The United States has a strong anti-intellectual culture, stemming from some of the most barbaric elements of the religious radicals who founded the country. While the U.S. is also home to the world’s best traditions of intellectual curiosity—in a testament to its size, diversity, and civil liberties—vast swaths of the country are cultural dead ends whose people fear and despise knowledge.
Less often discussed is the menace of pseudo-intellectualism. I have observed over the years that most people who are not anti-intellectuals are pseudo-intellectuals. They value knowledge, and, more accurately, they value being called smart. Against the anti-intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals often join us as allies. Indeed, it can be difficult to pick apart intellectuals from pseudo-intellectuals if you aren’t sensitive to the importance of the distinction. Yet it is a most important distinction. Pseudo-intellectuals do not abide by the fruits of the scientific method, and they do not adhere to the demands of logical argument. They often claim to do both, and may even believe their own claims, but their actions belie those words.
The direst consequence of pseudo-intellectualism is not that it further obscures science and logic from society. It is that, the human condition being what it is, and modern life being what it is, a person deprived of science and logic yet persuaded of the value of knowledge will often be compelled to construct a worldview that asserts humanity is weak.
I have watched people go to such lengths to assert what is essentially a misanthropic position, that our lives are defined by what humans cannot know and should not do. These pseudo-intellectuals draw exquisitely and erroneously upon the insights and innovations of the great minds of history—and the not-so-great-but-merely-popular minds—to explain and justify an attitude that is, at its heart, completely self-defeating.
The uncertainty principle, the recursively enumerable language, the incompleteness theorem...pseudo-intellectuals take these concepts and from them generalize that humanity’s attainable knowledge is so puny compared to its unattainable knowledge that the value of the human prerogative is fundamentally diminished. In other words, “We’re not as powerful as we think, we don’t really know what we’re doing, and so we shouldn’t meddle with the world as though we were gods.”
It’s a fundamentally anti-humanistic message. It denies our heritage of learning. It rejects our capacity for judgment. It defies the will. It ridiculously implies that we would be better off if we constrained our ambitions and disavowed our march of progress. It proclaims that ignorance knows best, that we should be a quiet and docile species. Ultimately, it sinks into the same faith-based thinking and disrespect toward knowledge that anti-intellectuals hold, the only difference being that anti-intellectuals take pride in their ignorance while pseudo-intellectuals, if they can be said to take pride in anything, take pride in the mediocrity that ignorance bequeaths unto us.
It does so because the pseudo-intellectual, when confronted with the vast adversities of the world, surrenders to their feelings of powerlessness and dissatisfaction...and submits as a human being.
That’s direst consequence. The second-direst consequence is that I never hear the end of this endless stream of mooks who try to elevate themselves by invoking names like Heisenberg, Chomsky, Gödel...and Aristotle, Jesus, Einstein, Gandhi, Aquinas, Mozart, Caesar...and on, and on, and on...all for the futile sake of proving their absurd claim that humanity is little more than a waste. They could as well invoke the discoveries of the Time Cube guy and, but for the lack of popular obedience to the authority in question, their act would be the same.
