Anti-anti-intellectualism

 

Worst. Thesis. Defense. Ever!

Don't use a five-dollar word when a 50-cent word will do.

-attr Mark Twain

I just finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and I can honestly say, boy was it long.  Probably about 500 pages too long.  If my take on the book offends you, just wait...I didn't read it.  I listened to it as an audiobook.  You can start your mumblings about my intellectual bona fides now.

After finishing the book, I Googled "Is Infinite Jest overrated?" and encountered a Reddit thread discussing its pros and cons.  On balance, I found the arguments in the thread to be strong.  There were a few "this is just academic trash" and "you're too stupid to appreciate the complexities of such a unique tome," but otherwise, the discourse was reasonable.  

I don't want this to turn into a review of the book, but while reading it, it made me think more about my position on intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, and snobbery.  After thinking more about the topic over the last few weeks, I've come here to say that I have absolutely no idea where I stand on the debate and will make you read about my thought process nonetheless.

My upbringing tends to pull me in all directions.  I grew up in a college town in North Florida (a section of the state which is even odder than the tourist traps you're probably familiar with), a solidly academic setting in the middle of a redneck enclave.  My parents attended college, but didn't graduate.  Both were children of college graduates, though, so education was generally prized within my family.  Neither of my parents questioned my desire for further education or suggested any path other than college, but if I'd decided to go into the trades or the military, I don't think I would've had to put up much of a fight.

My mother, in particular, was a steady reader, and, later in her life, inclined to more abstract artistic pursuits.  But I wasn't pressured to follow any particular intellectual pursuits myself.  My grades, too, were a mix:

Mostly decent during elementary school, declining as adolescence hit in middle school, fairly strong in high school, a mixed bag in undergrad (whereas most people struggle when first encountering freedom and correct themselves in their upperclass years, I started strong and flagged later on.  Sometimes I think it's a miracle I got my first job), and fairly strong again in grad school.

Like my mother, I've been a fairly consistent reader throughout life (my current daily goal is 20 pages of fiction a day while concurrently listening to another title on audiobook), and I think I'm a naturally curious person, despite the protestations of an ex-girlfriend who once called me the least curious person she knew.

But, I tend to get frustrated when elitism rears its head, especially when I perceive that elitism to be present to mask the owner's insecurities about their intellectual abilities or an attempt to separate an upper echelon from the unwashed masses.  

For example, I like jazz and have a fairly decent understanding of music theory, but I start to tune out when people focus too much on something like, oh, the brilliance of the modal jazz Miles Davis was famous for.  At some point, isn't it ok to appreciate the novelty of his work and simply listen to it?  Study it and understand it on your own, but don't force everything you've learned down someone else's throat as though they should also have the same appreciation or crawl under a rock.

And, for all the raves attributed to certain rock or pop artists, most of their chord progressions are the same.  It's generally some mix of the form I-IV-V-vi (don't worry if that doesn't make sense - it just means everything you're listening to today has a surprisingly similar structure).  Sprinkle in the occasional diminished chord or a major substitution for a minor chord in the key, and you're hailed as the second coming of sliced bread.

This isn't to say that you can't have real genius within such a bounded structure, but it's often those who clamor about genius in a genre the most who have the most tenuous grasp of the subject, while unnecessarily alienating curious observers with their snobbish intimidation.

Across the intellectual divide, there are those who shun any idea of expertise or those who possess it.  I suspect much of that comes from encountering people with a condescending attitude who are building their own walls around their insecurities by making knowledge inscrutable.  

But, there's also a subset who simply don't want to put in the effort and feel antipathy towards those who have, probably because it exposes their own insecurities about that lack of effort.

This elitism vs. anti-intellectualism generally shows itself most for me in vocabulary.  I've often heard the quote at the top of this post and rolled my eyes, virtually, if not actually, for dramatic flourish.  I understand the need to approach an audience on its terms, but I also had to learn all of these fuckin' words for the SAT years ago, so I'm going to use them.  

I will admit that I do occasionally indulge in snobbery when faced with someone who is so hell bent against the idea of expertise to pile on, or some intellectual snob in order to pull them down a peg (funny that I use the same technique for polar opposites.  I guess this pony only has one trick).  But, mostly, I like vocabulary.  It's like a puzzle.  Sure, unstoppable is a perfectly useful word, but inexorable is just so much more poetic, and the sound of it makes it seem to richly personify its synonym. 

On the other hand, though, the language around math and engineering puts me in a foul mood.  I understand that when communicating formally, it's important to define a square as a four-sided polygon with all sides of equal length, all at right angles to one another, because math, more than anything else, is based on precise language that deals in iron-clad proofs.  But, when communicating concepts at the start or with someone who is clearly struggling, it helps to simplify language and show counterexamples (like rectangles or pentagons) that give the learner a strong understanding of the basics, even if they don't know all of the exceptions yet.  It's much easier to refine terminology with a basic understanding than it is to try and understand acute and obtuse angles from scratch.

This is what often drew me to/frustrated me with traditional engineering.  We'd spend several lectures deriving heat transfer equations only to discover that, in the end, most of the pre-calculus-based formulas met the vast majority of our needs.  Furthermore, we could assume that we were dealing with a perfectly spherical black body, add in a factor of safety of 4 and voilá, we've invented a perpetual motion machine.

Again, I understand why engineering students need to learn the fundamentals of the material we're studying, but very few professors ever started with sketching the basic concepts (then again, they probably weren't very good teachers and didn't feel a desire to ensure their students grasped the concepts they taught).

I'll wrap up this post by giving a brief review of Infinite Jest.  I'm not sorry I read it.  I thought, in particular, David Foster Wallace's exploration of the theme of addiction was thorough and made me understand the struggles from the characters' perspectives better.  I also didn't mind that he meandered a bit in his prose.  I mean, how can I take issue with that aspect when I'm known to take a succinct point and turn it into a mellifluous, flowing literary river traversing the valleys of a rich lexicon in order to demonstrate the ebullience of the acme we eventually intend to reach?

But I do think it was 500 pages too long.  There were characters and whole sections of the book that could've been eliminated without losing the essence of or the message of the novel (despite exhortations on the contrary).  Of course, it's not unlikely that I'm completely missing the meaning or subtext of these sections, but a brief search of literary criticism on the book didn't point to reasons why the book must be set in a slightly dystopian future in order to tie all of the themes together.  I'd be willing to listen to arguments in favor of the book, but I'd wager that if I started with the opening premise that Infinite Jest is overrated, my interlocutor would probably just respond that I'm too stupid to understand it.  Which may be true.

Anyway, I'm only reading straightforward prose from this point forward.  Next up on my book list - Ulysses.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.