the anti-intellectual/anti-pretension horseshoe
on being/seeming/wanting to be/wanting to seem smart
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs begins at the zenith, where the disembodied voice of Flint Lockwood narrates the question: Have you ever felt like you were a little bit different?
We plummet through clouds into Flint’s childhood self—an awkward and cute young inventor—gingerly addressing his classmates. He identifies ‘untied shoelaces’ as the number one problem facing the community of his peers and proposes an alternative, laceless foot covering': spray-on shoes.
He drops to the floor, flings his dinky legs into the air and whips out an aerosol can. The iridescent vapour he sprays over his feet sets into glittery, translucent dark shoes. Voila! The class erupts into an impressed hubbub until Brent’s lone voice cuts smugly through the ovation: How you gonna get them off, nerd?
Flint panics, whimpering and clawing at the rubbery substance that’s now inseparable from his feet. Kids that were just applauding Flint’s innovation point a kaleidoscope of mocking fingers at him with snide laughter and Brent delivers the deathblow taunt—What a freak! He wants to be smart but that’s lame!
Beyond the dwindling reading comprehension of heated twitter debates or CHATGPT usage eroding the ability to critically think—anti-intellectualism is in full bloom.
Brexit felt like a tangible moment of pollination. Initially, economic experts unanimously agreed leaving the EU would make Britain worse off. Despite the procession of flags in every shade of red, the majority of Brits voted to leave.
The topic of immigration was a defining factor. A study of UK media coverage of the 2016 EU Referendum campaign1 found ‘coverage of immigration more than tripled over the course of the campaign, rising faster than any other political issue’.
Western immigration is inherently shaped by racial anxiety. Eurocentric countries that’ve established their wealth through colonial kidnapping and theft dictate strict regulations on who should enter their countries. This historical context ensures immigration rhetoric is always discussed as an emergency issue, one that requires brute force, control and domination—lest the government appear weak and doom their electorate to the same, invasive fate it once inflicted onto others.
Still inflicts. Britain will destabilise a country in the third-world and pit their citizens against the refugees requesting safety from British-made bombs. It is an offensively simple playbook tapping into the paranoia of the white British majority—relying almost exclusively on British ignorance of its own racial history and a libidinal investment in tribalism.
The average white Brit doesn’t know or care how to interrogate themselves racially. To critically consider their own relation to empire causes too much psychic damage. It is far safer to dismiss it all as woke nonsense. It is the anti-intellectualism of sociocultural ignorance—or the want to not know—that made immigration such a boringly predictable crossbar of puppetry in Brexit discourse. The decades of Conservative-led austerity meant the British population—especially the most impoverished—were restless, frustrated and ready to lash out. They were then presented a choice—to leave or remain—and herded towards an event that made them feel like they were actually doing something in regards to an institution that they knew frighteningly little about.
As a slogan, are the deeper, spiritual intentions at work not abundantly clear?
A portmanteau of “Britain” and “Exit” rose to being the exclusive way of referencing the entire campaign. A subliminal incantation. Brexit subconsciously appeared in the British psyche as a loveless marriage. We were asked whether we should leave or stay—even when our real, abusive relationship was with the conservative government. “Leave” was a true verb, a doing word, a pronounced dissatisfaction followed by an act of resolve. “Remain” was static, the same pain persevering, grinning and bearing it.
The toy-out-the-pram political reaction fuelled by quasi-imperialist rhetoric like “taking back control of our borders” and “asserting national sovereignty” was a symbolic up-yours to a European establishment that was only tangentially responsible for our domestic problems. In choosing to leave, the British public refused the advice of economic experts and I can’t help but think of Dr. Ha-Joon Chang’s Oxford Union Address2, where he stated economics is “the language of the rules”. A politically agitated and fatigued population that’ve been forced to comprehend everything in economic terms was finally being given an opportunity to reject the enforced paradigm. The people were always going choose motion, even if the motion lead to a downward spiral.
Economics has become a bit like Catholic Theology in medieval Europe. It has basically become the language of the rulers so if you don’t speak economics, you cannot participate in any debate. Especially because in the last few decades of neoliberalism, we have been encouraged, sometimes even forced, to think of everything in economic terms. When you’re trying to protect a library or museum, you have to make this economic argument.
— Ha-Joon Chang
At the start of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when Brent chastises Flint because he “wants to be smart”, the wording is revelatory. Brent does not mock Flint for being smart—Brent mocks Flint for wanting to be smart.
The difference is isolated in wanting. Desire is the incubator where all transformation occurs.
