The Priesthood of Prestige and the Hatred of the Uneducated

A lot of intellectuals get riled up about the looming specter of anti-intellectualism. I can understand the fear. Perhaps they were picked on for being brainy and artsy instead of being brawny, athletic and good at working with their hands. Gym class was a living hell for me in high school. I had already denounced the flailing jocks, conventional sports, and the clueless philistines I perceived to be all around me when I embraced punk rock, poetry and skateboarding. When punk made its mid-nineties comeback, I called all the newly minted fans poseurs even though they had gotten there just a few years later than me. Then again, they liked shitty bands like Green Day and Offspring, where I listened to Crass and Conflict. My denunciations were just as reactionary as the censure and bullying I’d experienced for dressing funny and writing in a journal. Now I see the same thing happening again with the fear intellectuals have for the anti-intellectual forces stalking America.

I will confess that I love theory. It excites. But the excitement and amusement and joy that comes from setting my brain abuzz with abstract music and heady papers diminish with ferocity when I see how much contempt intellectuals have for those who work with their hands, for those who dare not to pay attention to those theories and what they have to say. It’s no wonder that people don’t pay attention, when so much hatred has been spent on deriding those deemed dumb and uneducated.

In the United States this dual animosity, of intellectuals on the one hand, and so called uneducated on the other, has now settled into a holding pattern of locked horns, a real duel. The differences in taste on the part of each binary group contributes to this failed state. Each group looks down on what the other likes and dislikes.

            The echo chamber silo of higher education creates a self-reinforcing world view and such a similarity of aesthetics that it has become impossible to read a literary novel from one of the big publishing cartels. So many of the writers pushed by the mob boss editors, only got into print by way of an MFA program. It feels like they only love literature because of the perceived prestige. They don’t want a genuine life of letters if it leaves them for poorer, only for richer. Where is the rapture for reading and life in letters? Not in MFA programs. (Nor is it in StoryGrid but that’s another matter.) These folks themselves can’t seem to understand the appeal of pro wrestling, reality television shows about people with a duck call business, or country pop music. The self-appointed highbrow have made deep cuts of separation with any association they might have once had with what they deem low brow. This current cadre of big uni graduated thinkers don’t understand why their extremely disconnected, abstract, theoretical pronunciations don’t relate to how large portions of the population experience reality, and then continue to lambast those who they believe inferior for what they call stupidity.

            This isn’t a good way to win friends and influence people.

Instead of denouncing the supposed anti-intellectual we should be asking ourselves what we do we intellectuals really have against the uneducated?  As much derision and venom flies against those deemed ignorant and unschooled on the part of the intellectual as does the hatred of intellectual from those who are suspicious of the life of the mind. What is this really but a superiority complex painted over the top of thinly disguised class hatred? Otherwise, why the judgment on those who have dropped out of high school, who have not gone to college, who do not have what is considered to be good taste, who do not hold the same opinions and values, in other words the opinions and the values of the educated?

Here we see again the ages-old divisions between those who would manage society from the safety of their lofty perch, and those ready to get their hands dirty. In times past it was the ruler who had access to books, to teachers, to the learned. It was the peasants and the underclass who served the upper class, and had to make do with the wisdom of their hands and the oral knowledge passed down between generations. Another way to look at this simmering animosity, is as the division between the literate and the illiterate, between the written word and the spoken word, each representing a different way of knowing and transmitting that knowing, each giving rise to different types of culture and ways of relating.

As literacy began to flourish it became possible for those who would have formerly had little access to the canon of printed thought, to become self-educated. Yet the self-educated are dangerous to a ruling class, because with access to knowledge, they can read what the Bible actually says, as happened during the Reformation, and they can start forming their own notions about its meaning. They can take what they have learned, the revelation of their own thought on what they have read from the books of the Bible, and start making up their own minds about what has been preached. They can decide if the priesthood is in service to the word, or just giving an interpretation of that word allowing them to hold on to the reins of power. For the priesthood, who were a large swathe of the intellectuals of the time, having all and sundry read and make up their own minds about theological doctrine must have been scary as the basis of their power was pulled away.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and its economic aftermaths.  As Fossil Capitalism ramped up, on the one hand, and Bureaucratic Communism, on the other, it was those who worked with their hands who caught the brunt of the downsides of both of these systems. The intellectuals who set up and gamed these systems in the first place got to reap the rewards of underclass obedience. A few bones get thrown to the working class from time to time and some plucky bootstrappers are allowed to rise in the ranks here and there. But only a little bit. The brains always will be in need of brawn to get things done, and since the brains rarely like to give up the creature comforts they’ve accumulated, it is better for them isolate and keep as many resources to themselves as possible, while simultaneously sowing division so as to better stay on top as conquerors.

