Wow. I have been blinded by the sheer irony of this most anti-intellectual of statements. We should beware lest our linguistically challenged friend here creat a space-time vortex which will destroy the universe.
True anti-intellectualism has been around for . . . well, forever. And though admittedly, the world would be a better place if we got rid of it, I don’t think it’s necessary for *everyone *to be intellectual-friendly. I think the only people who *must *be intellectual-friendly are the intellectuals themselves. And I’m not sure whether this has ever really been the case.
Everybody else is an intellectual, to themselves they are just smart.
Shows what you know. A true intellectual is capable of conveying a bitter sneer with only a handful of single-syllable words and one punctuation mark. Two, if you count the interjection “you bat-eared fuckwicket” as punctuation, which is a subject of much debate.
I would respond, but my anti-intellectual bias leads me to steer clear of The Stright Dope. I’m gonna go down to the supermarket and see if the latest issue of People has any pictures of Britney Spears in it.
The following is a response from a reader:
Below is a link to a very good book that you may enjoy, written by Richard Hofstadter. This book is multifaceted and the title is somewhat misleading (chosen to induce book sales no doubt) as the theme of the book is very broad and includes an excellent analyses of education in America, with the main thesis an analyses of the American Character from the founding of the Nation to the “present day”. The book won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and deservedly so. I highly recommend it.
Well, I’m going to be critical of this post, but hopefully not in way that warrants moving this to the pit.
Okay, we have a topic.
This is totally irrelevant to the argument that anti-intellectualism inhibits learning. This statement also begs for a cite. I believe that if my professors had attempted to communicate with me in gestures and facial expressions alone, I would have lost a little more than 10% of the content.
The great philosophers and scientists and historians of the past have managed to communicate with us quite effectively, despite being dead for a long time. They use language, and sometimes pretty charts and pictures. It can be done.
When writing for the general public, and not in an academic setting, a good rule of thumb is to write at a grade 10 level. Use good grammar, use words that convey the meaning you want to give and no more, and stay away from jargon known only to specialists and the highly educated. For them, you can provide footnotes and references to more detailed discussion.
I used to work with a guy who thought himself an ‘intellectual’. He could not say something in 5 words if he could say it in 50. You run into these types in boardrooms all the time. If he wanted to say “I agree with your report,” he would say “Having perused the information you provided in full detail and with due consideration to its content, I must convey my agreement with the essence of what it says.” Needless to say, he was an idiot.
Learn to speak clearly. Don’t sacrifice clarity for the sake of sounding ‘smart’. Flowery speech is often the sign of a charlatan, snake-oil salesman, or someone who is compensating for his own insecurity or lack of understanding. Or as the saying goes, “If you can’t convince them with facts, baffle them with bullshit.”
So now you get to be your own editor. Or more likely, your audience will provide some editing for you. If you are capable of listening to the feedback you get, you’ll soon learn whether you are making sense to them or not.
Another nice thing about the internet is that it is evolving its own content aggregators and editors. Great technical articles gain audience because they are referenced by Slashdot and other content filters. Write something funny or interesting, and someone might ‘Digg’ it and gain you a big audience. Set up a blog and start writing, and your audience will filter itself - write over the heads of the kids, and the kids will go away. Write simplistic twaddle, and you may lose everyone. It’s very democratic.
I’ve found that condescending speech has little to do with the complexity of the topic. It’s possible to write condescending children’s books at a child’s level, and condescending works aimed at an audience of professors. Great writers have the ability to pass along complex ideas without sounding condescending. Lesser writers can sound like snots while giving you the time of day.
To draw an example from the last quote, look at the difference between these two paragraphs:
“How do I, who have been studying the matter at hand for months and even years, know what words to provide a parenthetical definition that some may need but others may consider to be condescending?”
and
“How do I know when to provide a definition that some may need but others find condescending?”
The answer is that the first paragraph sounds condescending.