Even the wildest conspiracy theorists have pinged intuition, understanding that something is not quite right, sensitive to an anomaly in the matrix. Their “want” to fix the bug is valid. Their feet are trapped by rabbit-holes or hollows in the minefield.
Similarly, Brexiters who sought reprieve from the measurement of everything in such banal, insidious terms of commerce were right to. The neoliberal axiom of everything needing an economic function would burn all the forests for firewood if we followed it blindly. The rejection of intellectualism, in this context, was an understandable response; acting on their distrust towards experts whose presence had made no material difference to the average person’s financial life. The citizen bet ignoring the expert’s opinion would make no difference either.
Rejecting experts of an unreliable field is meaningless without substituted knowledge. To reject the intellect of economists just to be seduced by racist propaganda is an arbitrary exchange.
You can attribute much of the vitriol following Dr. Ally Louks’ completion of her PhD in Olfactory ethics to the fact that pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is culturally undervalued. Rather than celebrating someone successfully studying a subject they’re passionate about (which shouldn’t be celebrated in the first place—it should be a societal norm) the controversy revealed how much people have succumbed to the neoliberal conditioning that passionate study is only valuable if it is economically lucrative.
It is a metric that even affects how we view art. We fixate on the box office success of films, hype about the first week sales of musicians and all of it rings as a hollow substitute for critical analysis or simply enjoying and casually discussing the emotional resonance of an artistic experience.
Furthermore, the anti-intellectual rejection of the expert is exacerbated by the non-expert’s inability to accept the human flaws and/or perceived shortcomings of the expert. If an expert is an expert they aren’t allowed to be wrong.
When Brent initiates the kid’s choir of ridicule towards Flint for wanting to be smart, he does so in denial of the observable fact that Flint is actually smart—smart enough to invent something that is essentially a neighbour to magic, even if it was a misfire.
Smartness, if not executed perfectly, is lame.
The anti-intellectual’s inability to allow grace for the intellect’s failure mirrors exactly how we treat morality. One mistake can fell a good person from grace. One good deed can change a bad person’s lighting. Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust and by extension, the desire to not be made a (further) fool of.
Story time
My short story Pat-a-cake begins with the line: In the dreamscape of before, when your mother was a world…
It is not a beginning I arrived at easily nor is it an arrival that is particularly complete (I still might change it before it gets published).
For a long time the entrance was: In the hypnagogia of before, when your mother was a world…
Hypnagogia is ‘the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep’. It’s also a word I’ve known since I was twelve because I was the kind of kid who’d read the dictionary before bed.
When I first showed a friend Pat-a-cake, he asked me what ‘hypnagogia’ meant. I explained. No biggie.
I showed it to another friend, a writer this time, and they did me the courtesy of reading all the way through before asking what it meant. I got worried. Was this one of those words that was more obscure or archaic than I realised? I defined it. They said cool. No biggie.
The third time I shared it was in a writing workshop. The unanimous feedback was that as an entrance, ‘hypnagogia’ had the potential to throw the reader off. It alienates the reader from the story almost immediately.
It is also the most snugly fitting word for the sentence.
With consensus growing, I changed ‘hypnagogia’ to ‘dreamscape’ — keenly aware that I had sacrificed the precision of meaning, the emotional charge and the layers of texture for the reader’s convenience.
If anti-intellectualism criminalises the ‘want to be smart’, anti-pretentiousness criminalises the ‘want to seem smart’. The usage of ‘hypnagogia’ might earn me the title of pretentious for its obscurity. The flip-side is the insincerity of replacing it with ‘dreamscape’, which feels like an insult to the intelligence of the reader, a mollycoddling, a lack of faith in their curiosity when given the opportunity to learn a new word.
What happens when a culture—addicted to aesthetics and systematically devaluing the acquisition of knowledge (save for economic productivity)—is presented with knowledge it doesn’t understand?
That is—what happens when “seeming” becomes indistinguishable from “being”?
Smartness itself is rendered an exhibition and intellect becomes less about knowledge and more about the ever-more finite ways of marketing, cosmetically packaging and presenting knowledge. The “wants” collapse under the weight of themselves. The knowledge itself withers.
If you’re Austin Butler, you get called pretentious for liking The Good, The Bad, The Ugly as a kid. If you’re Celine Song, you get called sauceless and told you’re not allowed to like Zootopia until you make better movies. If you’re Ryan Coogler, you’re spared the digital gulag for being inspired by Puss in Boots: The Last Wish before making Sinners.
If neoliberalism has demanded economic productivity, internet culture demands output for the attention economy; a system largely run by a cryptocurrency of sincerity (or maybe rather, sincerity as a compelling performance).
