>On Jul 6, 2008, at 10:44 AM, shag wrote:
>
>>seriously, tho, i think carrol is spot on. there is an expectation
>>that intellectuals are better than, superior to, ordinary people.
>
>Who holds such an expectations?
joanna: " And my own experience of academics when I was there was that for the most part they were the most ordinary of cowards."
carrol was only speaking to the anti-intellectualism that manifests on this list. were he not, he would not have used the language of "scabbing". he wasn't speaking the charlie daniels kind of anti-intellectualism. carrol may not agree with below, but let me tie it together.
joanna's sentence indicates disappointment that they weren't ordinary cowards. that statement has nothing to do with thinking manual laborers are special and joanna has never been known for idealizing working people -- surely not someone who once complained about rural inbreds and their lack of interest in books.
as carrol pointed out, it's about holding intellectuals to a special standard, believing in them in a way that belies the outward appearance of digust. kind of like being outraged, now, that obama is sprinting to the right. to be outraged, now, is to have believed that he was different than your ordinary democrat.
as for the below: that is outsider's resentiment. (joanna and catron: insider's resentiment.) i shouldn't have to explain resentiment, should i?
and btw pandering to anti-intellectualism is very convenient because there is no there, there. it's a moving target. an empty signifier. the panty-waisted intellectual, lazy and effete, can point at anything and anyone and exceptions can always be made. oh, not that one there or that one over there. we mean *these* kinds of intellectuals.
people who do not sweat for living engage in what you are calling anti=intellectualism, too.
the guys out in the sales field make noises to the director of the department about how they are out there in the muck, while everyone in the office isn't working so hard.
the web developers think they do all the work to build the site and make it work.
the inside sales staff think they do all the work and we (web developers) live in our own little world of code, all out of touch as to what it's like to deal with customers bitching about widgetX not working.
everyone thinks that management is out of touch.
but then, mgmt says, upon our complaints that they're out of touch, "you guys don't realize what we have to face, upstairs." and then we get code words and round about ways of saying what it's like to have to answer to executive level management.
of course, maybe the guy riding the street sweeper is thinking all of 'em are a bunch of wimpy people who never get their hands dirty and sweat for a living. and the guy crawling around in an attic, hooking up cable, is thinking that of everyone else.
the other day, someone posted some article about usability. it was written in social scientese. it was written to conform to the conventions of juried peer review. it was, therefore, written in a specialist language that people on the list (a user group) didn't understand.
so, there was some back and forth about the language and how it was obtuse and written that way to purposefully keep people from understanding what they were writing about. yadda.
that is resentiment from feeling ignorant, in a world where it's not OK to be ignorant, where being ignorant is the equivalent of being dumb, when being ignorant should really only understood to be something that all of us are and can overcome with time and inclination. where ignorance is a state in which we all exist, more or less, etc. but because ignorance is seen, not as a social product, but as an individual-level moral failing, we erect all these mechanisms to lay the blame at the feet of intellectuals, rather than understanding the bigger issues at work.
finally, as I mentioned, consult _Hidden Injuries of Class_ where you learn that, underneath his resentment of intellectuals, the first man they interview in that book really has an undue admiration of them. He feels shame and embarrassment, underneath the bravado. Frank was his name, as I recall.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)