Re: When Getting A Degree Makes You The Enemy

gemini://auragem.letz.dev/~clseibold/20230924.gmi

> When are we as a society going to stop being spiteful of the next generation's accomplishments and start being encouraging of their dedicating four years of their life to studying what they love and gaining knowledge and experience from it?

Probably not tomorrow.

First up, at least in America, is

> Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

> — Isaac Asimov

or if you want that super-sized try "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Hofstadter (1963). He also wrote something about the paranoid style in politics. This all remains somewhat relevant today. Or a lot relevant, after we scrape off the litotes. Speaking of fancy rhetorical terms, the sophists got a bum rap in ancient Athens for teaching people how to rhetorize. You might correctly think "professor" when "sophist" comes up, except there's been 2700 or so years of negative baggage attached, e.g. "sophistry" is taken to mean "subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation". They could corrupt the youth!

> … the Sophists taught only those who had private means, or whose parents had. This tended to give them a certain class bias, which was increased by the political circumstances of the time. In Athens and many other cities, democracy was politically triumphant, but nothing had been done to diminish the wealth of those who belonged to the old aristocratic families. It was, in the main, the rich who embodied what appears to us as Hellenic culture: they had education and leisure, travel had taken the edge off their traditional prejudices, and the time that they spent in discussion sharpened their wits. What was called democracy did not touch the institution of slavery, which enabled the rich to enjoy their wealth without oppressing free citizens.

>

> In many cities, however, and especially in Athens, the poorer citizens had towards the rich a double hostility, that of envy, and that of traditionalism. The rich were supposed--often with justice--to be impious and immoral; they were subverting ancient beliefs, and probably trying to destroy democracy. It thus happened that political democracy was associated with cultural conservatism, while those who were cultural innovators tended to be political reactionaries. Somewhat the same situation exists in modern America, …

> — "The History of Western Philosophy". Bertrand Russell. 1945.

To envy and "keeping things the way there are" (or were imagined to be) one might also add fear: will housing insurance get too costly? how far will the shrinkflation go? what happens as more oil exporting nations flip to not exporting? etc. This fear (and envy, and traditionalism, or any combination thereof) could keep some folks irate at those who are, or look like they are doing elite intellectual things. Some of the elite being hilariously tone-deaf probably does not help, if one looks at the Unity management, or the Reddit management, or …

Also, it's super easy to slip into outgroup bias, which includes being irate about out-of-touch C suites, or at people who use the wrong programming language, those who are pro-skub, or whatever.

So, probably not tomorrow.