{"id":13238,"date":"2020-01-08T19:08:56","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T00:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=13238"},"modified":"2020-01-08T19:08:56","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T00:08:56","slug":"anti-intellectual-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=13238","title":{"rendered":"Anti-intellectual thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How shall I put this delicately?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to start by talking about a very private bodily\nfunction… in the vaguest possible terms. Because I\u2019m a sensitive soul. Then I\u2019ll\ngo on to make a vapid point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I clicked on an article that showed up on the Book Full of\nFaces a little while back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was about the aforementioned Private Bodily Function. This is a function performed frequently by every person, saint or sinner, male, female, or delusional. The headline informed me that I was finishing up this function \u201cTHE WRONG WAY!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out of curiosity, I read the article. When I was finished, I\nthought, \u201cIt appears that the author of this article has never actually\nperformed this bodily function.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which I find somewhat unlikely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I noticed who published it. When I saw that the article was aimed at college students, all became clear. An academic wrote it. And academics, as you\u2019ve probably noticed, literally don\u2019t know\u2026 many things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It takes an academic to analyze a commonplace physical act\nand declare that all mankind has been doing it wrong from time immemorial. The\nwhole scam of modern higher education is based on taking what is known and\nunderstood, deconstructing it, and rendering it mysterious and in need of\nexpert intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a time in history when the purpose of education\nwas to learn the higher mysteries, the beauty and wisdom concealed behind the\ncommonplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That changed (I think) some time around the Enlightenment.\nThe Enlightenment decided there were no higher mysteries, and turned its\nenergies to deconstruction and demythologizing. Instead of learning what we\u2019d\nnever known, the modern student is meant to unlearn what everybody already\nknows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of the first line of Alan Bloom\u2019s book, Love and Friendship<\/a><\/em> (quoting from memory because I can\u2019t locate my copy at the moment). Describing Rousseau, he writes, \u201cA Swiss told the French they were bad lovers, and the French believed him.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was just the beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How shall I put this delicately? I\u2019m going to start by talking about a very private bodily function… in the vaguest possible terms. Because I\u2019m a sensitive soul. Then I\u2019ll go on to make a vapid point. I clicked on an article that showed up on the Book Full of Faces a little while back. … Continue reading Anti-intellectual thoughts<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,13,1],"tags":[95,125,367,1716],"class_list":["post-13238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-reading","category-uncategorized","tag-academics","tag-alan-bloom","tag-bodily-functions","tag-love-and-friendship"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}