No, I’m not a whining left-wing intellectual arrogant East Coast atheistic Jewish elitist liberal arts professor who’s about to explain to you why everyone who dislikes me is simply incorrect.
I mean, I am all of those terrible things, and worse, and I am about to explain why everyone is wrong, but each of those terrible things must be taken one by one, because there is no Unified Field Theory of Hatred.
Some haters will stress one basis over another, but let’s address them separately for the sake of simplicity. I understand anti-semitism, for example, as the essence of simplicity.
The world hates the Jews for one reason: they deliberately reject Jesus Christ. “We” do, that is, not “they,” because in this I am 100% Jewish. (In most other regards, I approach 0%.) I reject Jesus not on any theological grounds or tribal basis or a quibble with his supposed teachings or morals, but because he’s ridiculous. People hate the Jews because, in unison with me, we’ve always said “Don’t be silly” when Christians approached us to be open to his divinity, more or less the same as our response to someone offering to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge or to tell us that a Nigerian prince has millions waiting for us. “Precisely what sort of a naive dope do you mistake me for?” is the tone of our rejection of their God that sets them off, rather the rejection itself, and that eye-rolling tone is the sole cause of their millennia of Jew-hatred.
There are other rationales offered, of course—the “Chosen People” bit seems to irritate some Christians unduly, of course, and the money-lending practices (that usury-rejecting Christians imposed on us) sets some of them off, and the insular nature of our tribe (like every other tribe) seems unusually off-putting to them, among a few dozen other ancillary reasons to hate the Jews, but these are all cherries topping the twelve-tiered cake that is our refusal to consider the basis of their belief system as anything other than ridiculous.
The entirety of Christianity is the belief in impossible, contra-logical, mysterious events piled on top of each other so high that no one can see all of them at once. But that’s okay, according to Christians, because all you really need is faith that all of them are true: no need to give a single thought to examining any of these absurdities individually, not the dead people coming back to life, not the parthenogenesis nonsense, not the Three-is-One-is-Three gibberish that no one can even try to make sense of without tangling himself in knots.
It all comes down to this: will you set aside everything you know to be true and accept these blatant falsities just because (we say) Our God commands you to? If you can, you’re a Christian. If you can’t, you’re not. And if you laugh at the question, you’re a Jew.
So I’m a Jew.
Now as to why the Jews hate my guts, that’s a different question. This question is answered by the maxim “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.” If one part of your beliefs is false, then all of it is false—a glib overgeneralization, but there’s something there, and what’s there is belief in God generally. Yes, my DNA is all Jewish, but my AND is all atheist. (“AND” is my habit of relentlessly asking “And?” to any assertion.) Simply, the Bible, which is the basis of all Jewish belief, is founded on ignorance, and a house (as the Bible itself confidently asserts) founded on ignorance cannot stand for very long. In this case, “very long” is actually very short—they lose me with the beginning of Genesis, and never get me back. There are many ways the world might have been created, but none of them include “In the beginning, God created…”. That’s simply a pile of bearshit (literally, the first word in the Bible is “bearshit”) and it just gets piled higher and deeper from there.
Now as to “piled higher and deeper,” let’s move on to anti-intellectualism. Yes, I have a Ph.D., and those who couldn’t be bothered to pursue that degree for a decade or so sometimes tend to dismiss all advanced degrees, or even to cite them as sound reasons for disqualifying all holders of Ph.D.s as clueless idiots. After all, why would someone waste ten years of his life answering questions no one else can understand only to write a book that no one will ever read? It’s amazing to me how people view the most rigorous qualifications for expertise in an area of knowledge as a sign of ignorance in everything outside of that area of knowledge, and along the way also dismiss that area of knowledge as utterly irrelevant.
It doesn’t take very much to downgrade expertise because there are experts with whom one may disagree. I would go so far as to state that intellectual rigor requires us to view all claims of expertise with a degree of skepticism. But only someone who’s worked for decades alongside hundreds or thousands of people with Ph.D.s can assure you, as I can, that while there are certainly a few imbeciles, crackpots, and outright frauds in that mix, in the main people holding Ph.D.s are thoroughly trained in their fields of expertise and are often perceptive and knowledgeable in some areas outside of those fields. Nonetheless, people do persist in regarding all knowledge above their own level of achievement as flim-flam and doubletalk, almost certainly out of a sense of insecurity and a vague sense that education and accomplishment is somehow a negation of their own self-worth.
