(February 20, 2020 at 4:39 pm)TimOneill Wrote: baseless slurs and sneering fantasy
I expect you know Hofstadter's great book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It's such a model of scholarship -- deeply researched and jargon-free. It makes one weep for the intellectual level of publishing to compare it to a bit of error-filled propaganda like Greenblatt's The Swerve.
Anyway, I think we often see Hofstadter's thesis in action. In debates like this one, people who have not studied a subject frequently feel they are better qualified than people who have. It's something about a distrust of education. A prejudice against "eggheads" who have actually taken the time to learn something.