A lot of the highbrow intellectualism I see around me lacks rigor to say the least. Because it makes assumptions about human nature that are contested, if not downright incorrect, much of what people read fills their head with nonsense.
Instead of getting into why I think the specific cultural hegemonic set of ideas is wrongheaded, misleading, and downright idiotic, I want to talk about why highbrow work is often this way, and how incentives make this unlikely to change. So, if you’re sick and tired of whoever is on top of the world, here’s my reminder that those who replace them will be similarly sucky.
First, the average person isn’t intelligent. I’d warrant that many are barely functioning. This means that an advanced grip on grammar is often enough to impress and mystify. Most people lack the abstract thinking skills and cognitive empathy to take arguments on their own terms, and determine whether they are analytically internally consistent. Oftentimes, many strong theories posit things that are self-contradictory. One need not be Socrates to recognize that.
While this may be true, it doesn’t completely explain why intellectualism tends to be centered around stupid esoteric ideas. I think this is largely because of signaling games. Things like murder being morally wrong aren’t especially hard to grasp, and tell little about the person supporting a view. When a topic is able to be kept away, it needs priests and monks to share its vision onto the world. When only a select few are able to attain the message does it confer status onto the person holding the belief. Because elites want to be able to distinguish themselves from the common person, they adopt beliefs that a common person would never accept, oftentimes regardless of their veracity.
In the same way that it takes time to learn manners, it takes time to learn all the various ways that certain behavior is problematic or bright. When people have this education, they’re reluctant to self-criticize, after all, because this would push them down the class hierarchy to some extent.
Finally, a large part of intellectual life is sponsored by those in power. Intellectuals might not be the bravest when they don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from. The incentives to obey the government, given that the government is the main employer of academics means we’ll probably see a subsidization of beliefs that favor those who confer job benefits onto the intellectuals.
I think this does a good job of explaining some of the intellectual rot in institutions. Unfortunately, counter-elite institutions run into a lot of similar problems. Because they’re reflexively anti-institution, there are often failures to recognize when institutions do good.
A good example of this is that large parts of critical theory are correct, and should be uncontested. For instance, people’s perspective plays into what they think of as rationale. People who have certain characteristics often experience the world differently as a result of those characteristics. But, because certain parts of this theory are right doesn’t mean that it should get a pass on its egregious jumps in logic. Failing to engage with the intellectual merits is almost a IDW rite of passage, which I think is generally bad.
Ultimately, the road to intellectualism is a lonely one. It takes a long time to learn lots of things, and of course people overapply their theories on the world. One thing that I think would help is a more adversarial approach to learning, one where people are able to disagree and form theories of their own. Surely some children will be left behind, but those kids probably aren’t going to get the point, regardless of which silver spoons they were born with in their mouths.
Isadore Johnson's Website 