I used to have a father-in-law (“used to” in both senses—he’s now dead, and I’m no longer married to his daughter) who would invoke my Ph.D. every time he wished to dispute me—if I asked him to open a window, his response might have begun “Do you think I don’t know that the air is stuffy, Mister Know-It-All Ph.D?” In other words, it was so threatening to him that I held an official credential certifying that I had knowledge in some field which he didn’t hold, he needed to remind me on a daily basis of the many areas my Ph.D. did not declare me his intellectual superior. I think this sort of insecurity is more common than not. It’s widespread.
He was born, as I was, in Brooklyn, and like everyone else, we had no control over where we were born, but I’ve noticed over the years that people not from Brooklyn, not from New York City, not from the East Coast in general tend to be sneered at by people from other parts of the country for supposedly having an air of superiority. This is mere simple geographical rivalry, I suppose, and it’s based on East-Coasters boasting on occasion rather foolishly of their regional pride, a failing common to people everywhere. I’ve never understood how you can boast about the one thing you had no say over whatsoever, where your mother chose to be when she gave birth to you, but I find that it’s only East-Coasters (plus Los Angelenos) who get accused regularly of this false pride. It’s a not-very-well disguised form of anti-Semitism, I suspect, with a generous helping of anti-intellectualism thrown into the mix, and I suppose it’s just an iteration of those twin hatreds that pretends to seem a tad more polite. Certainly my friends who live in Colorado or Tennessee who constantly remind me that they live in the very best part of the country don’t get accused of “elitism” nearly as often as I did when I lived in New York City.
And “elitism” is where all this hatred rises to its peak. Before we go into the question of whether I consider myself to be “elite” (I do) or why others despise me for thinking so (they do), we need to settle the issue of whether elitism is objectionable.
Is the concept of an elite good or bad? I say it’s a very good thing, and I’ve said so ever since I was an ignorant child on the far fringes of any power structure that could be termed “elite.” From the very beginning, I was aware that there were people who understood things I didn’t understand, who ran complex organizations I could barely conceive of, who trained for years to hone skills that I wanted very badly to acquire someday, and my entire childhood was spent trying to find a way for me to enter the gates of this elite.
On a much grander scale, that of the human race, elitism is the story of our success. From our beginnings as highly evolved apes, people have been able to improve our condition by figuring out what worked for us and convincing others of our tribe to use the inventions we’ve discovered: fire, the wheel, clothing, all the way up to modern technologies that I can barely put into words. All of these advancements were discovered, then refined, and built upon progressively, which makes us humans.
And with some difficulty, and over a long time, I managed to get a toe inside the door of elitism, and I still regard “elitism” as the gold standard of leadership. If I see two candidates, one of whom is better educated, more articulate, quicker of mind, more thoughtful, than the other, then all else being equal that’s who I’ll vote for. Sometimes it’s a judgment call between two seemingly comparable candidates, but mainly (over the past few election cycles, certainly) it’s been a phenomenally easy call.
“Elitism” can show up in various ways, so I’ll lead with it into the next area of why people hate my guts: I’m a card-carrying professor, and one of the standards I apply to my narrow area of expertise is English grammar, which it was one of my more onerous chores to teach. Unlike some of my more broad-minded colleagues, who professed that grammar is an arbitrary construct that means very little, I apply lofty standards of grammar (and spelling, and diction, and the ability to create and to navigate complex sentences, such as this one) as a means of judging others’ intelligence, not because it’s important to use grammar correctly but because it’s not.
