The world is not a welcoming place to smart people.

Smart people disrupt things. They constantly think about why people do certain things, why they are done a certain way, and why we bother doing them. Some even go to the extent of recursive/self-referential/meta-thought about why they worry over such things, perhaps even ad infinitum.1 Even when smart non-sotards2 aren’t

Thus throughout history, powerful (and not necessarily smart) people have engaged in pogroms against the intelligentsia. Involuntary exile. Death by hemlock. Book burning (and not just from the Qin dynasty). Inquisition. The list goes on. And even when others don’t target them, there are the smart people who become so burdened with weltschmertz that they commit suicide: Shāng Dì Xīn (商帝辛), Minamoto no Yorimasa, Carothers, Turing, …

Isn’t it weird that people generally get annoyed by smart people, and wish they would go away, and yet croon with such pride in bearing precocious progeny? Think of the countless arrogant parents who think “My kid is a genius!” whether or not their offspring actually deserve such appellations.

It is perhaps because of some general feeling of bewilderment at the complexification of the world - a trend that has accelerated exponentially from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution to the Age of Computers - that people caught in the wake of progress react in a visceral manner to generate an anti-intellectual backlash. Notions that the universe is made of tiny superstrings vibrating in eleven dimensions? Pish-tosh!

Sitis wrote about the anti-intellectual currents that have begun to permeate the Singlish vernacular, but yet there was reference to “being dumb in an intelligent age”. I take the opposite view, that the world as a whole seems to be becoming increasingly anti-intellectual. It’s not an “intelligent age” we live in, it’s one where counter-intellectualism is ascendant.

Surely people have noticed the rise of evangelical mega-churches in Singapore and the increasing occurrence of conservative values as excuses for a lack of progress toward democratization. But Singapore is far from the only country feeling a resurgence in such non-thought. Lysenkoism is perhaps the most famous example of anti-intellectualism masquerading as scientific advancement. Carl Sagan famously wrote a book entitled The demon-haunted world, in which he attacks the resurgence in pseudoscience in America, perhaps culminating in the infamous Kansas trial on intelligent design. But the current Dubya administration in the US is perhaps the crowning achievement of the anti-intellectuals to date, with the “ordinary joe” platform, the politicization and general pooh-poohing of global climate change, budget cuts in national R&D funding, expurgation of contraception (leaving only abstinence) from sex education material, and the Republican War on Science.

Perhaps one could consider it part of the legacy of the postmodernist fondness for complexity and anti-bourgeois bias that gave us the fruits of egalitarianism such as Wikipedia. But the same disdain for authority leads to a diminished respect for the authority of experts, leading to phenomena such as edit wars, arrogance borne out of ignorance by well-intentioned amateurs, and even astroturfing that is making reliance on peer-contributed content an increasingly risky proposition if one insists on rigorousness and correctness. The egalitarian model of knowledge can only go so far without devolving into stamp-collecting of minutiae and trivia that begin to permeate the online encyclopedia. The veneer of authority which permeates the general tone of Wikipedia serves to mislead unsuspecting and uncritical wiksperts whose knowledge rely primarily from reading Wikipedia.

But more worrying still is a more insidious form of anti-intellectualism that is permeating modern science. Yes, today’s cutting edge, twenty-first century science. Those of us in graduate school and academia will have heard exhortations against ivory tower mentalities, and have listened to encouragements toward thinking of applications of our pie-in-the-sky research. In short, we are asked not only to make science progress, but in our world of key performance indicators and ISO 9000 certifications, the science must also be lucrative. In my (admittedly limited) observations of the scientific world, there seems to be a drastic shift away from basic, or fundamental science, toward applied science that lends itself to patentability and profitability.

Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with applied research. It is a worthy endeavor to apply the fruits of basic research toward commercialization. After all, it is when research expresses itself in the phenotypes of consumer products and specialist machines that the effects of scientific progress are most keenly felt and (more often than not) appreciated. However, when such research comes at the expense of fundamental research, we then run the risk of stalling the giant R&D engine that the global economy has come to rely on. (The model for the R&D pipeline that is commonly used is fundamental research -> applied research -> product development -> product testing -> commercial product.)

If you doubt that there is a looming crisis in the world of science, just ask any researcher you know when the last time a research proposal that didn’t have ‘nano’, ‘bio’ or the like on it. Theory has been eschewed for practical computational modeling of tangible physical systems. Even physics, the traditional bastion of fundamental research, has fallen prey to a massive fashionable rush toward building quantum computers, at the expense of understanding fundamental issues in quantum mechanics. And nobody these days publishes great papers on theoretical developments anymore, it’s always dressed up and buried under a miasma of applications, applications, applications.

It’s quite a shame, really, considering that basic research is the riskiest of all human endeavors. And any business type worth his or her salt should immediately apply a fundamental financial maxim to recognize that basic research is therefore the activity with the greatest possible returns. In this sense, it seems like basic science is falling victim to the cult of now that the global society works off of nowadays. In an age of instant gratification, ideas that take longer than one sound bite to communicate immediately fall off the cultural radar. And that, really, seems to be the genesis of anti-intellectualism as we see it today.

References

  1. Sitis, What Others Say?, The incredible dumbness of being - being dumb in an intelligent age, 2007-10-09.
  2. Carl Sagan, The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark, Ballantine Books, 1996.
  3. Larry Sanger, kuro5hin.org, Why Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism, 2004-12-31.

Further reading

  1. Larry Sanger, Slashdot, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir [Part 1] [Part 2], 2005-04-18.
  2. Mandla Nkomfe, Umrabulo (African National Congress), The role of intellectuals in our movement and society , No. 25, May 2006.
  3. C.H. Llewellyn Smith, CERN, What’s the use of basic science?, 2006.
  4. James Gleick, Faster: the acceleration of just about everything, .
Footnotes
  1. Amongst other people, one can thank Gödel and his incompleteness theorems for providing powerful new insight into the power of metacognition.↩
  2. social retards↩