by Penny, Laura
Before we get into different flavours of anti-intellectual invective, let us look at some of the assumptions that disparate nerd-bashers share. Here is a short list of some of the most frequent allegations against the brainy.
1. Nerds are arrogant and think they are better than you.
Nerds do not think they are better than you. Nerds are better than you, in their particular fields, unless you happen to be an even more devoted nerd. This is a fact. However, I must admit, as a good Canadian, that I felt quite dickish typing the phrase “better than you.” North America’s shared egalitarian ideals are admirable, but pseudo-populism exploits those noble notions to level the culture, to raze evidence and argument, to belittle learning so that legitimate scientific research and the myths of creationists represent “both sides of the story.” A pediatrician and Playboy pin-up Jenny McCarthy are equally entitled to pontificate about the potential risks of vaccines. Any chump can go online and tell the world that Shakespeare blows and those dopey books about the sparkly vampire who won’t put out are the BEST EVAR!!1!!.
We have really put the duh in democracy, creating a perverse equality that entitles everyone to speak to every issue, regardless of how much they know about it. We see this on the news all the time. Ask celebrities about foreign policy, quiz the man on the street about the recession, read tweets and emails from the viewers. When a news show does invite experts to speak, producers make sure to get a batch representing “both sides” of the issue and have them squawk over each other for five barely intelligible minutes.
At the same time as the masses were being endowed with the inalienable right to rate everything on the Web or have their 140-character pensées voiced by CNN‘s Rick Sanchez, economic inequality increased and social mobility declined. The moneyed elite became more so and the cultural elite became increasingly obsolete, drowned out and washed away by a tsunami of tweets.
Becoming a nerd is hardly a viable route to the top of the social food chain when nerds are the butt of jokes, the official spokespeople for imaginary things and superannuated crud. Anyone taking classics or history for the prestige is either at Oxford or stuck in 1909. The idea that someone would get a liberal arts education to secure a perch above the lowly hordes is a misreading of current cultural conditions, given the well-worn “D’ya want fries with that?” jokes that are your reward for completing a B.A.
Conversely, people constantly use money as a form of social display. Obese SUVS, blinged-out watches, brand-name clothing, and monster homes are more flagrant and effective signifiers of one’s worldly success and status than a head full of Hume or haikus. Several fields of human endeavour do a much better job of cultivating our feelings of better-than-you-ness than the long, humbling slog of study – marketing, advertising, cosmetic dentistry, and a goodly chunk of the rap industry, to name but a few.
2. Nerds are lazy losers who expect money for nothing.
Are there lazy professors? Of course. Every occupation has its drag-ass dregs. What I take issue with is the caricature of professors as a slack species, a class of sluggards who teach a few hours a week and then get the whole summer off. Schoolteachers suffer from the same summers-off PR problem.
Education frequently bears the brunt of anti-public-sector sentiment. Those in the learning professions are painted as the most feckless wing of the ever-expanding civil service. This is one of the reasons why, in debates about public education, charter schools are now touted as the solution. We’ll talk about them in Chapter Three, “Is Our Schools Sucking?” For the time being, suffice it to say that the appeal of charter schools is their claim to cut three things that the more-money-than-brains mindset cannot abide: government, unions, and bureaucracy.
At least schoolteachers get some sympathy for coping with your junior snot-noses and teenage hoodlums. Profs don’t even get points for being glorified babysitters. And the hours we spend doing the rest of the gig – committee meetings, research, presenting conference papers, and attending university schmoozefests – are not always visible or legible to the general public, so they do not quite count as work either.
The idea that mental work is not really work is a hangover from old economies, from our days of hewing wood, drawing water, and making cars. But North America’s economies are increasingly dependent on service work and office work, on the kind of labour that makes more memos, meetings, and minutes than old-fangled objects. The dematerialization of labour and the deindustrializing of the North American economy are anxiety-making social changes that have cast many workers to the winds. It’s little wonder that many cling to mythic mid-twentieth-century notions about who really works for a living.
For example, shortly after Dubya began bailing out big banks and businesses, sales of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged surged. The right-wing press read this as a sign of the Silent Majority’s resistance to creeping socialism. Government growth was going to make productive people go Galt! But all of Rand’s heroic capitalists triumph in industries that are now dead or bleeding. It’s easy to write potboilers that posit sharp moral distinctions between the makers and the takers when you live in a big-shouldered factory world where people still make things.
The collapse of the old manufacturing economy and the growth of the new service and financial economy make Rand’s ideology not just simplistic but downright nostalgic, a fantasia of a capitalism that never really was, and one that is highly unlikely to “return” soon. The producer/consumer distinction that drives her work is tough to sustain when our biggest product is consumption. It’s hard to guess what that shameless elitist Howard Roark would hate more: the socialist bank bailout, the skeevy second-handing mortgage peddlers, or the miles and miles of tacky abandoned McMansions.
