I am an intellectual snob – did you know it? I also have low self-esteem, in ways not yet explained on this blog. This academic year I plan to be more of an intellectual snob than I have been in some time, and to cultivate low self esteem as best I can. Read on and you will see why.
The most destructive moment of Reeducation – the moment which broke me – was when all three Reeducators told me I was an “intellectual snob” [sic]. They said this because I had said I would read Al-Anon literature, but that I had no interest anti-feminist “self-help” books. I said that there were far better analyses of the situation of women, far better work in clinical psychology, and far more exalted sources of general wisdom available, both in libraries and in the lovely Maple Street Book Shop.
They, of course, said this was just my intellectual snobbery talking. I should not think I was better than the people who love anti-feminist self-help books. I pointed out that I had not claimed to be better, only different, but they said that to claim difference was to claim superiority, and that was that. I was cowed enough by this discussion not to leave Reeducation, and to become severely hampered for work. This year, however, I am going to be a true Intellectual Snob, no holds barred.
It is interesting, though, that my Reeducators thought I was snobbish. You will be able to see the irony of this when I explain why they thought I had low self-esteem: I was dating Ti-Jean, a Cajun from Lafayette. [Note: Cajuns, Acadiens, Cadiens, Cadjines, are from Acadiana, not from New Orleans, despite what everyone else in the world appears to believe.]
Ti-Jean was a green activist with radical leanings I met on Horn Island. Dating Ti-Jean you got to ride in canoes in lovely waterways, dance in old-time halls way out in the country, go to Gospel Mass, meet old blues musicians, eat mirlitons stuffed with shrimp and eggplant with crab, rescue kittens, and do all sorts of other things that would make you say, Mais, yeah chère – an expression I first heard from him.
From the point of view of Reeducation, however, Ti-Jean was a highly inappropriate person for me to be seeing because he did not have a college degree. Apparently his classes had been dull. He had dropped out and moved to New Orleans. Now his day job was his landscaping business. At night he was a wine steward at one of the very most famous traditional restaurants in town, and his true job, as we know, was being a green activist.
If I had had enough self-esteem, said Reeducation, I would be seeing primarily doctors, lawyers, and oilfield executives. A few other careers might be acceptable if the person were successful enough. Someone without a B. A., who worked with his hands, and who, furthermore, had something to do with wine, was simply beyond the pale.
This year, however, which I have already declared with gusto to be the Year of Intellectual Snobbery, I might also cultivate my low self-esteem by seeking out someone else with Ti-Jean’s skills. I might learn to cast for shrimp or catch fish.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yeah well, I am also an intellectual snob with low self esteem. Actually I do think that these aspects COULD be theoretically linked. For instance, until very recently I’ve had the view that my understanding of things out there in the real world was doubtful. In may ways, I think this came from alienation — specifically migrant alienation — rather than self esteem. It also came about through my father’s misogyny and desire to undermine my independence, so as to feel a relative power for himself.
So, I developed a habit of looking around me in preparation to be corrected by those who were more culturally ‘in the know’ than I — which effectively meant everybody and anybody. At the same time, my relative social alienation meant that I turned to books to try to understand that which I couldn’t directly understand (due to my shyness and confusion) by directly engaging in the culture. So, I developed a big vocabulary, and used the words I had discovered from the books in every day conversation. (I hadn’t learned the casual lingo of those around me; of those who I understood more than I did, and who, consequently, I found threatening.)
So, I had this apparently ‘elitist’ way of talking whilst feeling that everybody else was my teacher and I was merely their potential student.
Obviously, this has created many misunderstandings in my life.
Anyways, what I also wanted to say is that the more people gave me negative feedback for being ‘an intellectual snob’, the more I felt I had to work harder at intellectually understanding these people, who saw me in this way. I thought their thinking processes must be very complex, their culture must be way complicated, that they would look down upon me from their contemptuous heights. I’d have to work harder and harder at understanding what was escaping me.
These days I see much more clearly that it was just bad faith on the part of others — not associating with me enough to find out what really made me tick, but keeping me at a distance on the basis of some stereotype that I was not even familiar with. Because my motivations in being intellectual were not linked to snobbery (as presumed) but to self doubt, the ostracism that I experienced from family and others actually drove me more and more towards an intellectual personality. Oddly enough!
“it was just bad faith on the part of others” – DEFINITELY!
Obliquely related:
1) I’ve also had the view that my understanding of things out there in the world was doubtful. That is why I have at various points taken seriously some views that a person who trusted their instincts more would reject out of hand with a simple “that’s not for me” or a “that’s silly.” The ability to suspend disbelief like that has unhealthy roots but also an upside: I can acquire new systems easily, which makes me very good at academics and also foreign travel, both of which I like. Someone once watched me do this and said, “You’re like a well trained anthropologist – you drop your own cultural assumptions as you’d drop a coat, and are thus able to see clearly what is happening here, with empathy and without judgment.” A lovely compliment.
