The Case for Anti-Intellectualism, Part I

Breaking the serpent's curse.

In “the” online “discourse,” the only thing more numerous than “cases for” must surely be the infinite critiques lodged against them. Of course the internet itself is all too “happy” to fill up and fill out its spacetime with the cases and critiques we virtualize ourselves with and, yes, reduce ourselves to. Now, the process of reorganizing life can be turned against life itself, automated under the authority of the artificial. What’s underway here is a de-organization, in the sense that the organ, at its root and origin, is the tool — and what we are allowing ourselves to be virtualized into and reduced to is no longer even any kind of tool. A tool must only serve as an implement for what is not itself a tool…

Lol! Of course, only an intellectual would be foolish enough to try to “prove” with words that a tool is only in service of a non-tool, as if the reality of what we must do not to be reshaped out of existence by our tools is dependent on those particular words and the rules by which they are assembled into meanings. This foolishness is apparent enough in exactly the way intellectuals gaze in paralysis at the spectacle of helplessly feeding themselves ever more fully into the internet. It recalls the reality that virality is involuntary: you spread the viral notwithstanding the intentionality of your will or the dispensation of your heart.

What’s happening here? Deep down we all know, we simply don’t want to acknowledge it, and the intensity, the pride of our stubbornness in resisting the acknowledgment, is something we will have to drag out into the light all over again, as this is an issue we’ve had since almost the beginning. In so doing, we should see pretty quickly why intellectualism is, well, not a “problem” to be “solved”, but an ill to be cured, and not by any strictly human physician.

For good illustration of what intellectualism is, the John Templeton Foundation’s discussion of “intellectual humility” does nicely. Longtime readers may get a dark flash of what is to come from the opening lines: “Saint Augustine famously called humility the foundation of all other virtues. One variety of humility, intellectual humility, is perhaps the most foundational when it comes to the interests of the John Templeton Foundation.”

If humility is the best, surely the intellectual would want to partake! Well, what’s in the box? Brackets mine:

Intellectual humility is a mindset that guides our intellectual conduct. In particular, it involves recognizing and owning [huh?] our intellectual limitations in the service of pursuing deeper knowledge, truth, and understanding. Such a mindset [uh oh] appears to be valuable [hm] in many domains [what now?] of life — from education [oh boy] to interreligious dialogue [gulp] to public discourse [yikes]. It promises to help us avoid headstrong decisions and erroneous opinions, and allows us to engage [sigh] more constructively [hmm] with our fellow citizens.

Over the last decade, psychologists, philosophers, and other researchers have begun to explore intellectual humility, using analytical and empirical tools aimed at understanding its nature and implications. At once theoretically fascinating and practically weighty, the study of intellectual humility calls for collaboration among researchers from fields of inquiry including psychology, epistemology, neuroscience, and educational research. In recent reviews of research commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation…

Oh, I get it — intellectual humility is a jobs program for intellectuals who are so intellectual that they have intellectualized everything but intellectualism and now need to intellectualize that too. No, wait, it’s a rehab for intellectuals who hit rock bottom and need a few weeks of tough love and high-class pampering to get back out on the streets to work it for that dollar.

No, hang on, it’s not rehab, it’s the ultimate drug, pure uncut “probity” for pro intellectuals who have blown through their and the world’s supply of street-grade intellectual probity and need that lab-quality stuff. Which Nietzsche busted them for a long time ago:

The maturation of Western metaphysics occurs during modernity’s scientific and political revolutions, wherein the effects of its inconsistencies, malfunctions, and maldevelopment become acute. At this point, according to Nietzsche, “the highest values devalue themselves,” as modernity’s striving for honesty, probity, and courage in the search for truth, those all-important virtues inhabiting the core of scientific progress, strike a fatal blow against the foundational idea of absolutes. Values most responsible for the scientific revolution, however, are also crucial to the metaphysical system that modern science is destroying. Such values are threatening, then, to bring about the destruction of their own foundations. Thus, the highest values are devaluing themselves at the core. Most importantly, the values of honesty, probity, and courage in the search for truth no longer seem compatible with the guarantee, the bestowal, and the bestowing agent of an absolute value. Even the truth of “truth” now falls prey to the workings of nihilism, given that Western metaphysics now appears groundless in this logic.

But Nietzsche’s prescription was to — invent more drugs. Only not by making more tools, but rather by making more sacrifices — human sacrifices, that is, the absolute best and “brightest”, by inner fire if not exactly intellect:

‘affirmation of life, even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian… beyond [Aristotelian] pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.’ Nietzsche concludes the above passage by claiming to be the “last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus”…

In short, Dionysus, who for Nietzsche, unites epistemology (intellect) and ontology (being) in a single eternal cycle of will and action: the new god periodically but forever comes out of the periphery into the center, where human life is restored to vitality as the people tear him to pieces, feasting ecstatically on his blood, until, watered down over time, the process begins again.

It’s really from this standpoint that people for whom it’s too late not to look, need to be looking at what wokeness has become, which is a “last organization” for terminal or peak or apex intellectuals desiring to sacrifice themselves as ultimate morsels to — well, here the metaphors get a little mixed: is it the slavering mob needed the pure blood of the intellectual gods, the intellectualists? is it the internet, the digital borg, of which the lumpenwokes are only a path-clearing vanguard? Or is it merely the rising woke iteration of intellectuals, overeducated and underprivileged, always “final” until the next new god arrives?

English scholar Karma Lochrie argues for a measure of epistemological humility to “correct the tendencies of medieval scholars to assume heteronormativity of the past based on the presumption of widespread agreement about what heterosexuality means in the present.” In this instance, Lochrie uses the concept of epistemological humility as a corrective for anachronism in historico-theoretical scholarship on gender and sexuality. Lochrie uses the term interchangeably with “hermeneutic humility,” which they define as “a hermeneutic of epistemological uncertainty.” In the context of queer history, Lochrie elaborates that this entails a twofold commitment to (a) avoid taking for granted the meaning of heterosexuality in the present, and, by extension, (b) avoid assuming a priori heteronormativity as a fundamental organizing principle of the past.

Lochrie attributes her use of the concept of epistemological humility as a methodological orientation in queer history to English scholar and LGBTQ activist Judith Halberstram's notion of “perverse presentism.” Citing Halberstram, Lochrie summarizes the method as the “‘application of what we do not know in the present to what we cannot know about the past.’” As an example, Lochrie discusses the 1998 Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, during which former United States president Bill Clinton argued that ‘sex’ only refers to heterosexual penal-vaginal intercourse, prompting a debate about what ‘having sex’ entails — i.e. whether it includes other acts…

Soooo much wording. Intellectualism is dead — long live the new flesh of the new intellectualism!

If this loop reminds you of the ourobouros, our serpentine old nemesis around here, you’re ready for Part II, doubtless very soon to come.