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"...all that goatee-stroking bollocks and student-flavoured shite."

16:07 / 06.12.02

That's what my ex, Paul, would call any attempt of mine to look past the surface of things. I don't think he was being mean at the time, and I certainly wasn't being serious sometimes. (I mean, c'mon, trying to find evidence of promotion of fascism through the Hollywood gestalt? I think I was fucked on Jack Daniels that night.) I think it offended his Kentish sensibilities, maybe.

But it does make me wonder why there seems to be this anti-intellectualism bend that is somewhat seen as revolutionary, or at least a gigantic pin utilised to correct inflated heads. I mean, sure, power and thinking one knows everything should be challenged. But I think it comes a bit knee-jerk at times.

The reason why it rubs me the wrong way is because, as a kid growing up in the projects in D.C., I would constantly get beat up for "talking like a white girl". I never could pull off the innercity mushmouth patois with anything even resembling a straight face, and because my interests lay far beyond anything that that particular world could offer me, I spent a lot of time in front of the telly. And what do you get when your best friend has cathode ray tubes? You get the perfect diction that comes from watching too many documentaries, the nightly news, Bugs Bunny, and really bad 80's sitcoms.

But it seems to me that the anti-goatee-stroking brigade, who was installed as a checks-and-balances thing so that intellectuals don't end up with their heads too far up their arses... they're not really in it for some sort of holy crusade, but rather to tear people down and make 'em feel like crap for giving a damn and using the brain cells that living life has a habit of destroying.

Oh, fuck it. Now I'm getting all maudlin.

::aphonia::

19:42 / 06.12.02

Does this thread give you any ideas?

04:33 / 07.12.02

Whoops. *blush*

Uhm. I'll be over here, next to the coat check.

::a::

17:12 / 07.12.02

Actually, it might be interesting taking some of the ideas in that anti-intellectualism thread and slamming them together with this thread I tried to get rolling on "the tabloid soul." One of the thrusts behind the article that I linked to there was that conservatism has become a dominant political discourse because conservatives know how to appeal to the "tabloid soul."

What you've pointed out here is a tendency to view anti-intellectualism as revolutionary. There's something revolutionary about the way the tabloid soul is constructed, too: it relies on defining an elite and then defining oneself as a loudmouth pointing out the follies of that elite. That's the essence of tabloid appeal; being a populist underdog putting the "powers that be" (whether they really exist or not) in their place. It's close to the paranoia of conspiracy theory, but not so defensive and fearful... and self-consciously artificial, although seductive.

02:19 / 09.12.02

Ok, I just spent an hour searching and can't find any evidence to support this. Nevertheless, I swear it's true.

A president, shortly before the Civil War I think, was elected in part because he accused his opponent of being an dandy. As evidence, he brought up the fact that the incumbent had had the nerve to install indoor plumbing in the white house.

This isn't exactly anti-intellectualism, but.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:03 / 09.12.02

Hmmm..but looking at it the other way:

I never could pull off the innercity mushmouth patois with anything even resembling a straight face, and because my interests lay far beyond anything that that particular world could offer me, I spent a lot of time in front of the telly.

No offence, aphonia, but I think *Jesus* would have clipped you round the ear for that one. So they hate you for "intellectualism", you despise them for their limited ambition and harsh, common voices. Who has the moral high ground here?

16:12 / 09.12.02

No offence, aphonia, but I think *Jesus* would have clipped you round the ear for that one. So they hate you for "intellectualism", you despise them for their limited ambition and harsh, common voices. Who has the moral high ground here?

[sarcasm] Why, me obviously, since I'm the one who actually got away from that fucking zoo. [/sarcasm]

No offense here, but I watched people die around me. I watched 12 year olds get knocked up by their 22 year old boyfriends. I lived in the fucking projects, and got beat up on a daily fucking basis by people for speaking a different way. And, no, I'm not "big" enough to be "better than them" and not make fun of their language right on back.

And the day that "Jesus" or "God" gives a damn about what any black woman has to say about her own damned experience is the day that the world would become a completely different place.

::a::

16:32 / 09.12.02

Well, I grew up in a rich white suburb and I watched kids get institutionalized, OD, die driving drunk, commit suicide, and am now watching the survivors turn into their parents. Angst and horror are everywhere. Happy childhoods, I think, don't have anything to do with environment.

And most of us in the suburbs, at one point or another, idealized poverty-stricken youth, who we saw as having "something real" to struggle against. Which is the flipside of anti-intellectualism. Some kind of class equivalent to self-hating jews and internal homophobics.

And, yeah - it's easy to cop an attitude when you look at the consumerist bullshit around you. I grew up on Long Island. We invented Mall Culture. We made Mariah Carey, Billy Joel, and Tiffany for Christ's sake. But, I don't know - most days, I try and stay focused. Think that they're living their lives as best they know how and if they're happy then they're doing better than I was.

I'm happy to hear you got out of the projects. But anti-intellectualism isn't tied to poverty. If it was, money would bring class in a non-class-struggle sense, and we wouldn't have gaudy mansions. But it doesn't, and we do.

