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.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-07-24 12:05 am (UTC)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.)