At 08:05 AM 1/29/2013, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>Well, one reason why something isn't named is that it doesn't need to be.
>It so entrenched in an apparatus of oppression, it is hegemonic, a norm.
>You don't name man, you name woman. You don't name white, you name Black
>or Hispanic or Asian. Intellectualism perhaps was only named in an
>opposition to some hegemonic ideology. In this case, that hegemonic
>ideology is Enlightenment liberalism and its faith in human reason and
>freedom, and claims of a force-of-nature like movement to the full
>expression of each, the denunciation of anyone who doesn't hew to that
>belief system as childish, undeveloped, ignorant, superstitious,
>irrational - as Jefferson referred to people in a letter to John Adams I'm
>not going to quote here.
>
>This reaction against Enlightenment Liberalism (EL) we call
>conservativism, right? Or perhaps we can call it a specific variant of
>conservatism - which is what Corey Robins seems to want to study:
>reactionary conservatism. Not sure. At any there are other reactions
>against Enlightenment Liberalis, to be fair, since you could also say that
>Marxism and its children and cousins are also reactions against, if not
>also products of and issued by, the Enlightenment.
>
>But back to the C word. Why might you call it that? Because it is an
>ideology that emerges,initially, in opposition to Enlightenment ideology,
>no? It is the reaction against the enlightenment faith in reason and
>freedom. Conservativism emerges and speaks of its opposition mainly in
>terms of an opposition to the claims about human freedom and its unalloyed
>goodness and inevitability.
>
>the first example of this, with which I'm familiar anyway, is Joseph de
>Maistre. His is a reaction against the idea that knowledge, science, and
>human freedom are an unfolding and moving us inevitably toward a perfect
>world on this earth.
>
>Caution: it only sounds like I'm talking about ideas emerging and flowing
>and reacting against other ideas because I'm painting broad brush strokes
>and not addressing the material reason that undergirded these movements.
>Not enough time. I'll speak in shorthand here.
>
>In the United States, this anti-intellectualism emerged with a vengeance
>after we officially (de jure) eliminated caste distinctions.
>
>Think of it this way. Remember Thomas Lacquere's thesis in Making Sex? In
>that book, he argues that with the emergence of political egalitarianism -
>the claim of equality gender equality - was accompanied by an ideology of
>genders as polar opposition thus reinscribing women's oppression with the
>claim that women were emotion, men were reason; women where hearth and
>home, men were the public sphere; women were virtuous and men were not. Etc.
>
>this same process went on with political egalitarianism. We broke down and
>delegitimated all claims to feudal class distinctions. But that leveling
>was only surface. The way caste distinction were reinscribed was the same
>way gender subordination was reinscribed: through, among other things, science.
>
>Anti-intellectualism, understood in the best light possible, is the
>suspicion that professionalism, expertism, scientism, rationalism,
>academics, intellectuals, all this science stuff -- it is a sham, just
>another way to exercise subordination of one social strate over others.
>Just as the feminist suspicion that all this talk of women's essential
>polar opposition between the genders was a sham: just another way to
>reinscribe inequality and cement men's domination of women in ever new ways.
>
>And not surprisingly, expertism, professionalism, science, and so forth
>were used as ways to institute and ensure the hegemony of a certain set of
>cultural norms -- those favored by that strate of people wielding such
>authority -- as the best cultural norms for everyone because they were
>undergirded by scientific claims how to live the right life.
>
>Science was also used to control populations - in macro ways through
>statistics and in micro ways through claims about what to eat, when, and
>why; how to be healthy, what cause ill health, what habits of eating and
>cleaning were good, true, and beautiful - but also scientifically approved!
>
>Science was used or could be, claimed progressives, to fix every social ill.
>
> From the beginning, people were fighting progressive era claims about the
> inevitability of progress under the banner of science.
>
>in the feminist literature, we can talk about the rise of an entire
>occupational caste filled by white middle single women from middling or
>well-to-do backgrounds: Women who became social workers, social
>researchers, social scientists, settlement workers, and charity workers.
>Among black feminist literature, this is sometimes talked about in terms
>of the tensions between well-to-do black women engaged in social uplift
>and the politics of respectability versus lower strata black women who
>worked as maids, servants, and laundresses during the Jim Crow era.
>
>We could go on to discuss the ways in which the lives and practices of
>ordinary people - the way they grew backyard gardens, the way they canned
>vegetables, the way they raised children, cleaned their homes, cooked
>their food and even what food they ate, the books they bought if they
>bought any, the forms of entertainment they took in, they way they spent
>their money, anything and everything -- is subjected to scientific scrutiny.
>
>In order to turn immigrants and black people into properly behaved docile
>workers, these professionals and academics and bureaucrats and scientists
>set about to destroy folks ways and replace them with scientifically
>sanctioned ways of rearing children, cleaning their bodies and their
>homes, dressing, exercising, etc. (you saw this in the workplace as the
>Empire of the Foreman gave way to the Dominion of Management...)
>
>This process generated resentment.
>
>....
>
>More later. It's not really an answer to your question, of course.
>
>
>
>At 10:58 AM 1/28/2013, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>Does anyone know of a text (book, article, e-mail post, published diary,
>>letter to the editor, etc) in which the word "intellectualism" is used
>>WITHOUT any reference to "anti-intellectualism"? Or, alternatively, does
>>anyone know of a text referring to "anti-intellectualism" that _also_ uses
>>and defines the positive content of the word "intellectualism"?
>>
>>Wikipedia is really bad on the word "intellectualism."
>>
>>Carrol
>>
>>P.S. Would anyone on the list try to discuss Intellectualism WITHOUT
>>referring to "anti-intellectualism"?
>
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