The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

Armed and Dangerous has an interesting short essay on the varieties of what is called 'Anti-intellectualism':

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals.
One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to the murkier corners of the culture wars to develop the point.
Note: The term “intellectual” is not infrequently applied to me. By the end of this essay it should be clear why, though I recognize the justice in that application, I’m not completely happy with it.
One kind of “anti-intellectualism” is opposition to “intellectuals” considered as an interest group or social class in the Marxian sense – what Russian writers called theintelligentsia. The only more specific term I can think of for this is anti-intelligentsianism, an ugly coinage which will have to do for the duration of this essay.
Another kind is what I’ll call traditionalism. The traditionalist believes that intellectuals discard or undervalue what Russell Kirk called “the organic wisdom of institutions” (in England and continental Europe this position is associated with Edmund Burke). The traditionalist opposes intellectuals not because they form an interest group but because he believes their ceaseless questioning carelessly damages the organic fabric of society, woven by history and supporting human happiness in ways not understood until it is torn asunder.
Next we come to what I’ll call the epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly. Where the traditionalist decries intellectuals’ corrosion of the organic social fabric, the epistemic skeptic is more likely to be exercised by disruption of the signals that mediate voluntary economic exchanges. This position is often associated with Friedrich Hayek; one of its more notable exponents in the U.S. is Thomas Sowell, who has written critically about the role of intellectuals in society.
Less commonly, we encounter what might be called totalizing anti-intellectualism. Where the traditionalist wishes to preserve what is or was, the totalizing anti-intellectual wants to remake the world by any means necessary. He is a partisan for a specific totalizing system of thought which regards the methods and habits of intellectuals (and possibly the traditionalist’s fabric of society, too) as its enemy. In Europe the totalizing system is likely to be romantic blood-and-soil nationalism, Marxism, or Fascism; in the U.S. it is likely to be fundamentalist Christianity. Elsewhere, under the influence of the anti-rationalism of Al-Ghazali, Islam teaches a particularly violent and exclusive variant of totalizing anti-intellectualism.
Finally, we have what I’ll call the thalamic anti-intellectual. The thalamic anti-intellectual’s opposition is not ideological but personal and gut-level. There can be many reasons for this, but one that will stand for all is that intellectuals make him feel inferior and personally threatened.
These are five different phenomena with different sources. So, when American intellectuals rail against “anti-intellectualism”, it’s important to pin down which kind they are actually talking about. And a major, related problem is that intellectuals sometimes pretend to be talking about one kind of anti-intellectualism as a way of discrediting another against which they don’t actually have good arguments.

Read the rest here.