Assault on the Intellect

It's the end of term and I'm tired. I'm tired of doing somersaults trying to explain why students should care about language and art. All these people want some sort of evidence (i.e. a degree) that they have exercised their intellects. But if they can get the degree with the least amount of intellectual exercise, all the better.

And who can blame them?

How few people care about ideas, about what makes people tick and behave in the ways they do? Intellectual life is out of fashion. It's not efficient. It has no use-value. Who should read "theory"? It's elitist with its big words and complex concepts. I'm so drained at the thought that ideas need their very existence to be justified. Why can't everything be spoken in "plain language"? What's plain language, anyway, and who decides? And isn't the world a complicated place? No one ever asks a scientist to speak in plain language: they accept that science requires 11-syllable words. But, no, people and society and art should never require such words.

The battle inside and outside the classroom these days is the same: people seek you out for your critical capabilities. They want to know how to critique and understand the complications of the world. But only until they have to face their own confusion, the undoing of their own assumptions and expectations about themselves or what they want to believe about the world. My friends are often like my students: they want my advice, they want to know what I think about life, about the world, but really what they want most is to know what I think about them. They compose creative questions, solicit information. But when they don't like the answers or the responses, they say "you're too critical," "too negative," "you intellectualize everything."

How weary to be both exalted and denigrated because of your brain.

Is it too late to be labotamized?

Posted by Bush Whacker at March 27, 2003 11:11 PM