In Defense of Anti-Intellectuallism
My confession of being an anti-intellectual requires a bit of explanation. Being anti-intellectual is not the same as being anti-intellect. My beef is with a particular social class — the “intelligentsia” — and not with the practice of using one’s intellect to reflect on experience. In my experience, intellectuals (as a class) are ideologically intolerant, easily offended by ordinary humor, and pretentious in their prejudices, which they disguise as universal truths…
Moreover, I find a direct relationship between the academic obscurity of self-consciously “intellectual” writer’s prose and the willingness of that writer to justify the unjustifiable.
Brilliant. I would have spelt it “defence” in the title, but that would have been pretension, and I don’t believe pretension befits my intellectual class. For that matter, neither does ’spelt’.