Being an intellectual is just a value system. One among many. And as much as I don't want what the people around me have, it's not as if they secretly covet my collection of used paperbacks and wish they could trade their Nordstrom's credit cards for my Borders Frequent Coffee card.

However, anti-intellectualism, in the sense of a distrust of anything smart, and voting into power the dumb guy because he's one of the boys... that's not excusable. That's terrifying and ignorant and makes me think that we're living in the New Dark Ages.

iconoplast,
who is American enough to think God listens to whiny white kids from the suburbs.

17:40 / 09.12.02

anti-intellectualism isn't tied to poverty. – iconoplast

Neither is stupidity or ignorance. As someone who also came from an impoverished inner-city environment, I am all too aware of how difficult it is to thrive in one. But running away from the ghetto and getting out of the ghetto are very different things.

One can can physically remove hirself from hir childhood environment, denigrate it and delude hirself that because s/he speaks differently, lives in a different neighborhood and dates different people, s/he has somehow transcended it. However, the tower blocks still loom large inside hir head; every insult or assertion of escape (sarcastic or not) rings deeply hollow with the realization that the dreaded, hated projects are carried internally, everywhere one goes, affecting every move one makes, until the decision is made to get over hirself and face one's childhood misery once and for all.

Good luck with it, aphonia.

That having been said, I'm right there with aphonia in terms of anti-intellectualism being a way to "tear people down and make 'em feel like crap for giving a damn and using the brain cells that living life has a habit of destroying." She's right on the money there.

My take on the the anti-intellectual mindset is that it's:

1) a safety valve for lazy thinkers to express their jealousy and fear of those who have taken the time and effort to educate themselves, and

2) an attempt to level the conversational field for those who don't feel they can confront an intellectual or an intelligent person directly on a given topic.

18:49 / 09.12.02

But is it revolutionary?

19:22 / 09.12.02

Not particularly. If anything the anti-intellectual standpoint tends towards stasis, keeping things as they are and not trying too hard to change things.

03:06 / 10.12.02

One can can physically remove hirself from hir childhood environment, denigrate it and delude hirself that because s/he speaks differently, lives in a different neighborhood and dates different people, s/he has somehow transcended it. However, the tower blocks still loom large inside hir head; every insult or assertion of escape (sarcastic or not) rings deeply hollow with the realization that the dreaded, hated projects are carried internally, everywhere one goes, affecting every move one makes, until the decision is made to get over hirself and face one's childhood misery once and for all.

Holy Toledo! Get out of my head, you!

Nah, actually I've been thinking aout this all day. It's bullshit... I do carry this around like a fucking weight. And not even a "cool" looking weight... like a ridiculous heavy clownsuit.

*sigh* Every time I think I've got an answer, I find I'm just as lame as everyone else.

Sorry about that.

::a::

12:08 / 10.12.02

Badbh Catha: I would argue that anti-intellectualiam can be a revolutionary force, or at least can be harnessed for revolutionary purposes. Examples: the active persecution of intellectuals in China's Great Leap forward and Cultural Revolution, the wholesale slaughter of academics in Khmer Rouge Cambodia (just wearing eyeglasses was enough to make you a target for death!), and the Islamist revolutionary stance that any knowledge not contained in the Qu'ran is excess to requirements... we saw it in Iran, and more recently under Afghanistan's Taliban.

Indeed, the so-called "Republican revolution"—the hard-right, Christian fundamentalist shift that has forever changed political discourse in two-party America—has been driven largely by anti-intellectualism: these people speak openly of "culture wars," their ideology pitting think-tank "eggheads" against the "common sense" of "ordinary working people." It's a shuck, of course—the Republican agenda is carefully crafted and marketed in exactly the sort of think-tanks they outwardly deride—but the success of the tactic is testimony to the ingrained nature of the prejudice on which it plays.

I would further argue that almost every revolution has an element of anti-intellectualism. That's because it is useful for the revolutionary mindset to divide the world into clear demarcations of Us and Them, while it is the intellectual's tendency to see both sides of a story: the revolutionary sees this as dangerous, fears that the intellectual may become "tainted" or "corrupted" by their empathy for the "enemy."

Christ, but that's a lot of scare-quotes. I'll stop now.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:48 / 10.12.02

I think Jack makes a very good point - the forces of extreme reaction are anti-intellectual, but also radical, even if they don't realise it.

The Talib who wants to abolish ball games and have clean-shaven men beaten may believe that he is recreating an earlier form of Islam, but he isn't; he is creating a whole new platform based on modern interpretations of certain ideas. Likewise the retired RSM who hectors his local MP about funding for local drug abuse treatment programs; his politics are based on an idealised past that never happened, and certainly not as he imagines it.

In these contexts, the distrust of intellectuals is, I suspect, almost instinctive, because they are assumed to have the capacity to reeal the false historicities in play. In order to recreate "the good old days", the ability actually to reconstruct what those good old days were factually like is a deeply undesirable skill.

15:06 / 10.12.02

Weird - Did we just elide "intellectual" with "Invisible" (in the Grant Morrison sense) or what?