Rich Hills proclaims himself "certainly an anti-intellectual." Undoubtedly this is in part a function of my current mood, but though deliberate obscurity can be very annoying (and quite bad things), whatever tendency (certain classes of?) intellectuals have towards that sin is far, far,
far outstripped by the anti-intellectual "I don't need this 'knowledge' crap to know that someone's argument is [racist, sexist, anti-American, anti-family, stupid]" trope. The people who will make bold pronouncements about what a person says or means -- not only without a gesture towards actually reading them, but with a smug assertion that they don't
need to -- represent potentially the most aggravating sin in America's public discourse.
It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini.
Umm...no it doesn't. All three found plenty of sustenance in the more mundane "anti-intellectual" defenses and support of their cohorts.
Rich Hills seems to have mis-labeled his argument. He seems only to be attacking a certain type of intellectual, or at least a certain type of writing (and I assume we're all familiar with what he's referring to). I share your disdain for true anti-intellectuals, but that label doesn't seem to me to apply to him.
ReplyDeleteWithout naming names, it was not him specifically who sparked my ire on this topic (although he earns a little for hinging on post-modernism...ickkkky!, which does annoy me, particularly since he recognizes that difficult concepts often are going to be tough to understand, ala Kant).
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