On anti-intellectualism in academia
Mar 19th, 2009 by Bryan
I have been reading Grand Hotel Abyss ever since their fantastic post about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series. The blog is steeped in literary theory, and I have just enough background in that to follow the arguments without contributing much to them. I enjoy their contrarian pieces such as this one on Women’s Lit.
Anyway, there is an interesting piece there this morning on anti-intellectualism among academic elites. It takes a couple of reads to absorb the whole argument, but it is worth the effort. The argument begins with an aphorism: “The left intellectual’s contempt for “elitism” is an inverse form of self-regard.” Think about that for a minute.
The part I am interested in here is this paragraph on leftist (totalitarian) celebration of “The People:”
Anyway, there is no such thing as The People. The People is an illusion created by mass culture so that power blocs forced to accountability by democratization could have an interlocutor or a proxy in order to carry out what they’ve always been doing, and this is as true of the vanguard party as of the Republican Party. There is no The People, there are only people, and people get off on all sorts of things.
I see this impulse very clearly in religious studies, in which there is a populist interest in the cultural forms of religious communities taken as a whole, but at the same time an utter contempt for the actual beliefs, theology, and practices of religious people.
The blog post imagines an encounter between an elite academic and the stereotypical plumber. A similar dynamic is at work between Professors of Religion and those who practice and live religion, although the religious person holds nothing of the ulitity of a plumber for the inept academic.
I have been thinking a lot about the democratization of discourse and universal access to knowledge. We have to be careful not to structure these new conversations in ways that include those who have always been present, and exclude those for whom we still feel contempt or pity.
