What’s anti-intellectualism and why is it bad?
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I mean, there’s an entire wikipedia article on it. You could go there.
The first sentence sums up nicely what it is: “Hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism, commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy and the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical, politically motivated, and even contemptible human pursuits.”
It’s a form of populism. It’s the people who say “I dint get no fancy educashun and i turned out fine” as they head off to a payday loan company to cash their paycheque from their 10%-above-minimum-wage job.
Anti-intellectualism is a profound rejection of critical thinking. These are people who come up with conspiracy theories about 5G transmitters in vaccination shots.
In short, it’s a rejection of reality.
It’s distrust and hostility towards intellectuals, generally manifesting as being scornful of education systems, arts, and sciences beyond things people can see and understand.
It’s bad because without knowledge, we would still be sitting in caves wiping our asses with leaves. The printed word, phones, Healthcare, planes, satellites, husbandry, electricity. All these things came from nerds who liked to study things. But people who use the products of previous intellectuals (like cars) are decrying modern intellectuals (like electric cars). This causes us to stay with our mistakes, and we stop improvement as a society
There are two common types of anti-intellectualism.
The first is hostility towards a class of people known as ‘intellectuals’. These people tend to either occupy certain social positions or engage in social habits that designate them as ‘intellectuals’ – they take pride in being regarded as authorities and make efforts to convince others they are authorities (whether or not they actually have any sort of meaningful expertise). When you heard someone railing against ‘media elites’, this tends to be this sort of anti-intellectualism.
The second is hostility towards the process of rational thought. Reason involves starting with consensus assumptions, deriving conclusions from them and testing those conclusions rigorously (normally quantitatively). However, relatively few people understand this process well and instead view concepts as ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ in terms of their own personal faith – and many of them thus attack anyone engaging in such a process that yields different conclusions than they assume as wrong. When someone starts talking about how math is ‘unfair’ to people to color, this is the sort of anti-intellectualism you’re dealing with.
These two definitions are, in fact, at odds with one another. The first might be more accurately described as ‘heresy’ – the refusal to believe in an anointed class – while the second might be more accurately described as ‘irrationality’ – the rejection of reason as a tool for answering complex questions. You can normally tell the difference in that the first definition is about attacking people or institutions while the second is about attacking methods.
When someone says they don’t like it when anyone uses big words around them.
When someone is proud of being illiterate.
When someone honestly believes the whole world doesn’t need smart people.
It’s bad because these people are holding the whole world back.
It’s the act of opposing reasoning, thinking.
The base is an attack to people that express reason, ignoring reason itself.
Example: you say that exposure to sun is harmful, i reply that it’s also good for vitamine D production. We then agree that sunlight is good for the body but only for a correct quantity. This is reason. Is having an argument with the scope of growing a better concept together.
You say sun is harmful, and I reply you better bugger off. This is anti intellectual.
Why is it bad: because if I’m anti intellectual I won’t protect myself from an obvious cause of skin cancer just because I don’t like the person saying it, and I won’t even get vitamin d cause I gonna just stay in the sun in August, to get a tan, and nothing else the rest of the year. I get sick and die.
I feel like it would be far more interesting to hear why you are anyone thinks education and intelligence is bad.
Since this is ELI5:
Let’s say you and your friend get a cake. You each get half the cake because that’s fair. You and your friend are asked to come up with the fastest route from his house to your house, and whoever has the better answer gets another cake. He draws a line on the map that’s straight north and then straight east. You draw a map that goes south, then west, then north a bit, then east, then north, then west again. You drew a line past all your other friends’ houses because you want to see how they’re doing. But the question was for the fastest route, so your friend gets a cake and you don’t. Now you’re upset that he got a cake even though you’d always take your route. You might think it’s better to take more time to go past your friend’s houses, but that’s a value judgement.
Anti-intellectualism is the idea that even if his solution is the better one given the problem statement, your answer should have been accepted instead, or at least accepted too. It’s not that you don’t have a good idea, but you solved the problem in a way that doesn’t fit the problem statement. It’s a problem because maybe you could have just gone straight east and then straight north, and also solved the problem just as well, and also gone past your friend’s house. It becomes a big problem when enough people think that the solution isn’t a good solution because they don’t like it. And if somebody decides to give you the cake because they like your solution, even though it’s not the best one, then others start doing the same thing, trying to appeal to the subjective likes of a judge instead of the objective criteria set out in the problem.
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