Am I alone in thinking this is quite a bizarre article which doesn't really scratch the surface of anti-intellectualism?
His argument about children and their lack of genuine creativity seems a little misplaced - they are disparaged as 'tinkerers' rather than creators, but I can think of no better word than 'tinkerer' to describe Leonardo, or indeed many other great artists/scientists.
Aside from all that, I can think of plenty of reasons why anti-intellectualism would exist:
- not all forms of expert knowledge are equally valid. It was only around 100 years ago that medical expertise progressed to the point where it was more likely to cure than kill you.
- the value of expert knowledge/intellectual capital can be hard to determine. For example, once you move past the hard sciences, to sociology and literary theory and beyond, how much is contributed to human knowledge and wellbeing? How much power/status should be accorded to people in these intellectual disciplines?
- societies are composed of counterbalancing forces, between elements which are conservative/progressive, peaceful/aggressive, practical/visionary etc. No more than every business can be a startup, how can all people in a society consider intellectual investigation the main objective, as opposed to more mundane aspects of maintaining and running the society?
- science seems to have been stranded on one side of an ideological divide, where its support/derision is now a badge of political identity.
I don't know, I think it was fairly thorough -- at least, for a quick read on somebody's webpage.
Regarding Leonardo as a tinkerer, based on his description of Mozart's works, I'm pretty sure that this guy would find da Vinci to be creative.
As for the rest -- I was excited when he mentioned cost versus benefit for curiosity, and disappointed that he didn't spend more time on it.
Curiosity is dangerous. I've been lucky to have survived several different bouts of raging curiosity; as a species, curiosity about things like nuclear reactions has brought with it the risk of self-annihilation. Space exploration has claimed a number of lives, as has more conventional exploration throughout history.
If you're one of the people that likes to equate everything that modern humans do to some evolutionary development, then I think it would be easy to show an evolutionary disadvantage for very curious creatures. The most curious have pretty good odds of disappearing and never coming back, or getting themselves otherwise killed or removed from the gene pool.
What would be left is the childlike curiosity that he was talking about -- curiosity sufficient for exploring the immediate environment, figuring out what's good to eat and what isn't, what's dangerous and what isn't, and once the environment becomes "safe", you stop exploring.
I have one quibble though: I don't think that this solves the case of anti-intellectualism in the sense that most people would think of the term, which is a hostile response to intellectualism. What he described was more of an apathy towards rigorous curiosity; when I think of anti-intellectualism, I think back to high school.
My guess is hostility towards intellectualism is just a way for some people to level the social playing field against other people. Just as intellectuals who are not well-suited to sports will sniff down their noses at the very idea of chasing some stupid ball around a field, so do the greater majority of people sniff down their noses at the very idea of exercising your brain if you don't have to.
He attributes the failure of some cultures to explore to lack of curiosity or anti-intellectualism. But exploration of that scale in that era was incredibly dangerous. A sufficient explanation is that individual explorers didn't want to be killed by barbarians, drowned at sea, or eaten by cannibals.
Continuing to send manned missions to the moon after 1976 didn't seem that useful. Personally, I think I got more out of Star Wars than yet another moon landing.
His argument about children and their lack of genuine creativity seems a little misplaced - they are disparaged as 'tinkerers' rather than creators, but I can think of no better word than 'tinkerer' to describe Leonardo, or indeed many other great artists/scientists.
Aside from all that, I can think of plenty of reasons why anti-intellectualism would exist:
- not all forms of expert knowledge are equally valid. It was only around 100 years ago that medical expertise progressed to the point where it was more likely to cure than kill you.
- the value of expert knowledge/intellectual capital can be hard to determine. For example, once you move past the hard sciences, to sociology and literary theory and beyond, how much is contributed to human knowledge and wellbeing? How much power/status should be accorded to people in these intellectual disciplines?
- societies are composed of counterbalancing forces, between elements which are conservative/progressive, peaceful/aggressive, practical/visionary etc. No more than every business can be a startup, how can all people in a society consider intellectual investigation the main objective, as opposed to more mundane aspects of maintaining and running the society?
- science seems to have been stranded on one side of an ideological divide, where its support/derision is now a badge of political identity.