikes me that intellectuals who have racked up the greatest kill-scores have done so because of their views in humanitarian fields (politics, philosophy, etc.) I am yet to see a genocide in the name of math or art. One exception I see is the misrepresentation of climate data to support global warming (if indeed that is true).
This is, maybe, a non-sequitur, but for the sake of intellectual correctness, I believe the Cultural Revolution, at least, was anti-intellectual. Mao closed down schools, burned books, and put teachers and intellectuals into re-education camps until they were ready to join work groups where they toiled in factories and fields. Mao's greatest intellectual rival, Deng Xiaoping, was held under house arrest for years. Mao promoted hard work and nationalism, not intellectualism.
"Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東; pinyin: Máo Zédōng; Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung) About this sound pronunciation (help·info) (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and Communist leader. He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism, military strategies, and his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
(Wikipedia, the true sign of a lazy citer. :) )
Look, it's a fact that ideas, when misapplied by powerful individuals or institutions, can lead to needless suffering. You could point to large scale suffering resulting from communism, from a misplaced belief in ethnic or cultural superiority, from capitalism, from religion, and so on.
The fact that various beliefs (whose social implementation results in suffering) have been propounded by intellectuals does not warrant the conclusions you are drawing. I am tired of this tendency among some HN readers with a bee in their bonnet about communism to just drag it into any discussion and use the deaths of large numbers of people as currency for laying out an irrelevant political argument.
Also, what can this following sentence possibly be but doublethink?
> Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position.
(What is intellectualism if not a deep faith in rationality itself?)
I'd like to note that, even if they are correlated, this does not in itself show that there is a causative relationship between intellectualism and dangerous ideology.
To rephrase the grandparent comment's line of reasoning in a more sarcastic way: "Wildfire kill Ogg family! All fire bad! Ogg anti-fire!"
Faith in the academy.
I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples. Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.
Furthermore, all 3 men in your example were, strictly speaking, populists who crafted themselves as intellectuals only through propaganda. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were never known for their intellectual prowess until they took power and their respective propaganda machines rebuilt their image.
And your central claim, that contemporary distrust of intellectuals is somehow rooted histories butchers begs the question: why isn't anti-intellectualism more widespread, especially on the populations most devastated by these monsters?
The type of anti-intellectualism outlined in this thread and news story is a distinctly American version. Yet in your rationalization of this view you name none of the cultural causes in the US for this view.
The intellectuals are deeply at fault because it was the intellectuals who gave the orders. The militaries just carried them out.
You can argue that the pilot of the Enola Gay had some responsibility of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, it's absurd to argue that FDR and Truman had less responsibility for that bombing.
The examples being listed against intellectuals would be more appropriately applied against charismatic leaders who either instigate or take advantage of populist sentiment in populations during difficult times.
I'm guessing we have very different views of what an intellectual is, so let me make this clear: Being smart and well educated doesn't make you an intellectual. It just makes you smart and well educated. If that's your standard, HN is probably exclusively populated by these intellectuals. No offense, but this isn't the case ;).
The point was that leaders are responsible, not that those specific leaders were intellectuals.
It's interesting that you defend intellectuals against the charges of mass murder by using your definition of intellectual, but don't mention that the folks in question, while not intellectuals according to your definition, got their ideas and justifications from folks who do satisfy your definition of intellectuals. And, that went both ways - they were also supported and praised by intellectuals.
The whole point of being an intellectual is that words have consequences.
I'm not saying that a leadership's intellectual advisors and supporters are as responsible for the purges as the leadership, but it's absurd to claim that they had no responsibility. That claim is especially absurd coming from someone who tried to argue that the leadership was far less responsible than the folks who carried out their bidding.
I hope you think it's absurd. If a madman and a thug takes inspiration from a theory, it's hardly the fault of the theorist.
Most westerners are able to see the absurdity of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but they fail to see the absurdity of blaming the Holodomor on Marx. This is probably because the intellectual climate here has been poisoned by decades of cold-war propaganda, which created a paranoid sense that all socialism would necessarily devolve into Stalinism.
Bad Theories + Power --> Bad Results.
Bad theories come from all over the spectrum but power tends to fall into the hands of smart people.
I guess the problem is that the kind of intelligence needed to get into power and the kind needed once in power can be different. I view the latter as requiring a lot more critical thinking/questioning of your own ideas (although for the former you may need to question others ideas).
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=126...