It is, however, time-consuming and it requires more than a little effort to master the rudiments of English grammar, and since I’ve done that (two masters degrees, in fact, besides my Ph.D. in English) I can tell, usually at a glance, how much time and effort someone has applied to that mastery. An illustration of that sort of glancing: for a few years I had the job of screening applications to join my University’s English department, applications that literally came in by the hundreds, all of which needed to be vetted down to a more manageable number (a few dozen) for the entire Personnel Committee to examine. Since I wasn’t exactly awash in spare time myself, I discovered that these applications could be vetted effectively simply by reading a paragraph or two of the cover letters that accompanied each applicant’s C.V. and transcripts and sample publications. I could eliminate more than half—some years, much more than half—of the entire heavy package simply by searching out elementary errors in the composition of these cover letters, typically within the first few sentences.
You may wish to defend these unfortunate job-seekers by claiming that anyone can make an innocent typo, or misspell the name of the person chairing the Personnel Committee, or even to wrongly use a split infinitive (as I have just done) in a formal introductory letter. But because I hold applicants for jobs requiring deep understanding of the English language to a very high standard—that is, because I am an elitist—I was quite comfortable weeding applicants who don’t meet my standard into the “reject” pile.
And I’ll apply those very high standards in many other circumstances. If I hear you say in casual conversation “If I was…” in a sentence where “If I were….” was the correct usage, or if you write “infer” where you clearly mean “imply,” and certainly if I hear “irregardless” emerge from your lips, I will judge you, and I’ll feel good about my judgment.
And I’m glad to be judged by high standards. Any scientist worth his or her salt, for example, can probably discern within a few minutes with me that I don’t understand science very well at all, because in fact I don’t understand science very well. So it’s entirely proper that someone with a lowly M.S. degree (or even a bachelor’s degree in Biology or Chemistry) can judge me instantly as undeserving of any position requiring any scientific acumen at all.
I want experts in all fields to run all of society, the more expert the better. That is the essence of elitism, and I’ll embrace it fully and defend it to the death.
Is that an arrogant attitude, in addition to being an elitist attitude? People conflate the two, but I don’t even think that either term is offensive. Call me elitist, call me arrogant, and my response is something like “So?”
That’s pretty much my response to all of the categories I belong to—“arrogant” and “Jew” and “intellectual” and “New Yorker” and all the rest—that people hate my guts for. The one I haven’t addressed yet is “liberal-arts professor,” which is actually a rather humble title. That is, people assume that liberal-arts professors are know-it-alls whose goal is to intimidate and indoctrinate their students but most of my colleagues over the years (aside from those rare crackpots and frauds I alluded to before) have no such designs at all, and are puzzled by the accusation. (Which I explain as simple projection: people who think that if they ever had a captive audience, they would naturally try to indoctrinate them and so assume that must be what professors do routinely with their alleged power.)
Professors in general, I’ve found, are a rather humble lot because they understand, better than anyone else, just how low they truly stand on the pecking order. To take myself as an example, I had to get my Ph.D, just to apply for a professorship (and many, if not most, of my peers enrolled in my doctoral program dropped out without taking the degree), and when I got hired, it was as an Assistant Professor without tenure, which I then had to earn and get promoted to Associate Professor and finally full Professor, all stages at which my academic inferiors got weeded out. So the assumption is that I must be full of myself to have reached the stage I have, but the reality is that there are professors way above me on the pecking order, and no one knows this fact better than I do.
The truly elite professors are chosen from my rank (full professor is as high as you can normally go)—they’re what we informally call “stars,” full professors who can easily switch universities without a drop in rank. (Full professors must still apply for jobs in other universities, who very rarely seek to fill their full professorships from outside of their own Associate Professors, but stars get offered jobs, and they occasionally deign to take them.) But even among the stars there are “super-stars,” who often don’t even have to teach, or who teach one course per semester just to attract publicity. We mere full professors consider the super-stars to be more than ranks above us, but more like another type of intelligence altogether.
It’s impossible to carry an exalted idea of yourself while being aware of the existence of these other types of professors with this sort of super-status.
And don’t get me wrong: I enjoy being misunderstood by so many people and for such different reasons. I would be disturbed, indeed, only if I ever thought that so many people hated me while they understood me. It’s also why I rarely take the trouble to explain my positions to them—I no longer get paid to educate people, and that’s a great burden that’s been taken off my shoulders.