Death of intellectualism

Now that is a catchy phrase for a title. I internet searched that phrase on a well known search engine and received the usual amount of millions of hits in lightning speed. When I starting typing the phrase in the search box, by the time I got to death by intel death by intellectualism appeared as a choice, however there was no actual reference to death by intellectualism, well at least on the first page.

What was provided were titles, articles and other options like:

the death of the intellectual

what is the hatred of intellectuals

anti-intellectualism. (which by the way was a Wikipedia reference) which seems to be an interesting use of a resource for this topic)

intellectualism another topic with Wikipedia as a source-both seem so contradictory

and a series of questions on the topic such as 

what is the intellectual movement to what is a synonym for anti-intellectual to what are pseudo intellectuals to what makes a person an intellectual

And the last question I mentioned is somewhat where I was headed when I thought of that catchy title. I never got there.

Many of us who are not overly well read have that fear of and abhorrence of people who write that quote from historical writings or historically known intellectuals that references another historical writing from another historical intellectual that basically make you want to scream get to the point. And people who write to the overly well read audience seem to think that is the only people that matter. 

I use to read George Will regularly yet only understanding half of his vocabulary. Every now and then I would pull out a dictionary and realize he could have made this easier. Does it make him an intellectual because he has a large vocabulary? 

I do need to say that I did not read all the options or much of any of them from my internet search, I was more enthralled by the choices that came up. My main premise for why I decided to write was that the average American is not impressed with intellectualism. All this effort by a few intellectuals is lost on so many and not just Americans, but people all around the world and offers them no solutions to their world problems. 

As stated before in this blog I feel a big problem is intellectuals on the left are way too pretentious. Their version of my way or the highway is just as bad as the right wing extremists trying to shove their anti intellectualism down our throats. And yet we somehow muddle through trying to rationalize which madness is actually the correct answer. Of course neither is and both are and not because it depends on your viewpoint, but that some ideas no matter where it comes from works.

After writing the first sentence in the paragraph above, I am laughing at myself. I have multiple times said the left is pretentious, and on the search page, one of the questions was are intellectuals arrogant. I didn’t read that section, but I thought, duh. A bit of a non intellectualism answer there for you.

And non intellectualism didn’t exist so there I coined something worthless. 

This could be a much more fun topic to explore, yet alas it is late and like all good Americans I have to prioritize my job and so I must hit the hay, go off to slumber land, so I can get up and perform my tasks that allow me to spout off on a world I know nothing about which is okay, because they know nothing of my world.

And I did touch on a few of the items on the search page so if you have some time, it looks to be an interesting rabbit hole to dive into head or feet first, but it never answers the original question of death of intellectualism.

Cheers