Anti-Intellectualism vs. Intellectualism: One Student's Response

By Anna Brailow on July 6, 2016

In recent news, outlets such as Psychology Today have observed a case of intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism in America. The authors question whether [despite being able to access more resources now than ever] Americans are truly informed citizens as a whole.

To paraphrase, do they truly want to be informed in the first place or do they merely want confirmation on a side of an argument that they already believe to be true? Or, and this may be the case, do they only believe something just because they want to believe it?

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Psychology Today quotes Charles Pierce, journalist and author of “Idiot America”:

“The rise of idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”

According to Pierce, there are many Americans who do not feel as though they ought to actively pursue or put any effort towards any more knowledge than they already have, a dangerous thought that could indeed be true. This, however, is not a new concept and it is not [nor has it been historically] confined to America.

Before discussing even more applications of anti-intellectualism vs. intellectualism, it would be most productive to describe what exactly they mean. Beginning with intellectualism, one concise definition dictates that it is to have the power to acquire, understand, and reorganize knowledge according to a speculative or practical interest in a particular pursued topic explored via moral and ethical means.

This definition was paraphrased and adapted using a combination of the works of Harold H. Punke in the journal “Improving College and University Teaching“ and the lectures and papers of philosopher and historian Dr. Morton White. This will be the definition that I will be using throughout this article.

Using this definition, intellectualism doesn’t have to apply to higher order abstract thinking and acknowledges that every person has the capacity to be an intellectual depending on the way in which they attain and use their knowledge. White makes a distinction, then, between the anti-intellectualist and the anti-intellectual. The former, the anti-intellectualist, is hostile to the doctrine of intellectualism. The latter, the anti-intellectual, is hostile to the intellectuals themselves.

“Unlike the anti-intellectual, the anti-intellectualist may press claims of the heart and the hand against those of the head, or they may think of intuition as a superior faculty to be distinguished sharply from that employed by the mathematician or the experimental scientist” (White, Reflections on Anti-intellectualism). Intellectualism, then, has historically relied on a rational truth driven by coherent logic while anti-intellectualism is driven by a truth of passion.

Here is where things start to get complicated. Every person is capable of sensory and emotional feeling as well as rational logic, and more often than not the two go hand-in-hand. Consider this in relation to music, literature, art, history, etc. While not everything is logical, there are times when clean-cut logic is necessary. While not everything is so clean-cut, one must rely on creative thinking. Thankfully, many modern intellectuals realize that rational and passionate thinking are naturally and essentially human, and must be worked with and worked around for the sake of stability.

Dr. Morton White addressed a real scenario. Those who take on the role of the anti-intellectuals (in this case, 17th century empiricists) would wish to eliminate the intellectuals (continental rationalists), only allow them to operate within certain bounds, and/or invade the discourse of the intellectuals and dictate what should be done. The term he used in his scenario is “containment.” Anti-intellectualists would use the same strategies, but would be up against a different opponent.

Rather than come to a consensus with the intellectualist rationals, empiricists decided to contain their ideas and impose a reconstruction of that idea and a new intellect. The idea was to turn the ideas of the rationalists in their own favor to preserve social hierarchy. So, these new ideas become more popular, and then they are criticized by rationalists. Criticism made empiricists more aggressive, trying even harder to contain or possibly even eliminate rationalists.

There were certainly people who took on and accepted the new doctrine of passional truth, die-hard empiricist followers, completely shutting out any other form of reason. The problem here wasn’t that rationalists wanted to reject a passional truth completely; in fact, many of them embraced some form of a passional truth (say, a religion of some form) themselves. A big part of what intellectuals were trying to assert in this scenario was that experimentation based on something that goes beyond a singular sensory experience, the question of why things are the way they are, may not be answered solely within the boundaries that passional truth may give.

In short, the answers for the questions that we have about the world and life cannot all be found in one particular place. Dr. Victor Kumar, author of In Support of Anti-Intellectualism, actually makes this point. Mainly, he states that there are certain particular types of knowledge. One of them is “armchair knowledge,” which is knowing the logistics behind things and how to do them without having the experience of doing them. Then, there’s the kind of knowledge gained through experience “because intellectualists do not think that knowing how and knowing that are distinct kinds of knowledge.”

Wait … haven’t scientists and mathematicians through experimentation (aka experience) been publishing their findings and then having them reinterpreted by the media and large corporations to be redistributed to the public? Do intellectualists who know how to do something and the logistics behind something not rely on people with more hands-on or other kinds of experience, especially if they do not have that kind of insight themselves?

Finally, a question for further thought, do doctors have to experience having a disease or any form of debilitating condition firsthand in order to know how to cure it?

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