2) I had a huge blog fight a few months ago with two people who decided that since I was a professor, and since I was commenting on one of their blogs but keeping an emotional distance from the arguments happening there (I didn’t have the energy for it, and I also didn’t think it was my place
to intervene), it must be that I was an overly objective academic overly invested in scientific distance and also in the power of intellectuals and academics. It was really funny since anyone who actually knows me, knows I am so not into that sort of thing. They wanted to help me break out of the mind into feeling. This, I cannot help thinking, is just so American (it’s a very anti-intellectual country, just look at the presidency) … the idea that intellectuals do not have emotions, or that they are snobbish, it is so out to lunch, the actual snobs and unfeeling types are the ones running the place, I’d say … !
You are lucky to have that ability to suspend disbelief, and I believe that I also have it to some degree. Actually, I think it is the capacity to give people the benefit of the doubt until you know them. This is something that should be in us all, but for some reason is trained out of us. I think it is the essence of the thing I am thinking about when I condemn the a priori categorisation tendency which I see in the west. Whenever I encounter this tendency to categorise somebody new rather than to risk an intersubjective encounter, I feel a little bit of the life force go out of me. It is very damaging.
In all honesty, I am trying to recapture some of this openness that I used to have as a child towards black people and others. You know, I have really been traumatised by other people’s ideas that because I came from a colonial country I must be a vicious racist. Actually, this is untrue. Coming from a colonial country, I went to school, and interacted with blacks, some of whom I was afraid of (because I viewed them as being in a superior position to me, rightly or wrongly). So, upon arriving in the ‘first world’ I was much more emotionally prepared to see people of other colours as being on an equal footing to me than (I later came to realise!) my peers were inclined to do.
Yet, I was put in the position of someone who had to be castigated for inappropriate social attitudes (and unable to defend myself because of my confusion and my shyness!)
So, my natural easiness with black people was undermined in the first world, as I came to learn, indirectly, that they were people I ought to feel guilty towards, as an historical dominator. But……. there is really very little difference between feeling guilty and feeling dominant and superior, somehow. In some strange way, I gained a feeling of dominance and superiority by feeling guilty. It was a feeling which said, “keep away from those people, because just by looking at them wrong, you can inflict a lifetime of trauma”. So, I had internalised the western way of segregation on the basis of guilt and superiority.
I want to get back to my African way of friendship and equality, once more.
“Whenever I encounter this tendency to categorise somebody new rather than to risk an intersubjective encounter, I feel a little bit of the life force go out of me. It is very damaging.”
This of course also describes my infamous “Reeducation” experience … and a few other bad experiences, actually. That idea that “I know what you are and I am going to force you into that mold, at least as regards our interactions” is damaging indeed.
And on guilt – yes, it really is just the other side of the dominance/superiority coin.
White Australians being high and mighty about un-racism in their country??? They have to be kidding, right???
White Australians being high and mighty about un-racism in their country??? They have to be kidding, right???
As I explained to someone tonight, it’s like the gay repugs who oppose homosexuality. Their persecution is supposed to convince themselves more than anybody else.
No segregation in Africa, though? No white enclaves and such? … I think we are essentially all in colonial situations, though – these are not just in Africa.
“just by looking at them wrong, you can inflict a lifetime of trauma”
Actually POC’s – at least in the Americas, which I’m most familiar with (have only spent serious time in these continents and Europe) – are quite tolerant of being looked at funny, and rather kind about white people who inadvertently say racist things. I find whites to be touchier.
The trauma comes from direct insults, land grabs, police raids, lynchings, poor health care, involuntary segregation, lack of access to education, higher interest rates just for them, and other forms and effects of institutional racism and structural inequality. POC’s dislike these sorts of things rather intensely, and tend to be angry about them.
Tell that to those Aussies!
So, what’s wrong with being an intellectual snob? 1 by-product might well be the ability to spot latent or manifest intellectualism in people who don’t have BAs. Oh, and a question! What makes re-education think that doctors, lawyers and oil executives are intellectuals?
“1 by-product might well be the ability to spot latent or manifest intellectualism in people who don’t have BAs.”
😉 Precisely.
Reeducation was actually the crass entity here – SO middle class. It doesn’t think the doctors and so on are intellectuals, it thinks they’re professionals, which makes them better. Intellectuals, in the United States, are considered bad because they are “elitist” (as if these professionals were not more so). To be smart or well educated with goals other than to be a technician is considered un-egalitarian here. Admire riches, hate brains: as I say, look at our (P)resident and you can get an idea.
