Snotnose Twits with Palantirs

Damn, I missed the 600th post.

Daisy Deadhead, as promised, did a thought-provoking post here about the "elitist-liberal/progressive superiority and hatred of the uneducated and religious, and their accompanying unwillingness to work in any kind [of] coalition with them. " (Well, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Netroots Nation and RightOnline, and Brian DePalma's Home Movies also enrich the writing. I like that.) Particular attention should be paid to this comment as a response to the one immediately above it.

Anyway, I was going to say something rude about the intelligentsia, which the Maoist branch of Marxism, during the Cultural Revolution, distributed into the countryside, and the Khmer Rouge murdered, and then I realized that I'm using the wrong lens and probably the wrong elitist/progressives as well.

Because I am, in a technical sense, one of the Bad People. I do live on a Coast. I do have a college degree awarded by an Eastern college. I've had left/liberal leanings since I was old enough to have leanings. I do quote books I've read, and I've read tons of books. I do remember history and am not shy about proclaiming it. I was for years emphatically not religious, and even now cannot get near fundamentalism without my eyes reflexively rolling into the back of my head.

And those are my good points.

The problem with what's called intellectuals, intellectualism, the intelligentsia, the Pundit Class, or That Bunch isn't solely that they're Out Of Touch With Reality, although many of them are; it's (I'm going to use a dirty word here, so please forgive me) a pernicious class snobbery.

Yes, I said class. No, I am most emphatically not a Marxist. I think Marx wrote some useful things; I also think he was at bottom literally conservative (the opening of the Communist Manifesto actually decries Free Trade):

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

(Uh-oh!)

Only the "bourgeousie" get the blame for this, note; not the rich, who of course don't have that kind of influence. Laughter is healthy, go ahead.

The thing is, however, that some portions of the "middle class" hate the "middle class." One portion gets characterized as "the young," who might be energized by a sense of injustice, or from lack of vital challenge, or from boredom. Many of the revolutionaries of the preceding century were originally from the "middle class." (Che Guevara, for example.)

Another group loathing the "middle class" (I put that in quotes because my definition is "Neither filthy rich nor abysmally poor." This is not everyone's definition; some would specify "Has to work for a living in a non-sweaty job that's a career," and others would just say "Wannabes" or "People who like classical music and hate Journey." Further complicating the issue would be class-at-birth, class-by-nurture, and American class mobility, when it exists [it doesn't always]) are the people characterized as "intellectuals."

What you need to know (for purposes of this disquisition, not for the enjoyment of Journey) is that not all people who work with their minds are "intellectuals" and even most intellectuals are not what early 20th century Russians would term "intelligentsia," which was the set of intellectuals with cultural and political influence. The "intelligentsia" might correspond to what a lot of bloggers call The Village (Greenwich, of the Damned, from The Prisoner; how apt); an insular bunch, small in number, where everyone knows everyone else. They don't have to be in agreement on everything because what matters is sticking together if "attacked." They aren't the smartest, the wisest, the best writers, the best thinkers, or the most creative; they are just in position to repeat the same threadbare stories to a large audience over and over. And over. They have usually been "middle class" from birth and may consider themselves still young and questing. Encounters with people who are not in their mirrors may frighten them.

Add the tendency to believe that a) what they know are the only things worth knowing and b) they know everything, it follows that c) what you know and they don't threatens the universe.

Sorry. I didn't quite mean that. I am alluding, however, to the tendency (and I think it maps onto privilege), when faced with knowledge that you possess and they don't, to a) appropriate your information and b) erase you. Because otherwise, they don't know everything.

The other side of this non-omniscience is pouncing on all stray ignorance. I have a touch of that myself, on account of being stuffed full of facts in several public schools (the Eastern college? Part of a publicly funded university system), one Catholic school and several decades (yes, I said decades. Plural. I can no longer wash my face with Lemon Pledge) of haphazard-to-voracious reading. I expect adults to know when the Vietnam War was. I expect people to know why Nazism was evil. I expect people to have heard of Pol Pot and Stalin. I just got caught out this week because Kim Dae-jung, a former president of South Korea and Nobel Peace Prize winner, died, and I discovered I'd lost 30 years of South Korean history because somehow I'd only heard about Sun-myung Moon and Hyundai.

And many of us never outgrow the "gotcha!"

And since the educational system has apparently been failing to educate pupils for the last 30-40 years, the pool of un- and under-educated people has been expanding. A really long time ago, I made the point to somebody that holes in knowledge can be patched, but holes in thinking pretty much scuttle the boat. I suspect that the "intellectuals" have given up on the teaching function. Which is, really, a shame. One can learn a lot from a well-written essay.

Part of the trouble with the educational system is that the fight about science vs. creationism means that a lot of young minds are not getting enough science to understand the world and how it works. Have I mentioned that fundamentalism, just the word, makes my eyes roll into the back of my head? (Ow!) The funny thing, though, is that before creationism and the Moral Majority, the "left"/liberals got along with religion just fine. The Revs. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson naturally spring immediately to mind, but how about Rev. William Sloane Coffin? Philip and Daniel Berrigan? Robert Drinan? All those Quakers in peace marches? Quite a few churches are represented at LGBTQ Pride parades. Catholicism has a particularly rich tradition of social justice, and didn't the Lutherans just vote to allow lesbians and gays in committed relationships to serve as clergy? Jews used to be closely identified with social issues, and many still are. There are female rabbis. Mainline Protestant churches have female ministers.

I don't think religion per se is the problem.

I think something else is going on.

"Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn't like modern creationism. It wasn't joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest - valid enough in its own terms - against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of - and private reservations about - evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn't stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about 'presuppositions' and 'world-views', in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?"

Ken MacLeod, The Early Days of a Better Nation. (He writes science fiction.)

I think the original intellectual hostility was to this sort of thing, and then the annoyance spread. "Born-again" Christians, evangelicals, and Bible literalists might overlap, but not to the extent of all being the same. But remember what-is-not-known-is-not-worth-knowing, and the intelligentsia doesn't know the fine distinctions. Or, probably, care. (The militant atheists are a different matter; militant atheism, like Marxism, functions more like a religion than, say, an affinity group. Oddly enough.)

Anyway. The pundit types look down on and sneer at groups different from themselves because they are different. Basic primate behavior. Different makes them nervous.

(Well. Gee. That was long. If I promise never to do this sort of thing again, will you folks still speak to me?)(Also: I am not interested in class analysis stuff. Don't even start.)

[Edited to fix funky line breaks and to acknowledge the Gutenberg Project, from whence I stole copied the text.]