Now you’ve finally come back around to your original subject. Everything you wrote between this paragraph and the first sentence of your post was completely irrelevant to the point you are trying to make. So I suggest you tighten up your writing skills and learn to make your point without digression and flourishes. That may help get rid of the problem of sounding condescending as well.
But back to the point: Do you have a cite for the sweeping assertion you just made? Or are you just sneering at the ‘average person’? In any event, this gets back to the ‘know your audience’ point I made earlier. Don’t get in the habit of writing dissertations in YouTube comments - the audience there is likely to be unappreciative. On the other hand, feel free to be as deep as you want in the Great Debates forum here - you won’t find much anti-intellectualism.
Go where your audience is. But if you believe that your writing is going unappreciated, before chalking it up to the ‘anti-intellectualism’ of your audience I’d suggest a round of healthy introspection. Maybe it’s not the audience that’s the problem.
If you lecture me on how to swing a golf club when I didn’t ask for the lecture, you’re being pompous and rude. If you lecture me on string theory in a university classroom, you’re not. It’s all about knowing where and when a lecture is wanted and appropriate. It has nothing to do with the complexity of the subject, or the ‘anti-intellectualism’ of your audience.
If you walk into a thread where people are having fun talking about how funny George Bush looks, and you launch into a lecture on the nature of American imperialism, your audience is going to tell you to shut the hell up. And it’s not because they’re ‘anti-intellectual’, it’s because you have picked the wrong time and place for your lecture.
And finally, if you write a ‘lecture’ that is ill-conceived, poorly structured, full of strange digressions, and fails to make its point in any coherent way, the fact that your audience tunes you out is not in any way indicative of anything other than that you need to work on your writing skills, or that maybe you are talking above a level warranted by your own understanding of the subject.
By definition, no G&S parody is anti-intellectual.
That is exactly why books and articles are aimed at different markets. My wife has published a few books in a series aimed at junior high school students, and the guidelines are very explicit about the level of writing, and the length. Even technical articles are aimed at different audiences. An article for a mass circulation magazine is different from an IEEE magazine is different from an IEEE journal.
And if the material is aimed incorrectly, it will get rejected. You don’t try to sell Proust as a juvenile.
IEEE magazines have the policy that all acronyms must be spelled out at first use (with some rare exceptions) even in 99% of the audience knows them.
Well, the true anti-intellectuals are watching reality shows on TV. We might talk about hostility to intelligence, the kind of thing that makes someone who says he got all As be considered a snob, while the equivalent achievement in sports earns a letter and universal acclaim.
As to your point, some “intellectual” writing, once analyzed, is illogical garbage. In my experience it is much easier to write a clear description of something if you really understand it. If you don’t, you ramble. Asimov and Sagan’s, for two, ability to write popular science did not come from them being stupid.
You will need more than that in a debate. You spoke of most Americans and talked about what they read and yet you base this on your own experience. You haven’t met most Americans and have no way of knowing what most Americans read. An opponent in a debate will have no problem attacking this argument.
It would be best if I could know what your main point is from the very first sentence in your OP (original post). Everything else, especially in that first paragraph, should be support for that first sentence.
It might be helpful to you if you would join in some of the debates begun by others. I’m not trying to discourage you from posting your own topics. It’s just that maybe we need to warm up to you a bit as a person and not just as a lecturer.
Teachers will often praise you more often than criticize you. But Dopers are a tough crowd. You can learn very quickly here if you don’t get too defensive.
There are guidelines out there for how to write for different age groups and grade levels. I used to use a formula for determining grade level appropriateness, but it’s been a very long time since I used it. I’ll see what I can find.
Sam Stone, nicely done.
Indeed. I, for example, have a Chilton guide for the repair of a mid-seventies Chevette, three used teabags, the left hind leg of a wildebeest, some yarn, and a fairly hairy ass. I am invincible!
Academics often have to write stuff that seems impenetrable, because they sometimes operate at a frighteningly high level of abstraction. A bright layperson picks up a scholarly paper or journal and it often seems as though the writer is just daisy-chaining dependent and independent clauses together around some drily insubstantial concept.