The Rand revival is also weird considering what happened to the world’s most prominent Randian, Alan Greenspan. After years of being hailed as a guru for his outstanding achievements in the field of low, low interest rates as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Greenspan was hauled before Congress to explain why the markets had gone sour. He seemed unpleasantly surprised that the banking system could not rely on the virtue of selfishness as a regulatory restraint. When he was asked if his “ideology” had influenced his decisions, he admitted, “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
I can just picture Rand somewhere in Hell watching his testimony, eating Yankee dollars to calm her nerves as her acolyte apologized to the ultimate second-handers, those bureaucratic leeches and appropriators. (Ayn is doubly horrified when she realizes she is eating – aaargh – rubles. This is Hell!)
I digress. The main point is that academia is not the leisurely ivied stroll it is rumoured to be. If anything, a weak academic job market has made everyone but the exceptionally fortunate work much harder and has engendered the kind of competition, red in tooth and claw, that free marketeers always praise. Money for nothing is a much more accurate description of cashing in on swelling Internet stocks or soaring house prices. People love money for nothing! That’s why the lotto is so successful. That’s why Greenspan was hailed as a genius for making money as cheap as borscht. It’s money for thinking – which looks suspiciously like nothing – that the public seems to object to.
3. Nerds are social engineers who want to tell everyone what to do.
The only thing worse than a slothful prof is a bossy one. Intellectuals are always itching to advise, to embroil the public in diabolical social experiments. Daycare, gay rights, multiculturalism, and women working are good examples of the sort of social change the right thinks that nerds have engineered. Lefty allegations of evil egghead meddling point to things like cubic or part-fish tomatoes, weapons manufacturing, Big Pharma, and global trade agreements.
Different political groups, on the right and the left, often share a key presupposition: experts want to control you, thus expertise itself is a sinister force. Moreover, both agree that so-called experts only mess up the natural ord
er of things. For example, conservatives contend that activist judges ruined heterosexual marriage with 2.3 kids, while lefties argue that Monsanto’s chemists wrecked gnarly local veggies grown in genuine organic manure.
In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstader argues that the public increasingly distrust expertise precisely because they have become so dependent on it. As American society became more complex and highly organized after the world wars, the power of the experts grew, and people became increasingly nervous about their activities and proclivities, their sway over society. Complexity, Hofstader says, has “steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself.”3
North American society has continued to become more complex, more technologically sophisticated, since Hofstader wrote these words nearly fifty years ago, in the early days of the TV age. We now rely on new experts, such as the programmers who keep our online banking sites up and running. Technology may make us feel like we are performing more functions for ourselves – pay bills in your jammies with the click of a mouse! – but comprehension fails many of us when the site or modem crashes. All those easy-to-navigate web pages are floating on an unseen sea of technical expertise.
Lack of computer savvy is just the tip of the not-knowing, of the systems we depend on that stretch beyond our individual ken. The more complex shit gets, the more we are engulfed by structures we do not and cannot comprehend, the more anxious we get about our understanding of the world and suck on our soggy, well-gnawed ideological binkies.
This is why explanations such as “intellectual elites ruined everything” are so appealing. They order apparently chaotic events and turn them into familiar stories of good versus evil. The big problem with this particular tale is that it credits nerds with positively super-villainous powers and plans. After we destroy traditional values, we shall repair to our mountain hideaway and turn on the Weather Machine! The mad scientist and the loony prof are hardy pop-culture stereotypes. But they are also alive and well in political life and public discourse, where brains get the blame for social changes that come from a confluence of political and economic causes.
4. Nerds have never run anything real and they live in a candy-coloured dream world.
It seems silly to dispute the existence of schools. We’ve all seen them, and the vast majority of us have attended one or more. Nevertheless, the academic realm is not just excluded from the real world but pitted against it, described as its opposite, as if it does not properly exist. This opposition between school and the real, between learning and doing, does students a great disservice by sending them the mixed message that school is very important, but most of the stuff you learn there is not!
So cram, cheat, pass, and forget. Binge and purge info when required, then advance to the next level and the next until you reach the end screen of graduation and enter regularly scheduled reality, already in progress. It’s okay to game the system when the system is a game. You jump through hoops so employers know you can jump through hoops; nobody gives a shit whether you majored in regular hoops, flaming hoops, or jumping and juggling at the same time.
A number of post-secondary institutions, ranging from accredited universities to substandard diploma mills, try to pitch themselves as education for the “real world,” which perpetuates the notion that campuses are spun of fairy dust and wishes. This split between academia and reality is based on the popular conception of thought and action as polar opposites. Thinking is not the necessary precursor to action, or simply another kind of activity. Instead, thought is the enemy of efficacy and resolve, a perilously querulous anti-productive drag. Doubt is the mark of the quisling. Deliberation is flip-flopping or waffling, failure or unwillingness to heed the call of the heart and the gut. Consideration equals procrastination. Perspiration trumps contemplation.
