Coyote Blog

I'm not anti-intellectual, but I'm not fond of people who've redefined "intellectual" to mean something more like "Orthodox Groupthink Fan Club Member". (Insert standard disclaimers about overgeneralization and my own side doing it too).

In a lot of public discourse these days, "intellectual" (or "science", à propos of your next post) is a lot like "for the children", or "family values": Whatever crap you happen to be selling, slap a sacred cow on the label and go all outraged if anybody complains about what's actually in the tin when they get it home.

I left a comment over at Jefferey Ellis' blog on this very topic a few hours ago:

http://jeffreyellis.org/blog/?p=8374#comments

I’m not a huge fan of Palin, and have never seen Beck, but I think it’s a bit unfair to label large swaths of the Right with the label ” raving, anti-intellectual”.

We have to remember that the Left has agressively marketed itself and all of its positions as “intellectual” for the last 80 years. Organic food? It’s intellectual. Divorce? Sophisticated and intellectual. Separate tracks for Spanish speaking kids? Intellectual. The board game Go? Intellectual. Anti-nuclear power? Intellectual. Anti-anti-communism? Intellectual.

Many on the right are neither pro- or anti- intellectual, they are just against the arrogance of the left, and if the left wants to label X,Y, and Z as intellectual, then rightists will be happy to be against X,Y, and Z, and will use whatever label the left has handed them.

My biases: I identify a bit more with the right than with the left on cultural matters, but I still fundamentally disagree with both as political parties trying to enforce their prejudices with legislation.

I find "intellectual" to be synonymous with "credentialed" and I look to who issues the credentials. What I find is they are often people in academia who have never done anything in real life. Never started a company, never made a payroll, never put themselves out there in any way to fail in a meaningful way. They read other's papers and make commentary, they grade others commitment to the academic cause.

So a sheepskin from a place where this kind of thought is not only ingrained but is the only thought rewarded makes me think less of the skin, the bearer, and the people that say "but he went to (insert Ivy here)"!

Chris K beat me to it, although I generally avoid "credentialed" for the less-warm-and-cuddly-but-more-apt description "ivory-tower bullshit artist." People who have no idea or understanding of the concept that the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there's no difference. People who expect the world to behave according to their incompletely- and/or ill-considered machinations, just because they have a lot of letters after their name or (worst of all) because there is consensus (verifiable truth being so much of a hassle to determine and often inconveniently misaligned with one's politics).

I am in the camp with Chris K. and TJIC. It turns out that intellectuals seem to make crappy decisions. It doesn't matter how smart they are, their plans and decision don't seem to work anywhere near as well as their "smartness" would lead us to believe. I don't remember which administration staffer noted they were happy to listen to the intellectuals, but would not let them into the room when an actual decision was being made. That is not being anti-intellectual. That is being smarter than an intellectual.

There is a difference between "anti-intellectual" and "anti-intelligence".

I'm all for smart folks, but the ones who go around calling themselves intellectuals usually aren't as smart as they think they are, and have a whole dungcart-load of hubris and narcissism that are part of the package.

A factor in the loss of quality in academe is the US government. By putting up money for R&D for kookie schemes, they are corrupting the researchers. If you pay a professor a million dollars to study nonsense, many (hopefully not all) will become intellectual prostitutes. If DOE wants me to say that making large quantities of fuel out of small quantities of chicken fat is a good idea, and pays me a million dollars to do so, I can write a wonderful report showing it is a marvelous idea. This crap goes on all the time. The USG officials should be ashamed!!

There's a fundamental bit of question-begging embedded in the left's constant emphasis on "intellectualism." Implicit in the demand for intellectualism is the assumption that a technocracy is the appropriate sort of state. But in fact, of course, "technocracy or no?" is the very argument at hand.

Yeah: If we're going to have a big, complex government running countless aspects of humans' lives, then smarts have to be intrinsic to the whole deal. That's when intellectualism necessarily becomes a political value. But libertarians (and tea partiers to whatever extent) haven't ceded that whole "big, complex government" part yet. They're sitting here, "Whoa, hold up a sec. We have a problem with this whole 'big government' thing in the first place. Before anything else, that's the argument we want to have." It's not that they see intellectualism as "bad" -- it's merely irrelevant to the actual debate they're seeking.

It's as if the left just plows past that altogether. In decrying their opponents' lack of emphasis on intellectualism, the left is assuming its own conclusion: that a big, complex government is good. And so rather than accurately describing their opponents as anti-big-government, they wind up describing them as anti-one-of-the-traits-that-happens-to-be-part-of-big-government.