Anti-Intellectualism
We are living in a time when being intellectual or being perceived as an intellectual is a negative. Shows like, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” celebrates and laughs at the general lack of knowledge that permeates our culture. There is a need for “common sense,” but at times this too is not common nor sensical. If our denomination, or Christianity for that matter, is to lift the gospel message of reconciliation and social responsibility(1) to a level of prominence in our culture again, it is necessary to require a broad education of those that serve in ordained ministry and encourage them to be the public theologians that speak truth to power as well as marry, bury, and baptize. It is necessary, it is an obligation to bring education to the laity. Education that requires risk and questions rather than watering down the gospel message to bumper stickers, power point slides, or praise cheers.
This lengthy article on Truthout is a starting point for a conversation in our culture about education, intellectualism, and our need for serious people that want to solve our problems, and have the expertise to do so, because that is what the social contract of democracy asks of its citizens. It’s not about money, seizing power or keeping power. It is what made our nation great and why we feel nostalgic about the WWII generation. Below is my favorite paragraph from the article.
On Pop Clarity: Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Language
by Henry A. Giroux | March 24, 2010
I think it is fair to say that a different notion of reading and literacy, along with the institutions that supported it, dominated the first half of the 20th century. The notion of the public intellectual was not marginalized, and such writers engaged in ongoing public conversations about political and cultural issues that were of great social importance. These intellectuals spoke to more than one type of audience and were able to comment critically and broadly on a number of issues. To be a public intellectual, you had to be a particularly attentive student of society and the problems it faced and you had to take risks by intervening in ongoing public conversations that disrupted the powerful interests that shape common sense in efforts to change the nature of the debate. Such intellectuals exemplified a mode of writing and political literacy that refused the instinctive knee-jerk reflex of privileging plain speak over complexity. Clarity today too often legitimates not only simplistic writing, but an absence of rigorous analytic thought. Clarity, with its appeal to simplicity and common sense has become an excuse for abusing language as a marker of the educated mind. Public intellectuals in the past achieved complexity and accessibility in their writing for nonacademic audiences – crafting a language that was intelligible, but did not sacrifice its theoretical rigor – while insisting on the value of providing readers with the opportunities to struggle with matters of language and meaning rather than imposing a slick authoritarian style in the name of “unadorned truth.” As we move into the 21st century, Twitter-like clarity has replaced accessibility and has grown more pernicious as it aligns itself with an array of new corporate and military institutions, a dumbed-down cultural apparatus, school systems that miseducate and a growing network of films, talk radio and television shows in which language is emptied of content and thought only creates obstacles to the desire for thrill-seeking entertainment. In an age in which the acceleration of time is perfectly suited to the eradication of thoughtfulness, pop clarity and its notion of frictionless, spontaneous truth now governs the conditions for all modes of intelligibility.
Note
1. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.