What’s anti-intellectualism and why is it bad?
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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.
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