Here’s an example of an essay that starts off with butt-simple, fully readable statements about the highly abstract discipline of semiotics. Notice how the writer very soon has to lengthen his sentences, paste them together with semicolons and such into longer and more elaborate paragraphs, and intertwine ideas, quotations, jargon, historical trends in the field, and what have you. And that’s just chapter one of an introductory-level paper.
I’m going to guess that the o.p. has been reading up on Jacques Barzun and if not, I recommend him, particularly The House of Intellect and The Culture We Deserve.
I started to write up an extended screed on anti-intellectualism in modern American society and then realized that it would just be categorized as more evidence of snobbishness and superiority, which in fact, is not what intellectualism is or at least should be about. Intellectualism in the true sense–that is, not just snobbing away with a sense of entitled superiority, but rather expressing and satisfying curiosity about a wide array of subjects and interests–requires a very broad base of education that does not pander to a single course of study, or a particular set of vocational skills, and that is at odds with the goals of modern education, which is to crank out as many marginally competent graduates with as little expense as possible. As a result, displaying this array of curiosity–especially in schools, but also in general society–is regarded negatively.
When I hear someone complain, for instance, that the latest David Mamet film was “confusing,” “required too much attention,” and was “too hard to understand,” I have to wonder if the person speaking even made an attempt to apply his native intellect and attention to the film. Mamet isn’t Umberto Eco, or William Shakespeare, or even Anton Checkov; his obliqities are often fully explained, under the assumption (probably correct) that the majority of his audience is unfamiliar with the political history of Sparta, or the story of the Forty-Seven Ronin, or the most famous novel of Kafka, and yet he’s still criticized (or by some, unduely praised) for being dense and abstruse. And this is Mamet, who attempts to pander intellect to a semi-literate audience in bite-sized pieces. Presumably he should just grind out Michael Bay-esque explosion demos or Joe Eszterhas-inspired “thrillers” if he really desired commercial success. Asking modern audiences to think about what they’re seeing, rather than pureeing it into an easily digested gruel is the ultimate sin of intellectualism. And should you attest to having actually enjoyed the challenge of puzzling it out, you can expect to be treated to derision and dismissal.
“Keep It Simple, Stupid” is a principle that assumes the ultimate intellectual contempt for your audience; that they know nothing and are incapable of deriving understanding from context. It’s also unfortunately frequently appropriate, even among people who have allegedly attained advanced education.
But Barzun says it much better than I. He’s not simple to read, though; he assumes that you know enough, or will take the time to figure out what it is he’s saying.
Stranger
I think that in the US, capitalism and religion has joined forces to keep the common man and woman in an uncritical state of bedazzled consumerism and superstition. Together they have framed the issue of learning to be only an object of commerce.
Our vocabulary is our intellectual tool-box. The person with the largest vocabulary dies as the winner. Imagine the difference in what is discovered about reality for the individual with microscope, caliper, micrometer, plump-bob, and level in his intellectual tool-box versus he who has only a hammer, pliers, and yard-stick.
The following is a comment one reader made:
I noticed this a lot with my daughter’s high schools. She went through 3 … and in two of them, it was incredibly cool to be stupid. There was a very strong bias against intellectuals. This carried over into our home life where she ridiculed her mother and me for being “smart.” (Note: She is now 25 and barely making it on minimum wages).
Her junior year, we transferred her to one of the best schools in the region … and suddenly it wasn’t cool to be stupid anymore. She floundered horribly for 2 years, but never could quite make it work. Unfortunately, stupid had taken root.
The American culture is all about golf, sports, fashion, partying, and being cool and such. Not much room for intellect. Oh well I guess the Indians and Asians can take over from the USA as the center of technological achievement.
Who exactly are all these readers that you keep referring to?
Exactly. Where is your cite? What is your source? Have you personally written something that some readers have responded to?
This was a reply to my thread on another forum.
Obviously.