Folk intellectualism is faux intellectualism

Somewhere along the line, people began to hate the intellectual. Populism took its place as the… Somewhere along the line, people began to hate the intellectual. Populism took its place as the chief rival of high thought, and the public marked flowery writing, scholastic focus and words they didn’t understand as conflicting with their common mores. Indeed, my friends and I were once told at a rural diner that the difference between us and the ‘common folk’ was that while we had grades, they had manners. The entire anti-intellectual bent of folksy America can be characterized as follows: We can’t trust those fancy thinkers from their ivory towers, and we certainly don’t need their puffed-up philosophies. ‘ This might seem innocent enough ‘mdash; just your average, Archie Bunker-esque flag-waving ‘mdash; but it underlines some very real problems not only with the state of the union, but with the state of culture at large. The first drawback of the anti-intellectual position is that it imposes an artificial duality, splitting the populace into the smart immoral people and the unwashed virtuous people. I need only to hint at the Religious Right to illustrate such thinking in action. However, this distinction is plainly untrue. A small-town childhood proves quite quickly that depravity is easily accessible even if you have a drawl and do your best to keep the memory of the Confederacy alive on your mud-flaps. I would like to make some clever quip about college failing the Caligulan expectations of the country mice, but every so often on a Thursday night I feel that the horse-loving emperor might be proud of our little school. Nevertheless, small-town values do not entail greater virtue of those who profess them; morality can be summed in wives tales and penned in gilded tomes. However, these ethical confusions forwarded by anti-intellectualism are somewhat benign. Yes, they might have wrecked the previous eight years of the efforts of Democrats for the White House, but Nov. 4, 2008, suggests that this ideology has loosened its grip. We no longer have a taste for the down-home ethic that distrusts degrees and people who have read the Marquis de Sade. On second thought, I might distrust the latter but only on account of whatever morbid endurance it must take to peruse such literature. The product of anti-intellectualism that worries me the most, though, comes out when you hear jaded collegiates discussing how college is just a bunch of over-thinking. ‘Movies are just supposed to be fun. All this theory is nonsense.’ ‘Freud? Come on. People are just messed up sometimes.’ ‘There is no way Hemingway wrote any theory into his novels. They are just about war and stuff. He even said that the fish is just a fish.’ Surely you have heard this anti-rhetoric rhetoric before. This is by no means a new phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve our attention. When culture turns away from scholastic thought, it becomes vulnerable to manipulation. The minute that society writes off intellectual progress as impossible to relate to, as pretentious, is the minute that will usher in some new regime of control over society. When a society convinces itself that its various concepts and ideas come from some natural folk-knowledge rather than intellectual toil, it becomes incredibly easy to filter one’s own ideas into the social belief system. As long as one dresses his ideas in simple language and with frequent reference to things the common man will understand ‘mdash; cars, sports, plumbing ‘mdash; one can get his ideas worked into the ethos. As with most folk knowledge, these ideas quickly lose their origins and become something that everyone should know, winning the distinction of necessarily true. In a culture that embraces intellectualism, such a trick won’t work because the requisite skepticism associated with an intellectual state monitors the introduction of new thought and is attentive in marking the origins of thoughts. It is much more difficult to deceive people when their eyes are trained on the seams of the social fabric. A folk mentality clouds such a vision. Now, this should not be read as condemning folksy life. I treat my rural upbringing as a blessing. However, it is a call to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, to not chuck an appreciation of intellectual work when you dismiss the pretensions of it. Furthermore, there is just as much of an imperative for the popular man to work toward being the scholar as visa versa. Although scholars often do lose their focus on applicability to real social interactions, their working toward accessibility must be matched by an equal effort of people accessing them. We must keep in mind that most of the things we believe trickle down from the esoteric works of impossible over-intellectuals. The danger of folk wisdom is that it is sure it sprang from the earth. Be very aware that it didn’t. E-mail Erik at ech15@pitt.edu.