Timothy has an absolute blinder of an article here. The next time you read of some liberal – in the American usage of the word liberal – attack one of their opponents as a “hick”, or “redneck”, or whatnot, consider his words.
Read the whole thing.
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Timothy Sandefur on so-called intellectualsNovember 18th, 2008 |
 9 comments to Timothy Sandefur on so-called intellectuals |
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I wrap up this concept of who has the market cornered on anti-intellectual populism (in the U.S.) with – I am just as scared of Red State Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking, Johnny Cash listening, fish fry eating crowd as I am of Blue State sparkling water drinking, Melissa Ethridge listening, tofu eating crowd.
We have a serious crisis and I don’t see a way out. It seems that a goodly portion of those people who fit into the broad definition of intellectual have choosen one of the two major parties. They believe they have some rarified connection to the Ether, but they need the votes of the masses. They are Statist/Authortarians who need to pander every so often to the great unwashed for the continuation of their power. This applies to both sides of our two party system. But their is a fraction of the intellectuals who are anti-Statist, but are not able to get any foothold whatsoever with the masses when we try and tell them that they are being played for useful idiots.
It’s a losing battle as the masses want emotional arguments, not intellectual ones. They don’t care about Homer or Shakespeare, and are not much superior to “barbaric” tribesmen when it comes to superstitions. It is sad that so many intellectuals truly believe that they are so smart that their .000000016% of active human experience qualifies them to use offensive force against the world. They are so convinced that they can make a difference that they convince the superstition riddled useful idiots that they will make everyone above average, or at least those who count. And so they give these intellectuals power. It is unfortunate how few intellectuals see how limited each individual really is, including themselves, and abandon notions of coercion and force, and therefore make no promises to the superstitious masses.
I guess this transforms into an argument against those who go on about choosing the lesser of two evils. As it stands neither party in the two party system in the US have any vestige of pure intellectualism that will swear off massive coercion and force. It is pretty much a neck and neck foot race. It’s not a matter that one is appreciably less evil than the other. Both parties are squarely Statist and have devolved into making base appeals to the superstitious flocks making all sorts of promises of miracles. To make matters worse, superstitions warrant the use of force, broadcast force, striking out every which way. The superstitious want something, anything, done about “it”. Both parties have sold their souls to “democracy” and if they had any pure ideals left they both had to squander them away to hang onto power, and both sell out the lowest denominators. Both parties are low, base, brutish and anti-intellectual without much more than a hair’s difference between them.
“Education” nowadays means nothing more than adherence to a set of beliefs. If you believe in Darwinism, Global Warming and diversity as well as disapproving of discrimination, gun ownership and religious fundamentalism you are educated. The old dichotomy between an education based around transmission of facts and one designed to teach how to think is dead and buried beneath an education system that simply teaches how to be Left. The idea that some sort of familiarity with the cultural heritage of whatever civilization you have been born into is necessary to education strikes most moderns as simply bizarre.
Thus the more Higher Education there is, the more polls come out in which we learn that >50% of Britons can’t even name the Evangelists. I went to a seminar yesterday in which one bright young think, when asked for biblical monarchomach precedents, tentatively suggested “the Israelites”.
I’m not suggesting there is a conspiracy to use the education system to make people ignorant and incapable of clear thought in order to make them vote Left, but I think that’s probably the best statement of its structural function in society.
I can’t believe he left out the King and Pope of the clinically retarded left. Any article like this is at least worth mentioning Noam Chomsky.
Of course, as basically a right-liberal or a libertarian himself, the author leaves out what is actually the most glaring case of leftist anti-intellectualism:
Its hysterical denial of any significant differences rooted in race and gender.
This is the single plank upon which nearly all the leftist political architecture exists today, and it drives the irrationality of our politics more than any other thing. It is a fact that such differences exist, that they matter, that they affect outcomes in myriad ways that can never be wholly assuaged by any public policy. Any public policy premised on the assumption that they can is doomed both to fail and to be tyrannical. And yet, when leftists encounter any discussion of these things–as in the Larry Summers case–their response is as anti-intellectual an appeal to political dogma as a North Korean’s insistence on the immortality of the Dear Leader.
Good article, although it’s usually Goring, and sometimes Himmler who is ‘credited’ with the culture/gun statement. Of course Goring is famous for looting the art galleries of Europe in a frenzy of theft only surpassed by Napoleon over a century earlier.
The quote is misattributed, according to Wikiquote:
“In fact, it’s a line uttered by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst. The association with Nazism is appropriate, as the play was first performed in April 1933, in honor of Hitler’s birthday. ”
And a “Browning” could not have been a revolver! But it could have been a pun on Robert Browning.
Thanks for linking to this: I live in Cambridge, MA and sometimes it helps when someone else verbalizes what’s so appalling about this place.
I believe that the pattern is an old one. Years ago, I read an account of a medieval categorization of modes of thought, along the following lines: The rhetorical thinker believes that X is true because he grew up among people who believed X. The dialectical thinker believes that X is true because belief in X is current among intellectually sophisticated people. The demonstrative thinker believes that X is true because he can present a clearly reasoned argument for X based on logic and evidence. (A quick google suggests that in fact the three categories go back to Aristotle, as so much of later medieval thought did.) Superficially the dialectical and demonstrative thinker look alike, as both being “intellectuals,” but fundamentally it’s the rhetorical and dialectical thinker who are alike, as both believe what is plausible or what other people hold to be true.
In today’s political context, at least, the “right” seems to be mainly an appeal to rhetorical thinking and the “left” to dialectical. But perhaps that’s fairly generally true, in the historical era when “right” and “left” have been generally recognized political categories.
Linking this to the above post, it appears that Gove has taken a look at the British educational system and has summoned up the cajones to call bullshit
I realise you guys don’t like Gove because you suspect that he wants to make you read your nudey mags in underground vaults safe from a re-animated and heavily armed Mary Whitehouse to whom he has given jursidiction over national policing. But what the hell, that’s good shit he’s talking there.