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I've been wanting to start a thread on anti-intellectualism for a while, but wasn't sure quite how to articulate it, or what I was even trying to articulate... Something about the way 'intellectualism' has become a dirty word, and how there's some valid reasons for that, but that the baby has gone flying out the window with the bathwater... Something about the way British culture in particular (and Western, English-speaking society in general) seems to have become very suspicious of people who are seen to think too deeply, of theory, etc (I'm thinking particular about how this occurs amongst supposedly well-educated, middle class liberals)... and how this crops up here now and again, too.
Fortunately, some cat at the Observer saved me the trouble last weekend by writing a piece on this very subject, here.
quote:The most revealing response was supplied by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. 'The term "intellectual" is a very self-conscious one in the United States,' she said. 'To speak of oneself as an "intellectual" is equivalent to arrogance and egotism, for it suggests that there is a category of persons who are "not-intellectual".'
And in our egalitarian age that would not do. Americans have an abhorrence of people who, as William Styron put it, 'live in irony towers', in much the same way that the British recoil from what Orwell called the highbrow's 'mechanical sneer'. Rightly or wrongly, the idea of the intellectual is inextricably bound to a sense of class or privilege which nowadays is somehow unacceptable. It suggests a kind of effete separateness that sits uncomfortably in the mass gathering of democratic culture. Orwell wrote of the English intellectual's 'emotional shallowness, estrangement from physical reality' and 'their severance from the common culture of the country'.
'The English,' he observed, 'are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic "world view".' He was writing at a time - the Second World War - when the stock of intellectuals had bombed. Yet Orwell was himself in many ways the very best kind of British intellectual: transparent, precise, unmoved by fashion, a dedicated bibliophile, with a driving moral and political conviction that informed all of his writing. He was, in short, the paradigm of the public intellectual.
...'An intellectual,' wrote Albert Camus, 'is someone whose mind watches itself.' Too often, though, intellectuals' minds have been caught not watching the world. The legacy of the twentieth century - with its modernists, revolutionaries, avant gardists, ideologists, apologists, fellow travellers, and the millions of lives destroyed as a consequence of ideas - has left the whole concept of the intellectual embarrassingly surplus to requirements.
Steiner concedes that the British distrust of 'cleverness' has played a vital part in achieving an 'ironic tolerance and political maturity that no other country can rival', as well as preventing the 'murderous ideological arguments that mark European history'. However, he suggests, 'there may be a need to rethink the contempt for intellectuals'. In denigrating intellectuals as a whole, argues Steiner, we lose 'a sense of excitement about ideas' as well as a grand scale of social ambition.
Opinions? What is an intellectual? Do you like them? Do we need them? What is intellectualism? And does it get the respect it deserves? |
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), or "pretending to hate capitalism because it's fashionable to do so". Why would anyone pretend any of these things when they get so much shit for it?