Reeducation confused rationality and rationalization. It believed only in “feeling” which, it felt, could not coexist with reason or thought. It expected histrionics and so on to be especially extreme in women.
“You are an intellectual snob” means “You think you are better than others” and also “You are missing out on the real life in which everyone participates – except for cold fish like you.”
“You are an intellectual snob” means “You think you are better than others” and also “You are missing out on the real life in which everyone participates – except for cold fish like you.”
I remember when I was recovering from the workplace bullying (it retriggered my chronic fatigue syndrome in the form of very poor digestion). I was trying to learn about myself and why such a thing had happened to me. Actually, I was reading a philosophy book, when my father burst in and proclaimed that it was a terrible sign that the blinds were not fully open in the room that I was in. Obviously, he said, I was sitting there along, thinking thoughts that were the wrong sort and spreading bad vibrations through the house, making everybody else miserable.
Actually, when I was reading a book I was incredibly sanguine, because I felt that I was on the point of getting the knowledge I had been lacking up until that point. It was one of the few things that made me happy.
My parents’ later charge against me, that I was somehow ‘satanic’ for enjoying the things which they could not imagine themselves enjoying, came from a lack of imagination on their parts.
I think I would have recognized that shrink’s comment as the rank anti-intellectualism it was if it had not come from a shrink and been surrounded with all of that ideology about becoming more “feeling” (which I’m sure is invented partly for men, because it does help many of them, and partly to circumscribe women within ‘feeling’ so that they won’t think). I also did not realize at the time how destructive it would be to my being in general not to resist it 100%.
I also did not realize at the time how destructive it would be to my being in general not to resist it 100%.
Women are taught to yield. I am actually grateful to my parents for teaching me the opposite — although they did so inadvertently. Our friend again:
“Ye ever become smaller, ye small people! Ye crumble away, ye comfortable ones! Ye will yet perish—
“—By your many small virtues, by your many small omissions, and by your many small submissions!
“Too tender, too yielding: so is your soil! But for a tree to become GREAT, it seeketh to twine hard roots around hard rocks!”
Once, I could almost sense in my father the attitude of, “It’s all no good. The life and ideology that supports it, which I have embraced, is empty. I’m only trying to push you towards this empty life with all my might so that you can see how repulsive it is, and not embrace the life that I have been so unfortunate to have embraced.”
It is so interesting – I got more or less the same message from my parents, and made the same interpretation. But when I foolishly went to psychotherapy to finish learning how to live differently, the attitude was like my parents’ only (much) moreso. My then boyfriend said I should read Nietzche to get over it; I saw he was right; did; took it in intellectually but not emotionally. Women, indeed, are taught to be yielding, and there are various philosophies which also teach this to men; I think they may be a corrective for rigidity or overbearingness, but for women they are an exercise in social control at least and misogynistic destruction in their more extreme forms.
Someone called “Bob,” apparently from this machine:
Search results for: 82.80.248.177
OrgName: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgID: RIPE
Address: P.O. Box 10096
City: Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country: NL
ReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43
NetRange: 82.0.0.0 – 82.255.255.255
CIDR: 82.0.0.0/8
NetName: 82-RIPE
NetHandle: NET-82-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Allocated to RIPE NCC
NameServer: NS-PRI.RIPE.NET
NameServer: NS3.NIC.FR
NameServer: SEC1.APNIC.NET
NameServer: SEC3.APNIC.NET
NameServer: SUNIC.SUNET.SE
NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET
Comment: the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
RegDate: 2002-11-23
Updated: 2004-03-16
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-08-17 19:10
Said this as a comment on this post:
“The only reason there aren’t more rich and powerful women is because they are naturally subservient – the way God intended them to be. God made man the more powerful of the sexes for a reason, because he has a plan for all of us. The reason why there are not many women executives is because there is not supposed to be. They simply lack what it takes.”
From this fake e-mail address: lol@lol.com
And I spammed it … but yes, LOL, indeed! 😉 And he feels he must log in from Amsterdam … why is it that so many hecklers seem to log in from Amsterdam?
ALSO: I think this person is the same as came from an anonymized site, using anonym.to (see http://www.gulli.com/english/anonym-to/). They could have (but did not) hide their IP address with TOR (see http://www.gulli.com/untergrund/tutorials/tor-anonym/) … but I’ll bet they were not really in Amsterdam, but in some third place, and had logged in anonymously to the Amsterdam machine!
Unless this was a robot, like the ad robots, which I half doubt – reveal yourself, silly, we can handle this kind of comment!
Well your troll sure isn’t an intellectual snob.