[ExI] Why is there Anti-Intellectualism? (re: Atheism as somehow different than other religions)

[Damien Broderick]

On 12/26/2009 5:02 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote:
>> After many decades of intellectualism, the common people have developed
>> >  (evolved?) a healthy distrust of the intellectuals, mainly of the social
>> >  intellectuals. In the future this distrust will probably grow stronger, as we
>> >  will reap the fruits of many silly ideas implemented as policies.
>
> Uhum... You know, I am not challenging you, but if you (or anybody) could
> give me a list of intellectualists (names, specialty area, you got the
> idea), whom I am to blame... And if you don't mind, for what exactly?
>
> The longer such a list, the more interesting from my point of view. Give
> me those names, I beg you.

In US: the neocons are intellectuals, of a sort. They happily provided 
the Iraq war. Dr. Leon Kass is clearly an intellectual, and he helped to 
ban embryonic stem cell research. The doctrines of both these geniuses, 
on the other hand, seem to have been welcomed by a large proportion of 
the common people. On a more highbrow level, if Heidegger wasn't an 
intellectual, nobody is. He would be despised by the common people as 
someone who wrote incomprehensible horseshit for a living, but for all 
that he was a great supporter of the Nazi Volk so who knows how their 
muddled minds would have responded.

There seems some confusion in this thread between non- or unintellectual 
and anti-intellectual. Most humans are not intellectuals, but they don't 
necessarily condemn those who are, although some of the more thuggish 
might well shove their "pointy heads" down the toilet bowl pour le sport.

Damien Broderick