Mass Society’s Triumph Over Intellectuals

~ Modern skirmishes in the ancient cold war between deep thinkers and the unreflective masses

~Nihariika J.

What’s the status of the old cold war between intellectual elites and the less reflective masses? Which side has the advantage in the

modern period?

There’s reason to think that the masses have the intellectuals on the run, especially on four fronts, owing to the political and economic

predominance of liberalism.

Democracy and neo-shamanism

To see the impact of democracy, for example, note how in the distant past shamanism established a knowledge hierarchy. The shaman or

medicine person was the expert because of his or her greater familiarity with the so-called spirit world (via the natural routes of

psychoactive plants and ascetic techniques), or with profound peak states of consciousness.

Practiced perhaps for thousands of years in animistic clans of nomads in the later part of the Stone Age, shamanism later adapted to the

rise of sedentary societies. Specifically, shamanism was absorbed into ancient philosophy in Greece and India so that instead of relying on

magic, divination, and psychedelic states, the neo-shaman would discover the secrets of nature by employing logic or by following the

guidance of a muse, daemon, or inner vision. In short, shamanism was naturalized and secularized.

In either case, though, there was a balance between the intellectual’s needs to stand apart from the unenlightened tribe, and to repay the

non-intellectuals by guiding them or by offering them sage advice or fresh perspectives on problems.

If we turn, then, to modernity, we find that that balance has been largely undermined. The masses no longer defer to these sages, partly

because in Europe the Christian elites were disgraced by the humbler form of thought leader, namely by the scientist. Paradoxically,

scientific progress is humiliating because the method is impersonal, meaning that scientists are trained to distrust their biases, to let the

data and the experiments determine what should be believed.

This is paradoxical because science also proved to be triumphant in overthrowing the medieval, Aristotelian worldview that the West had

taken for granted for centuries. That is, scientists routinely humble both themselves and impudent, intellectual charlatans such as the

Scholastic theologians.

The Scientific Revolution, then, reinforced the political and economic revolutions of modernity, ushering in the Liberal Age in which, just

by being people with natural capacities for self-control and for improving ourselves and the world at large, humans are taken to have

intrinsic rights.

In practice, this was the rise of Everyman or of the mass person who was now supposed to be as sovereign as a monarch ruling over a

kingdom. Each of us who votes in democracy and in capitalism by choosing what to sell or to buy is supposed to reign over his or her

emotions and to overcome environmental obstacles, as the social contract, progressive values, and the welfare state empower us to pursue

happiness.

Of course, what this means for neo-shamans in the late-industrial stage of this liberal progress is that they’ve lost their prestige since

everyone’s a self-proclaimed expert now. The postmodern condition has cast doubt on all intellectual authorities that would stand apart

from the crowd, and has belittled the former’s visionary pronouncements, holding them to be so many ploys for defrauding the masses.

Thus, the liberal ideals of democracy, equality, and revolt against political elites have transferred to the gathering of knowledge, so that

the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. The masses deem intellectuals to be potential tyrants. In democracy they’re called

“demagogues,” in that they’re sophists who whip up the crowd into a frenzy by exploiting their emotions with deceptive rhetoric.

Whether all intellectuals are just demagogues, or whether there’s such a thing as a genuinely enlightened person can be debated. My point

here is just that modern intellectuals must contend with this democratic backlash.

Capitalism and the academy

A pattern begins to present itself if we turn to what’s been a haven for intellectuals, namely the academy. Thinkers would retreat from the

foolishness of the ‘hoi palloi,’ to learn and to teach in universities that were designed to promote humanism, the ideal of gnosis, or the

progressive promise of knowledge acquisition. Ancient Greek philosophers founded early institutions of higher learning in the West, and
the early-modern period rediscovered ancient humanism. Based on British, German, and French models, the secular academy flourished

in Europe in the nineteenth century. That “Age of Enlightenment” was the heyday of modern intellectualism.

But while democracy undermined neo-shamanism, in the twentieth century capitalism infiltrated the academy on behalf of the

unreflective everyman.

First there was the academic culture war, a skirmish in the ancient cold war between intellectuals and the commoners. The sciences were

at odds with the humanities, and the former sought to capture the latter with scientism or positivism. Beginning with Aguste Comte and

David Hume and continuing with philosophers of science such as Rudolph Carnap, who catered to Albert Einstein’s spectacular advances

in physics, the contention was that all knowledge is scientific, and the rest should be burned as mere pretention.

In hindsight, we can see how positivism opened Pandora’s box by denigrating the prospect of excellence in the arts, setting the stage for

postmodern relativism that would undermine even the scientist’s claim to cognitive authority.

After all, science, too, was politicized and captured by economic forces. Science is a tool of human empowerment, enabling us to master

nature by explaining its apparent patterns, but we could understand those norms only by returning to the arts or humanities, to subjective

appeals to metaphors, intuitions, and visions. Scientific models and mathematical formulations enable us to calculate and to control

phenomena by predicting their behaviour but understanding what’s being calculated and controlled requires broader, more creative

mental projections. This was the purpose of Einstein’s thought experiments, and it’s why there’s a burgeoning industry of pop-science.

