On Elitism and the Accusations thereof

[kohaku_wind]

Breaking news: on this grand internet of ours, in a series of separate incidents, there are people complaining about mistaken elitists, and there are people complaining about people who complain about elitists mistakenly. As I know some damn smart people in both groups, I am compelled to explain this phenomenon. (and bored, and getting to the stage of work where there's nothing left to do except grandstand about the work I've done)

It's easy to see the point of people who complain about elitism. Just go to any webcomic forum and several of the larger blogs, and you'll find at least one elitist fanboy wanker who has taken up the cause of the author, climbed into the ivory tower, and now throws rocks at everyone who argues with him.

On the other hand, what happens to people who have rocks thrown at them? They start throwing rocks back. Some people choose to reject elitism so strongly that it does more harm than good.

Let's look at an internet example of this: Visitors stumble across private fora (or public fora about unusual topics), get screamed at, and leave, rarin' to blog about how intolerant and elitist the community was. They run into this attitude enough, and they learn to expect it from everyone.

The kicker is, your average internet forum has more newbies over the course of its lifetime than members during any one point. So more people actually get cheesed off by this assholish behavior than there are assholes, resulting in more potential trigger-happy anti-elites than elitist targets. (how many of those potential anti-elites become actual anti-elites is another story, one that needs to be told with care to avoid the Multiplicity Law of Loud Idiots)

And as such, anti-elites chase the tails of the elites, throw tomatoes at the wrong people, observers get offended, and so on and so forth. A depressing turn of events.

...

Now, a reasonable response to this all goes something like, "But Amber, maybe people complaining about anti-elitism are elitists themselves!"

Yeah, maybe, but that's boring (not to mention uncharitable), I try not to make boring entries (have I succeeded?), and I haven't written a public entry in a month.

That's all I have to say; without evidence, no theory can hold. What are your recent accounts with both elitism and anti-elitism?

Comments

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

The thing is I'm *not* an anti-elitist. In many ways I am very elitist, and the discussion on my LJ got heated precisely because I candidly said that I think the humanities have value because people who don't read literature and think deep thoughts are less interesting, less cool people than people who do.

The thing is I see the xkcd thing as rooted in a sort of misguided anti-elitism. Denigration of the humanities is less often because people think math and science are the only things worth doing in life than because they think math and science are the only *difficult* things worth doing in life -- the reasoning seems to be not that reading books is worthless, but that anyone can read books, reading books requires no special training, and therefore reading books should be a populist activity with no burden of academic theory that anyone can do with no jargon at all.

The argument against the humanities is generally not "I'm better than you because I do math and you read books and math is better than reading" but "I'm better than you because I can objectively prove I'm better at doing math than you, whereas you're not any better at reading books than me because the discipline of academic study of literature is empty puffery".

Which I think is pretty obviously false, and I think that the geek community's love for empty cookie-cutter shallowness in the books they read is a big reflection of this. (I don't think that science fiction is a genre devoid of literary merit -- far from it. I think the crap that Internet geeks think is awesome is generally devoid of merit, and even when it isn't, their discussions of it certainly are.)

[alors-indikaze.livejournal.com]

The argument against the humanities is generally not "I'm better than you because I do math and you read books and math is better than reading" but "I'm better than you because I can objectively prove I'm better at doing math than you, whereas you're not any better at reading books than me because the discipline of academic study of literature is empty puffery".

Those statements seem to both tie into the idea that math and hard sciences give more worthwhile truths than those that come from philosophy.

I don't think you're an Anti Elitist (tm), but your most recent posts have been about a peculiar sort of elitism, so in they went.

[alors-indikaze.livejournal.com]

Also the first argument you list is very common among /.'ers. Usually has to do with "objectivity." Then again, it *is* /.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

"Slashdot libertarians" are the new, rising social force that appear likely to threaten all I hold dear. I worry about the Internet geeks who support Ron Paul a lot more than I worry about, say, Christian fundamentalists. (I grew up among Christian fundamentalists. They're not nearly as organized or determined or powerful as people on the outside seem to think.)

[vee-ecks.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to tell people who insist they're a potential Taliban that, but do they listen? Noooooooo.

Never mind, BTW, that like pretty much every other branch of Christianity in the US, "fundamentalism" is so schismed and reblended and whatnot that to simply point at "fundamentalists" is to say essentially nothing, or prove your ignorance, same diff. The fundies I grew up with, for instance, aren't really fundies, they're fundie/charismatic hybrids who cause traditional fundies - Southern Baptists, say - to recoil in horror and throw accusations of heresy.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

This kind of reminds me of when I was a high school non-conformist with a snobbish attitude aimed at all the other non-conformists who were just conforming to each other. Good thing time travel doesn't exist as most high schoolers would find themselves beaten to a pulp by adults who look strangely like them (only fatter and balder)