This sense that activity is real and thinking is artificial is not confined to either side of the political aisle. The right wing’s dismissal of academia as unreal may be more straightforward and full-throated, but the activist left is equally hostile towards tenured stooges who sit in cushy offices writing about poor people’s problems in elite, specialized jargon poor people cannot read.
Others who appoint themselves arbiters of the real do so from a perspective that pleads political neutrality, that speaks for the common sense that politicians and professors of all stripes have abjured. These denizens of the real world, such as business owners, managers, lobbyists, and pundits, are qualified to call for the demise of fields they know nothing about precisely because they know nothing about them. Here ignorance functions as proof of their savvy, a sign that Mr. or Ms. Real World is too sharp to be hornswoggled by some fraudulent, futile major like literature, history, philosophy, or women’s studies.
Occasionally Mr. Real World will cap his argument by insisting that he has read the compleat works of Lofty Classic on his own time, to unwind from the rigours of reality. If he can do some poncy English major’s alleged job on evenings and weekends, it is hardly real work. Culture may well be elevating and all – that’s why he reads Lofty Classic instead of the trash his office mates prefer – but it remains secondary and adjacent to the real world.
We can surmise from such speeches what is not real. The real world is not made of words or art or the past or idealistic theories about equality. Where is this real world and what is it made of? Most people who use the phrase “the real world” are referring to entities like the economy and jobs and money. That makes this particular tenet of reverse snobbery absurd. What newspaper have they been reading throughout the crashes and recessions of the past few years? The Pie-Eyed Optimist Times? The Hooray for Everything Herald Tribune?
Economic turbulence causes real suffering. At the same time, though, it is loopy to deny that vast tracts of modern capitalism are notional, speculative, crazy-brilliant conceptual constructs made up of digital bits and jargon and math that are every bit as imaginary and actual as Hamlet. The word real has been besmirched by prefixes such as “keepin’ it” and suffixes like “-ity TV.” When it appears between the and world, it becomes a rhetorical cudgel, a club to clobber thinking that has no immediate practical value – or at least none that Mr. or Ms. Real World can ascertain.
5. Nerds are living in the past, hung up on defunct ideas.
We often point to our magnificent technological achievements as evidence of our triumph over those benighted primitives who preceded us. I definitely get this vibe from my students. “Why do we need to read this old stuff?” they grouse. It’s, like, old, from the back-in-the-day times when people shat in buckets and were too stupid to invent cool stuff like cellphones. The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer, and iPod.
Anything that happened before the students were born is part of the same undifferentiated mass. Sporadically the void spits up costume movies and video games that make youngsters hazily aware of periods such as the toga times and the era of men in silly wigs and skin-tight breeches. Much of their historical knowledge is actually pop-cultural. They recognize evil Nazis and surly, embittered Vietnam vets from Oscar-bait and action movies and games like Call of Duty. But they do not have a very robust sense of when things happened, or what came before them.
Sometimes this ignorance of history expresses itself in the form of backhanded compliments. My English undergrads seem surprised when something old turns out to be interesting. Even though we have much better scary things now, like the Saw franchise, Poe is not boring – or at least not as boring as Macbeth. They cannot quite believe that a rickety claptrap machine like “The Tell-Tale Heart” still functions in spite of its advanced age. And nineteenth-century lit is not really even old in nerd years.
This notion is a testament to the way that technical and economic reasoning elbow out other ways of thinking and dominate student expectations, regardless of their major. If it’s new, it’s more likely to be true and to falsify or negate whatever came
before. Reading-intensive subjects such as literature and philosophy, and history itself, suffer under this paradigm, since books and lectures have become antiquated knowledge-delivery systems, consigned to the scrap heap by the predigested info globs of PowerPoint slide shows.
Retention is being outsourced to our prosthetic brains. Why clog your head with tedious facts about the past when you can simply demand an exam review sheet or consult Google or Wikipedia? But there’s something else at work here too. I remember prodding one particularly inert group of undergraduate dial tones thus: “I get the sense that you guys aren’t really interested in what people two hundred years ago thought.” They shrugged. No, not really, was the classroom consensus. What the hell did it have to do with them?
We see a similar shrugging in public life. In a 2009 appearance on HBO‘s Real Time with Bill Maher, Republican Meghan McCain declared, “I wouldn’t know; I wasn’t born yet,”4 when Democratic strategist Paul Begala mentioned the way Reagan had blamed many of his problems on Carter. Another prominent Republican blonde, former White House press secretary Dana Perino, displayed the same whatevs attitude in 2007. In a press conference she dodged a question comparing Bush’s policy to Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Later, on an NPR quiz show, Perino admitted, “I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about … the Cuban missile crisis … It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”5
How could she know? Perino is a pup. She was born in 1972, a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. It’s not like she was there.