In any case, scientism reined in intellectuals on behalf of the masses via the latter’s scientific avatars. In other words, scientism was anti-

elitist, so intellectuals who were repulsed by mass vulgarity began to find the academic retreat annexed to mass society.

A more insidious assault came, though, as I said, from the capitalistic capture of the academy. The academy was a refuge because of

tenure, a lifetime appointment which freed the academic from having to attenuate his or her research to fit in with political expectations.

But universities and colleges began to be run as businesses, which meant that more and more administrators had to be hired, and they

seized control over these institutions by cutting costs. Rather than having to pay for tenured professors, college bureaucrats found they

could replace them with the more precarious role of the associate, part-time, limited-contract professor.
Administrators and untenured faculty now outnumber the tenured professors, so that the academy is no longer a fortress for intellectuals.

Even within their ancient academic refuge, the power of intellectuals has been siphoned off to owners and donors, and to their managerial

class.

In the US where these capitalistic pressures are strongest, the liberal arts have largely been turned into frauds to compete with the rise of

the internet. The price of tuition has skyrocketed, the degrees don’t guarantee jobs, and the internet levels the playing field by offering the

planet’s accumulated knowledge practically for free.

Philosophy departments specifically have been neutered not just by professionalization and by the publish-or-perish mentality, but by

inevitable competition with the flourishing STEM departments. And by “competition” I mean a race to secure funding from donors and to

entice students who see themselves as consumers seeking to buy education as a commodity or as a profit-maximizing investment.

“Analytic,” largely Anglo-American philosophy departments have competed by reframing philosophy as a handmaiden to science, and by

confining themselves to clarifying concepts and intuitions with ponderous analyses. And the so-called “continental” departments have

competed by turning philosophy into a pretentious prose-poetic word game, the method being one of postmodern literary critique, as

though objectivity were always just a bid for social domination.

In neither case does academic philosophy seem a well-rounded retreat for deep thinkers, since neither discipline explores how philosophy

can be practiced as a modern way of life.

Consumerism and the creator economy

Further capitalistic encirclement of intellectuals is found in the creator economy. Once again, the subtext is the liberal triumph of the

unreflective masses. Not only is everyone a self-proclaimed expert because of late-modern mistrust of elites, but we can all start a

business with no need for intermediaries. Who needs a neo-shaman, guru, or intellectual when you can do it yourself? The internet

teaches you how to do anything, including how to make money from your hobby and your artistic talent.
With blogging and Facebook and Instagram pages, for example, writers started their magazines, competing with the established hardcopy

ones, such as the New York Times, Vogue, or Men’s Health. YouTube and TikTok compete with television shows, and podcasts compete

with the radio. In every case, the establishment’s threatened by the do-it-yourself rising stars of startups.

This is supposed to be a boon for artists, but it’s largely a way for big tech companies to rake in profits from a host of vanity projects, and

in the long run this elevation of the masses seems counterproductive. The problem is that the market is now oversaturated with content,

which means the value of every product in the Information Age is diminished. This is the so-called triumph of consumerism: art is

consumed now the way you wolf down a sandwich, and as soon as you’re done you forget what you just consumed and move on to the

next juicy morsel.

“Content creator” was a rebranding of “influencer,” since the latter seemed illiberal. No one wants to be just passively influenced since

that could be construed as being demagogued. “Content creator” is more grandiose since it compares the artist to God.

But the comparison is flawed because as far as we know God created only one universe (according to religious myths), whereas human

content-creators create seas of data, never-ending streams of articles, songs, pictures, and videos that addict consumers not to the artists

as fans but to the tech platforms that host them. The lion’s share of the profits goes to the big tech companies such as Google, Apple, and

Facebook, and to the tiny percentage of superstar creators. Most of these so-called creators are only side hustling in what’s better

described as a “gig economy.”

A gig, of course, is just a single professional engagement, which speaks to the precariousness of doing business on these platforms.

There’s no middleclass lifestyle for the bulk of content creators, no medical insurance or job security, but just an endless grind for less

than minimum wage.

Notice the contrast between the intellectual’s attraction to the realm of ideas, and this capitalistic trivialization of “content creation.” The

intellectual used to retreat from mass society for the love of knowledge. The Truth would strike the intellectual in an ecstatic moment of

clarity, and the intellectual would spend years trying to solve the mystery of what it all means, and how things work. You had to think

hard by yourself or at least away from the base preoccupations of the masses. Thus, mass society was trivial compared to the intellectual’s

epiphany, a dichotomy immortalized by Plato’s cave analogy.

The creator economy reverses this since now the Truth itself is trivialized, as is the artistic process. Knowledge and wisdom are reduced to

information that can fit into computers, and the intellectual on social media is expected to act like a carny showman. The medium is the

message here, so the fact that elite contents on the internet are just a mouse click away from the most profane ones, such as pornography,

cat videos, or other mind-numbing fare means that all these contents are implicitly equated.