Austin Butler is identified as pretentious for liking The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as a kid because his film choice seems insincere, implausible, even a deception. His film choice alerts the skeptical audience that he is someone who wants to seem like a cinephile. The assumption is easily rectified with an ounce of good faith. Maybe Austin Butler grew up watching Dad films with his Dad. Maybe he was just a weird kid. Perhaps all childhood experiences are not the same and what is registering to the fly as a chaotic “want to seem smart” is just normal to the spider.
You’d be well within your rights to brand me pretentious for using the word “zenith” at the start of this essay. I could’ve just said sky. I’d like to think I don’t choose words because I want to seem smart. There’s a whole cocktail of reasons swirling around my subconscious when I’m writing that determines what word lands on the page and they’re all rarely concerned with how I might seem. Zenith sounds better than sky. It’s relationship to astrology imbues it with more poetic connotations. Stylistically, it holds more emotional charge. I know the word so I use the word.
Whenever I sacrifice a word for convenience, the essence of CHATGPT phases through me with a ghostly chill. Words like “accessibility” ring in my skull but never with the resonance of urgency or necessity. Instead, they ring like a neoliberal axiom—demanding everything be economically viable.
What of beauty for beauty’s sake?
There are film enthusiasts whose top 4 Letterboxd films are works of niche cinema. There are writers who string together a daisy-chain of infrequently-used words. I refrain from accusing them of pretentiousness or trying to seem smart because I’d prefer not to indulge my own distrust at the site of being challenged. I have stumbled across too many great, obscure films and read enough wordy prose that is equally profound3.
You might get a hint of a writer “trying to seem smart” in the corporeal body of their text but it can only be verified in the spirit of the content—in the way arguments flow, in how it eschews or confronts contradiction, in its success in retaining your interest.
A world as treacherous as ours requires a healthy skepticism for survival. The shoehorn of anti-pretension and anti-intellectualism is connected by a metallurgy of distrust—distrust in the intentions of the (pseudo-)intellectual or distrust in the intellectual practice itself. Legibility is an integral part of intellectual transmission yet we are governed by convenience so tyrannically that challenge—even healthy challenge—can make us refuse potentially useful knowledge in nausea. Intellectually and morally—we want so badly not to be duped and although the vigilance activates our hyper-sensitivity, it does not necessarily sharpen our discernment.
As a writer, all I can do is make the choice between ‘hypnagogia’ or ‘dreamscape’ that will allow me to sleep best at night. As a reader, all I can do is approach what I read with enough curiosity that will open up worlds, less distrust that will shut them down and the awareness to know when I just need to close the page and move on.
Saidiya Hartman, 1997 — Scenes of Subjection (Perhaps the most challenging book I’ve ever read)
Bring back hypnagogia!! I’m a firm believer that the people who are meant to appreciate your writing will appreciate the specificity of your word choices.
I think a part of why people are so scared of being challenged by big words/complex ideas is because they’re then forced to confront their lack of knowledge, which translates to “their lack of intelligence” in their heads. And instead of looking at their potential lack of intelligence as an invitation to learn more, they become defensive.
Great essay!
I just found your writing, and I love it. I encounter a similar, if not the same phenomenon frequently in scientific research (I’m a PhD student in engineering who learned math out of stubbornness but like you, reads the dictionary for fun). We are told to write “plain language” versions of our work now to increase public understanding. I do understand and relate to this, because I know exactly what it’s like to be a product of underfunded public schools and simply not know “jargon.” However…we lose a lot when we rely on simplistic replacements for what the true meaning was. Like literature and using “pretentious” words, we lose beauty and precision when we use simplified synonyms. We are expected to invent overly general analogies just to make people feel like they understood and therefore are willing to invest in our work, but the reality is that it takes years of learning to understand it, and analogies are very, very poor translations of true nuance and its beauty.
Language is an art, not just a tool for some rhetorical end, and I think this is what people lack appreciation of when they demand accessibility, as you reference. Art forms do not have to bend to the viewer’s preferences, and in fact they are horribly cheapened when they do. Perhaps it is all a function of our consume-consume-consume culture - we think we deserve everything in the easiest package and delivered to us in a way that requires zero learning and effort on our part. It’s like we are now taught that it is morally good to feel entitled to ease in every way. But art is not easeful, and meaning sometimes requires structures of nuance that take effort to learn. How do we fix this? I don’t know…probably making students read books in public schools. Anyway - thank you for your beautiful writing, you give me hope that humans and their systems of meaning might possibly survive the brain-smashing world we live in now.