Anti-intellectualism

The left intellectual’s contempt for “elitism” is an inverse form of self-regard. The intellectual imagines that something we might call “knowledge justice” or “cultural justice” (that is, the equitable distribution of cultural goods to all) hinges upon her own knowledge and cultural apparatus. When she scorns the theorist, the poet, the queer, the modernist or whomever for “excluding” The People, she is unable to imagine that people pleasure themselves and each other differently.

It’s all very bourgeois and Protestant, like so much of what passes for left discourse in the US academy. Sociologists from Adorno to Bourdieu have noted that no one propounds high culture with more passion and volubility than the parvenu, the prole or petty bourgeois who has made it to the demi-monde or the schools. See, for instance, Adorno’s magnificently un-P.C. reflections in Minima Moralia on why non-westerners cannot be trusted with the revolution because they are too in (resentful) love with the various goods of the West; because the tradition is not internal to them, they cannot hate it properly, he says. But I would like to turn this dialectically back upon Adorno here: what is internal to the parvenu is the denial of difficult intellectual pleasure. The danger for the intellectual who has never known the parched cultural climate of the lower middle class is that he will not be able to hate popular culture and folk religion properly (not, of course, that Teddy had this problem).

Anyway, there is no such thing as The People. The People is an illusion created by mass culture so that power blocs forced to accountability by democratization could have an interlocutor or a proxy in order to carry out what they’ve always been doing, and this is as true of the vanguard party as of the Republican Party. There is no The People, there are only people, and people get off on all sorts of things.

I have worked alongside or otherwise known people for whom repairing air conditioners or cars, or cutting hair, was a profound pleasure, a tactile and intellectual engagement with the world.

Imagine, if you will, a plumber who loves his work. Imagine his satisfaction with the tools of his trade, imagine his sense of accomplishment at a job well done. Imagine the moral terms in which he figures his work to himself: he unclogs the world, he puts the workings of society back on track. Imagine, too, that he treasures the interactions with others brought on by his occupational itinerancy.

I do not share his knowledge, and I do not share his pleasure. If something were to go seriously wrong with my toilet, I would be utterly at his mercy. And yet no one speaks of the “elite” of plumbers who excludes poor folk like me from his hoarded knowledge of pipes and wrenches. No, we gather that the world needs plumbers, and some people like to plumb, and anyway if the job sometimes gets one down, it’s fairly well-remunerated.

No one thinks of poets or theorists this way, though; and this partially because the poets and theorists themselves think they’re better than plumbers, even when they pretend to hate themselves, especially when they get into a funk because the plumber does not share their knowledge and talents; and yet they think it unremarkable that they do not share the plumber’s knowledge and talents.

But there’s something more sinister than unacknowledged self-regard at work in the left intellectual’s anti-intellectualism. There is too a solidarity with private and public totalitarianisms. Because The People must be included in everything, their chimerical wishes must be respected; thus, state and private interests conjure those wishes out of surveys and statistics which tell one everything about people except for what one would actually like to know about them. Then state and private interests integrate all culture for The People, excluding everything that does not fall within the statistical average, and this in the name of protecting the poorest among us, even though it’s as likely as anything that the hairdresser’s daughter will love Lacan and the the aristo heir only football. That is the public totalitarianism.

The private totalitarianism occurs when The People’s wishes are so respected that actual people’s certainties are never disturbed. So, for instance, we hear from cultural studies types that family or church or Twilight or whatever is a fragile shelter for those deracinated by individualist capitalist modernity, and yet we never here that these shelters may be in their stultifications, their coercions, worse than the storm. We scorn as elite the products of a poor colonial lower-middle-class scribbler like Joyce, and celebrate as populist the extremely expensive productions of massive corporations.

Who, anyway, is the intellectual but the Jew, the queer, the hysterical woman? Anti-intellectualism is always a disavowed worship of the norm, thus a racism, sexism and homophobia. For don’t we always give the intellectual the name of the despised enemy? For McCarthyite America, the intellectual was a commie (and pervert); for communist regimes, the intellectual was an imperialist running-dog (and pervert). This goes on in persecuted communities as well as in hegemonic ones, as when feminists champion the sorority at large over the sister who wishes to go her own way, or when black nationalists accuse the black intellectual of being white. (Again, I am forced to observe the profound complicity between the identity politics of oppressor and oppressed.)

Finally, it’s not as if anti-intellectualism never killed anybody. From literature departments, you’d get the idea that “art for art’s sake” was the world’s most murderous ideology, and yet it’s exactly the kind of anti-intellectualism championed by mavens of cultural studies which enabled the various reigns of terror from Mao and Pol Pot to Reagan and Bush, all of whom legitimated themselves by abjecting the intellectual. After this, I am supposed to fear Joyce, Stein, Derrida, Woolf etc.? To the left anti-intellectual I raise my middle finger in populist salute.