Eric Posner on Anti-Anti-Intellectuals:
Eric Posner is relatively new to the blogosphere, but he has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers. Eric comments on Rick Hills' "Why I Am An Anti-Intellectual" post over at Convictions with a post entitled, "Anti-Intellectuals and Anti-Anti-Intellectuals."
I think the Hills post is actually an example of an argument where one makes a shocking statement that "I am X," but then proceeds to explain that he has a very idiosyncratic understanding of what X means. Like when Dworkin or Akhil Amar claim to be "originalists."
That said, I think Posner overstates his case by claiming that our system only works because the elites are polite about their control. I thnk the system works because the elites are divided on policy issues and the system provides them a means to resolve those differences by allowing the masses the right to vote to change the balance of elites holding actual governing authority.
HGB
Your must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say, As you walk your mystic way,
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.
But then in the next sentences, he calls the "error" of "mistaking the part for the whole" a "common" one.
Huh? Didn't Posner just concede that that's exactly what Hill wasn't doing?
It is obvious, from his writing, that Hill is an intellectual. But that's exactly what makes his mocking particularly effective...
Posner's "synecdochic literalism" is pointless verbiage. Highly inefficient, as his father might say.
And for extra points, I'll point out that Prof. Posner's point about how being an elite means pretending not to be one is related in an interesting way to Prof. Sunstein's point yesterday about how we should design Internet communities to encourage more cross-ideological debate. Madison knew that a democracy of elites needed to do just that to avoid violent conflicts during the succession of elite leadership -- a point made by Judge Posner several years ago (and Dewey and Lippman even earlier, as Prof. Posner points out).
Come on, nobody could talk about "synecdochic literalism" in a commentary on anti-illectualism without being self-conscious.
That said, I think I understand the post:
1. It takes an intellectual to understand and critique the arguments of other intellectuals.
2. Hills resents a subset of intellectuals, not "intellectuals" as such, but chooses the whole group as a shorthand [either deliberately or in "error"]
3. That sort of criticism is illustrative of a larger pattern of criticisms of lawyers, doctors, politicians, "elites," where one must often be a member of the whole group to be able to level apt criticisms at the bad subset of the group.
4. Yet, as with Hills, the critics often refer to the whole group rather than the bad subset. Thus, perfectly neutral words become epithets and discourse suffers. [I think of "trial lawyers" used as a shorthand for a subset of plaintiff's-side attorneys who are rational actors to a fault]
5. The segue from the points about self-contradiction and hypocrisy to the illusion of democracy is the analytical step that I don't think I completely understand. I guess he means to say that voters are mostly idiots, that political discourse consists largely of elites criticizing "the elite," and that democracy would fall apart if the idiots ever caught on.
Perhaps my incomplete understanding comes from the point where I missed the satire...?
Everybody needs to lighten up, right? Perhaps we should just have a game show here in the U.S. like they do in the U.K.
I like your breakfast cereal, man. But I still think you're missing the forest for the trees. No matter. I will still like your frosted flakes.
This assertion seems to imply that one cannot criticize one's self. Does it really matter if I'm a hypocrite if I happen to be right? Why can't an "intellectual" be an "anti-intellectual"
agreed - he was laying it on pretty thick. But isn't that what made it (IMO) a great post?
As I said, I found him "hilariously accurate."