Intellectualism

Our society has a growing anti-intellectual movement. There has always been tension between intellectuals and the less educated going back to the founding of our country. Primarily, the real source of the distrust and anger comes from class issues. From the beginning, the wealthy class afforded access to knowledge that was shaped by the wealthy class with a whole different language than the lower classes had. In many ways, the intellectual class has always been full of frauds. How many philosophers, scientists, theologians, politicians, and so on have made claims that couldn't be made to make decisions that affected the lower class negatively?

The anti-intellectual movement has stepped up in recent years due to a growing religious movement. Knowledge that in any way disagrees with faith is discredited... by - what else but - faith-based reasoning. Government officials use this movement to pass agendas that are harmful to our society knowingly. But furthermore, the media had jumped onto the anti-intellectual movement. In 1988, Michael Dukakis was ridiculed by the media for his intellectual way of speaking, and being unlike the "everyman". Oddly enough, the "everyman" façade was adopted by the wealthy class. Those who have had everything handed to them through cronyism and family connections became "everyman" and people who deeply studied issues looking for solutions for the everyman became intellectuals because their soundbites weren't as easy to digest.

In 2000, the same thing occurred, but on a higher level. Al Gore lost to George W. Bush primarily due to his image of being a stiff intellectual. Rather than going for someone who was obviously more qualified for the job and who understood the issues better, people chose the "everyman" in Bush. Bush, the former alcoholic drug-addict multiple-failure in business who went to Yale as a legacy that worked for nothing in his life was the "everyman" because he was religious, and spoke to the American people like he would at a barbeque.

In 2004, John Kerry suffered the same anti-intellectual blitz from the media, and suffered the same defeat. But the defeat of Kerry means more now, because intellectualism is now becoming a bad word. Education is truly getting frowned upon by large parts of our society, and science is getting attacked on many fronts. Global warming (which is a contributing factor to the worse hurricane season ever in the recorded history of the United States), evolution, birth control and birth rights, and natural resource experts are among the many who are under fire by the anti-intellectual movement.

Intellectualism is important for our society because intellectuals are the ones who come up with solutions to our biggest problems, innovations to make life and society function better, philosophical responses to help us live better and make sense of our purposes in life. Intellectualism helps change automatic living into focused living. It helps make everything more coherent and show connections between things that are often hard to find. Intellectualism helps critical thinking and can give life more color. Intellectualism changes literal interpretations into metaphors and symbolic thinking - it opens doors everywhere.

Until intellectualism is re-embraced as a source of good, expect a further decline of that which was once good in our society. We need to look to our intellectuals because there are a lot of things that need answers. We need to look past the appearance of what we've learned to hate about intellectuals, and evaluate what intellectuals say on their own merits as thinkers. Until then, the void will continue to grow, and we can only imagine were unreasoned faith-based thinking will take us next.