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comment by thewoodenaisle
thewoodenaisle  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ignorance is a mold that looks like a fire.

Well, I mean there is a difference between ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Sure, I can get behind anti-intellectualism being a form of cultural decay that will spread unless we do something about it. But anti-intellectualism isn't ignorance. And I don't think anti-intellectualism is exclusively prideful, willful, self-aware ignorance either. It's also a strange form of intellectual hubris, as if spending 5 minutes reading some shitty blog makes them an authority of X over an entire community of academics who have devoted their entire lives towards X.





user-inactivated  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Now we've got more definitions confused than we should. Let me quote Wikipedia:

    Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible.

How willful it is is a question that must be asked first towards similar beliefs, such as racism and misogyny: do people take on those, or do they imbibe them as their own from their surrounding? From the answer to that question stems the answer to whether it is, or can be, self-aware or prideful, and from those - whether it is ignorance (willful ignorance, in this case).

Whether it is, people still hold onto them without giving them a good critical look. That constitutes ignorance in my book.