On anti-intellectualism

A couple years ago my mom sent me a photo of medical test results. Our relationship was barely hanging by a thread at this point. Yet I did feel some sympathy for her, as I vividly remember the medical challenges that she fought throughout my childhood: a tumor near her brain and not one but two bowel obstructions, the first of which warranted a hysterectomy.

This time I received the news via text rather than word of mouth. I was hundreds of miles away from her both literally and figuratively. The message included a photo of biopsy results describing a suspected Category IV thyroid nodule, which would be subject to further tests because a needle biopsy cannot distinguish between benign and malignant tumors.

My mom asked me what I could make of it. Did she already receive a professional opinion?

“You’re smarter than a regular MD,” she said after I insisted that a doctor’s opinion is more trustworthy than mine.

Do I know more about biology than the average person? Yes. Am I qualified to give medical advice? No. Any response that suggested otherwise would feel irresponsible – immoral, in fact – to me.

My mom is not the only one who undermines medical expertise. This is not difficult to encounter, especially on the Internet. Reddit is flooded with medical-related subreddits, where posters routinely share their medical results and request a diagnosis from the community. Equally if not more alarming is the number of people who chime in on these threads who themselves have no medical credentials. It truly is the blind leading the blind.

Of course, medicine is not the only victim to this lack of trust in expertise.

The lack of trust in expertise perpetuates, as it distinguishes “good” but hopelessly unaware people from the scummy “elites” who actually are the ones who have invested years of their life deeply studying or practicing something. Non-experts who feel “cheated” in some way can only respond with naive and often unwarranted skepticism, which they feel deserves equal consideration. Isaac Asimov summarizes anti-intellectualism more gracefully than I can:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

As much as I hate generalizing people, I feel that there are two camps of anti-intellectuals. I will consider the current war in Ukraine from these outsiders' perspectives because it is a current topic as well as a personal one for me.

Firstly, some anti-intellectuals prefer to remain seemingly reserved, particularly when something does not affect them directly. They recognize that they know absolutely nothing about a topic but still probe people who have some sense of the issue: how do you know that? Where did you receive that information?

Some skeptics feel they have no business diving into this topic not only because it does not directly concern them but also because there is no way that they could be fed even semi-accurate information. They might ask, who is to think that Russian information – excuse me, propaganda – is false? After all, they only sift through Russophobic headlines in American media. And of course the West cannot possibly know the true motivations behind the war. Of course, the skeptics do not live in eastern Europe, so it among other topics are relegated to unsolvable mysteries. The funny thing is that a lot of the issues are fairly transparent; many experts who have studied and even lived in Russia have accumulated years of knowledge on the regime and its history.

I am not suggesting that investigating sources of information is a bad thing. The issue here is more that no information regardless of the source is ever worthy of the anti-intellectual’s consideration. So, ignorance breeds more ignorance. It is a conscious decision.

The second camp contains generalists. These people also read Western news headlines, rarely a full article and definitely not books. They think the world is easy to understand and summarize – who needs nuance? Why complicate things? Trying to find a less black-and-white truth defies the truth itself: it is already clear. These are the people who from their limited readings and life experiences believe that the world and thus the humans who inhabit it work in predictable ways, probably because that notion is comforting.

They stereotype entire countries: “Russians are X” or “Ukrainians are Y.” It does not take long to realize how ridiculous this is. Russia is clearly the largest country in the world. Yet many do not entirely grasp this until I tell them that it covers eleven time zones. That is huge. How can we possibly know how all of its 145.5 million inhabitants act and believe? Ukraine is also not a small country, only slightly smaller than Texas. Some Americans also stereotype their own population and project it on to what seems like a similar demographic in another country (e.g. religious Russians must be and act the same as religious Americans). Such generalizations are in the best case unhelpful and in the worst case harmful.

That my mom trusted my unqualified medical opinion over the expertise of a thyroid surgeon is alarming but unfortunately not surprising. When I was in high school she also told other people that I was fluent in German when I was in high school, which certainly was not the case. Quite frankly, I think my mother’s anti-intellectualism is why we could never get along.