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The disdain by the undereducated for the the intellectual elite stems from, I think, the value that society places upon those of a certain educational background (or, in rare cases, those who have been able to garner the interest and appreciation of the intellectual elite despite being outside of it), in the form of jobs and, in turn, financial remuneration. We award certain types of jobs to those who have been validated by the educational systrem as being worthy of those jobs, and usually you have to have come from a certain level of wealth, as often determined by the previous generation's educational pedigree, in order to pursue one's education to that pinnacle. So in part the anti-intellectual movement is an expression of class unrest in the terms by which the lower classes can most easily express that unrest, and by which the manipulators can apply that energy to their own aims. For example, man intellectuals oppose military expansion, especially in the area of nuclear arms, but fueled by mob fear and a classist disdain for those who can research and logically support their arguments, an unscrupulous politician can get the populist backing he needs to award contracts to his buddies in the defense industry. Eventually, the lower classes might figure out that they've been hoodwinked by a slick intellectual posing as one of their own (say, maybe a member of an old New England family who appears to be a Texan good ol' boy?), which only adds to their negativity, which inevitably will again be exploited.
Now, the argument I just put forward may make sense to you, or it might not, but if you were able to follow it through to its end, you are an intellectual, at least by the definition of the anti-intellectual armada. It does not take much to alienate an anti-intellectual. As a child I had something of a prodigious vocabulary, which would often perturb classmates and peers, so to cover their own embarassment at feeling stupid they try to demean you back; I remember at camp once, around age 12, I used the word "specifically" in a conversation, which became my stigma for the rest of that summer. I knew at the time they just couldn't contextualize that word into a sentence themselves, but nevertheless, I found myself "dumbing down" my speech or just generally getting self-conscious when I spoke to most people, which forced me to stay silent. More recently, I work in a store with a man who may or may not have finished high school, and as he's a lower-tier manager, superior and more senior to me, he does not like to ever feel inferior by having his ignorance exposed. Thus, when he does, he will become much more belligerent, accusing me of being "stupid," even sometimes outrightly lying to lord his position over me.
I believe this happens on a more subtle level when every voice of intellectual authority might claim one thing but a politician does the exact opposite; it's the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich/in power?" taunt, and it's an invitation to act with as little thought and analysis as they are accustomed to. The sad part is that all too often, the invitation is accepted. |
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