The playing field is levelled, Plato’s cave is closed, and the intellectual’s mystique has vanished.

Again, deep thoughts on the internet are all-too easily confused with conspiracy theories, fake news, and hate speech since all digital

writings, pictures, videos, and songs flow by in jumbled streams that trivialize their contents. The pessimistic, subversive perspectives

that would once, centuries ago, have been coveted as esoteric insights are now lumped in with the derangements of cranks and incels.

After all, negativity is often bad for business, so the mainstream mood on the internet should be upbeat and winsome to attract the most

customers.

Pop culture and the co-optation of nerdom

In popular culture, there’s a paradoxical development which is the popularization of nerds. Nerd culture went mainstream.

Nerds, you’ll recall, were supposed to be intellectuals whose single-minded devotion to obscure areas of interest made them socially

awkward. The movie Revenge of the Nerds popularized this image of the antithesis of the jocks or of the cool, rich kids. The cool kids

would go on from high school to dominate society, running companies or conning the masses from Ronald Reagan’s government, with

free-market slogans. And the nerds would toil away in some corporate basement as lab technicians or engineers.

Then came the Information Age, and computers became cool, as did their programmers, hackers, computer scientists, and software

entrepreneurs. Apps were “killer” products, and nerds in Silicon Valley became billionaires.

As Karl Marx would say, the underlying transition in material inequality had to be smoothed over at the superstructural, ideological level,

so nerds had to become cool. Comic book conventions accomplished this, as did the fad of Marvel superhero movies. A-list actors now

starred as comic book heroes, boosting what was once the province of untouchable nerds, with the Hollywood mystique.
But this was just one more capitalistic co-optation. Nerds were cool but not as nerds. Nerds were elevated in public discourse because

some nerds became plutocrats. Yet nerdom itself had to be disneyfied (simplified and sentimentalized) to appeal to a mass audience.

The sitcom Big Bang Theory is notorious for capitalizing on nerdom by showcasing a cartoon version of nerds who are vindicated in the

end only in so far as they succumb to the biological life cycle, find mates, and start a family. The philosophical obsession with subversive

knowledge is incidental or absent in the show, and what matters is the intellectual’s abasement before mass social norms, the very ones

that tend to appal intellectuals.

Modernity and the victory of the unreflective masses

Of course, none of this means that there’s no longer any such thing as an intellectual who thinks deep thoughts. Indeed, there are likely

more deep thinkers now than ever before, if only because of the explosive modern rise in human population. Yet the question I’m raising

here isn’t about the genetics of intellectualism, but about the social relations between deep thinkers and the less reflective masses. The

question is whether there are still institutional refuges for intellectuals, or whether modernity itself is somehow anti-intellectual.

If the latter were true, this would be surprising because we assume, on the contrary, that we know more now than any previous

generation. Science churns out empirical findings, and the internet stores the world’s knowledge which is just a few mouse clicks away.

But there’s a difference between scientific theorizing and general intellectualism. True, scientists may be the quintessential nerds in that

they think deeply about their arcane subjects, and they generate an abundance of empirical knowledge. However, one key subject is

beyond their expertise: What does it all mean? What should be done with scientific theories? Those questions call for subjective

explorations, whereas scientists specialize in objectivity.

Scientists needn’t broach the philosophical, moral, or even theological problem of our existential position in nature because the

applications of science are automated. Engineers and industrialists turn scientific research into products that are supposed to improve

our lives, making life more convenient for consumers. Thus, we interpret the increase in scientific knowledge as a positive development,

as dictated by secular humanism and neoliberalism, and we do so even as scientists themselves are the first to warn us about the self-

destructive tendencies of modernity, as our “progress” threatens the biosphere with overpopulation, pollution, the mass extinction of

species, and so on.

If we ask why there’s been an ancient cold war between intellectuals and the rest of society, the answer isn’t just that only a minority tends

to think a lot. Thinking a lot wouldn’t automatically set intellectuals at odds with everything else. No, what matters is what intellectuals

tend to discover with their minds. If the truth were reassuring, intellectuals wouldn’t feel alienated and disgusted, and the masses

wouldn’t be irked by these elites. The problem has been that the myths and prejudices that sustain our happiness, peaceful coexistence,

and progressive enterprises seem to conflict with philosophical, theological, and artistic perspectives.

That conflict hasn’t gone away, but what’s changed in the modern period is that those perspectives are no longer considered elite.

Knowledge has been relativized and downgraded unless it helps you earn a profit. Capitalism reigns. If God is dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche

said, meaning that highly educated, well-off people no longer defer to theistic religion, so are philosophy and art. If modern progress

represents the triumph of the unreflective masses in this culture war, as doubts about the fruit of their labour are silenced for business

purposes, and as the bastions of intellectualism are infiltrated and sabotaged, deep thinkers may have to watch only from the sidelines,

isolated and with no social standing as we advance collectively to our downfall.

.~.