The Wisdom of Anti-Intellectualism

[Reinhard]

A lot of folks from the South (and from some of the other redder, more rural regions of the country as well) nurse a longstanding distrust of intellectuals. Such skepticism, of course, mystifies many better-bred Americans, who chalk it up to typical hillbilly backwardness, the bumpkin’s gap-toothed pride in his own ignorance, that sort of thing. But the truth is that there’s a lot of wisdom in a general aversion to the kind of people who live in the ivory tower, even if expressions of that aversion occasionally traffic in hyperbole and fiction.

One such exaggeration is the idea that every last college professor on campus is some sort of liberal secret agent, carrying out PSYOPs from the lecture stand—a devotee of Marx with a shrine in his closet, a proselytizer of atheism and free-for-all sexual mores, bent on brainwashing impressionable undergraduates into willing foot-soldiers of the culture wars.

Of course there are professors at most contemporary universities who more or less fit this bill, although obviously they wouldn’t put what they do in those same words. But by and large the notion of a widespread and conscious conspiracy to subvert red-State American norms for political purposes is a significant overstatement. That scrawny grad student teaching our sons and daughters ENGL 101 in the Fall semester of their freshman year hasn’t been recruited by the United Nations to prepare the way for Agenda 21. He’s not paid under the table to sow discord.

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is a little more gruesome than that. That professor might not be on a conscious mission to turn students into defectors from the culture of their parents and hometowns. But he still tends to do just that. Professors do so almost spontaneously, as a natural result of how they conceive of their purpose as educators, as well as their almost fanatical faith in the efficacy of that brand of education to initiate sweeping social change and set the world to rights. These teachers and lecturers sever students from more conservative regions of the States, sometimes traumatically, from the communities they grew up in, simply because of what they take higher learning to be.

The content of higher education has changed dramatically in the past four or five decades, especially in the humanities. You can track that change in the “diversification” of studied or anthologized authors. You can track it as well in the rise of “theory” as a touchstone of literary and linguistic research or, more recently, the ubiquity of round-the-clock multicultural and pro-“tolerance” messaging in the classroom and on the quad. It’s been a significant change. The common answer now, in fact, for what we teach our lowerclassmen in their introductory courses isn’t so much a specific set of skills at all but: “how to think.” Their major goal is to inculcate a “critical awareness” in their students.

Translated into slightly-more-parsable English, what that means is that college educators want their undergraduates to be aware of the various ways in which misogyny, racism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, etc. have shaped the habits, attitudes, and beliefs that they’ve always held to be normal. And they want their students to be aware of the progress narrative that accompanies these terms, which tells how bigotry, hatred, and a fear of the “Other” have been hallmarks of Western thought throughout history, right up until very recent times. Students are taught that our literature, our art, our politics, our social norms, even our ancestral religions have all been influenced by these dark, regressive forces.

In this schema, then, learning “how to think” takes on a very specific meaning. It means learning only how to think along the aforementioned lines, how to scour one’s own thoughts for various heresies against progressivism, how to police other people’s speech and actions for the same—in short, how to hold in suspicion every worldview not founded upon the aforementioned narrative, not populated by the aforementioned -isms and phobias. (There are rare academics who question these dogmas, but in my many years of higher education I have yet to hear any serious critique of them in person from the lecture stand.)

But not only does the purpose of education have this particular, narrow meaning to the typical college faculty member; the power of education has a peculiar character as well. Education to them is an almost magical force, a panacea for society’s ills.

Of course it would be odd for an educator to think that what he does has no positive effects whatsoever on the world around him. Why would he get into the business in the first place? But the potentials ascribed to education in the discourse of liberal intellectuals frequently beggar belief.

How does one curtail epidemics of inner-city teenage pregnancy? Education. How do we reverse worsening nationwide trends in income inequality? Education again. How do we fight rape and sexual assault? Education. How do we beat Boko Haram and engender stability and democracy in Nigeria? Also education. How do we lower suicide rates, especially of “marginalized” groups like homo- and transsexuals? How do we prevent the future George Zimmermans of the world? How do we end the “war on women”, promote harmony between recent immigrants and current citizens of America, bring peace to the Middle East? You guessed it: education, education, education. For too many employees of our nation’s colleges, most all of the uglier aspects of the human experience issue from “ignorance” and “backwardness.” Thus all that stands between humanity and Heaven on Earth is a degree or two in Cultural Studies.

It’s no mystery, then, why so many college professors bring a sort of missionary fervor into the classroom. No mystery why they end up evangelizing to their students and attacking so persistently the beliefs of those students who hail from the less-enlightened hinterlands of America. These professors aren’t every last one part of a secret cabal. They’re not executing cryptic protocols. They just conceive of education as the undoing of “problematic” traditional understandings, and they believe in their heart of hearts that they can change the world by that very pursuit.

Before I went away to college, I was warned in various terms—some almost comically fanciful—about the sort of machinations and indoctrinations that happen in the university lecture hall. In undergraduate I quickly learned to dismiss these warnings for the backwoods, fever-swamp hallucinations I thought they they were.

Nine years of higher education later, with one graduate degree down and another in the works, I’ve come to a more reasoned and settled conclusion: Southern anti-intellectualism might be exaggerative in some of the cosmetic aspects of its critique, but it’s brutally accurate in its spirit and substance. They might not be coordinating their efforts behind closed doors, but there are very real senses in which the people to whom we entrust our young adults look to convert and induct them rather than provide them with the sort of knowledge or insight historically sought on the college campus.

http://theden.tv/2014/08/20/the-wisdom- ... ectualism/