Our corporate managers and corporate landlords are now the would-be keepers of the intellectual keys. What might those who have been wage slaved in the service industry by systems of debt do with the knowledge and access to information the Internet promises to give them? In this situation it becomes better to feed people a steady drip of drugs and entertainment to keep their boredom with life at bay. In boredom, stray thoughts might arise. They might begin to distrust those on whose behalf they have been working and toiling their whole lives with the power of their hands and the sweat of their bodies.

Those who try to rule with the power of their minds alone have reason to be afraid of the unwashed mob who might any day show up their doorstep.

If intellectuals are harvesting a bad rep just now, it might just be because they have been the ones working to shape public discourse and policy for the last few generations following World War II. This was when the dream of a managed society really got its wings. That society has been managed straight to the point of multiple crises and escalating collapse. So now, when the populist uprising happens in this century as it has happened in past centuries, it gets seen by many as having strong anti-intellectual characteristics. The intellectuals however, wish to retain their clout, and once again, instead of listening to the criticisms laid against them, deem others as anti-intellectual populists. One thing that seems to get missed by the professional managers is that the flip side to populism is elitism. Unfortunately it seems they’d rather see what they’ve accumulated die on the vine rather than to share their hoarded resources.

            The PMC also seems to be missing the fact that their very denunciations of the rural, of hillbillies and rednecks, of the bitter young adults who see no future for themselves outside an entrenched service industry catering to the needs of the very managers they despise, has robbed them of potential allies. As often as not, the anti-intellectual is very smart indeed, and the working classes have historically had just as much appreciation of music, literature and art as the richly educated. More often than not, they have been continually priced out of sharing in the fruits of high culture. I love classical music, but a single ticket to the symphony now costs about eighty to a hundred dollars, and I’m only talking about a middling seat. Participation is thus kept out of the hands of those who need that money for milk and bread, but who otherwise share the love of these productions of time. With these economic separations in place, the cultural distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow then become a matter of what class a person belongs to, what they can afford. To keep class identity in tact they may tune to into the pop music they can hear rather than checking out the rich world available to them for free from public libraries.
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            If the PMC thinks America has become too anti-intellectual, at least one prong of bringing the humanities back into greater circulation among everyone should be to bring down their affordability. The members of the intellectual class should also probably go to at least a few WWE matches and rodeos too, though, to get a taste of the friendliness of the people who they so dismissively assault.

All of this begs to question of what the role of the intellectual should actually play in society.      

Since the time of Pythagoras and Plato the Western imagination has been plagued with the idea that the intellectual should be the ruler of the people. The teachers at the universities, the educated heads of corporations, the Ivy League and blue-blooded politicians who have been running the show in the West, and their various lackeys, haven’t really made a good go of that inherited assumption. Something has to give.
A mere reversal of roles won’t foot the bill either. Casting doubt on the work of the mind, dismissing all science, dismissing all book learning and scholarship as suspect, is just as bad as calling all people who live in the rural parts of America rednecks and hillbillies, as if their interests and desires don’t matter.

 Rather than being dictators of taste (a hard thing for a music writer like me to say out loud), the intellectual should start to see themselves more as artists of the mind. A contributor to culture, whose creations swirl and play amid the ideas and imagination, rather than an enlightened ruler who gets to tell everyone else what to like and how to act. If intellectuals would like to see their ideas adopted more widely, we should do as Robert Anton Wilson has suggested, and seduce people into the reality tunnels forged by our imaginations. People are tired of being forcibly dominated by ideas and theory so abstract the practical value of them are like building paper airplanes for a humanity that is trying to travel back and forth between continents.

The intellectual as artist of the mind gives a new freedom to our own ideas. A thinker is someone who can excel at creating concepts. By working with concepts and getting them into circulation, the intellectual becomes a concept artist. Those concepts could be in the form of philosophy, written for the everyday readers who need philosophy to live, as well as the specialists who make a life pursuing the wisdom they purport to love.

I don’t see anything wrong with playing games of art and thought inside our heads. These games can none-the-less change the world as many intellectuals would like to do. But it would only be because other people feel drawn to and aligned with those ideas, not because they have been bludgeoned by them. In this respect the intellectual is better suited to have a role outside of professional manager, decision maker, politician. The world could use a few less politicians anyway, a few less executives, a few less bureaucrats and professors who get lost inside of the bloated systems of what the Left used to criticize and call the Establishment.

​            Whatever is left of the Left must now find a different way forward. When the life of the mind is not lived for the life of the mind, but for the sake of position in a priesthood of prestige, a lack of true presence of mind becomes a certainty. Those with presence of mind must allow their ideas to flourish or fail in practical freedom, and not seek to chain others inside cages of theory they too were once keen to escape.