By LUIS FELIPE MIGUEL*
The left-wing version of anti-intellectualism takes the form of belief in a grand conspiracy theory in which any adverse information is immediately framed as “imperialist manipulation.”
At the recent meeting of Compós (National Association of Postgraduate Programs in Communication), in Niterói, I was going to present a paper that discussed the discourse against science and against the cultural capital present in certain sectors of the left. But I got food poisoning and it didn't happen.
The rapporteurs of my paper were shocked by the criticism. I was practically thrown into the bag of the extreme right. The left’s denialism was downplayed as just “annoying.” (For those who are curious, the work, the report and my rejoinder are available here)
I do not believe. The denialist left is perhaps irrelevant as a political force. But it harms the construction of a project that is plural and emancipatory – and therefore must be debated (and fought).
Anti-intellectualism can be summarily defined as the refusal of specialized knowledge and hostility to complex thinking, in the name of the transparency of the lived experience and the sensitivity of the “ordinary person”.
Its great effect is to deny complexity to reality.
It is not a new phenomenon, but it has become a hallmark of the new extreme right. His “elite against the people” speech tends to save face from the economic elites and even from a large part of the political elites, so it leaves the intellectual elite to spare. The denial of science and history is one of the pillars of his speech. The transgressive element, so present in artistic works, appears as an affront to traditional values and hierarchies.
But the refusal of debate, the denial of scientific argument, or the belief in the superiority of knowledge obtained through direct experience are not exclusive to the right.
The left-wing version of anti-intellectualism takes the form of belief in a grand conspiracy theory in which any adverse information is immediately framed as “imperialist manipulation.” North Korea is the earthly paradise, China is the socialism of the future, Venezuela is an advanced democracy – and woe betide anyone who contests.
Or, alternatively, the valorization of subaltern voices, which is inspired by critical perceptions about the dominant forms of knowledge production and the spurious universalization of a European, white and male point of view, but has become trivialized – and gained strength in the battles digital – as a series of exclusivisms and exclusions organized around the fluid notion of “place of speech”.
From a denunciation of a certain rationalist idealism, which postulates a disembodied reason capable of interpreting the world while remaining outside it, we come to the understanding that we are trapped in our experiences and are incapable of true exchanges with others.
It would be possible to see there a reflection on the essential human condition, in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who observed that between the ideas and feelings of one person and another person, language always interposes. This more generous reading is prohibited because the focus is not the original loneliness of all human consciousness, but the group. We are fully transparent within the group we belong to, generally defined by race or sex and gender, but completely opaque to outsiders.
What arises, then, is the absolute impossibility of any dialogue outside the group. What initially referred to oppressive social constructions, which structured differentiated experiences for members of different groups, takes on a mystical air with the growing popularity of notions such as “ancestry” or the appeal to a “feminine” inherently connected with the natural world, in the wake by Luce Irigaray and other thinkers.
Even if we once again accept that the issue is structural, some questionable assumptions remain. The first is that the group experience is both perfectly shared with other members and completely incommunicable to outsiders.
The second is the presumption that the group member, through their own experience, has clarity about their situation.
The third is that any external look at the experience or mechanisms of oppression suffered by that group is always aggressive, offensive, threatening or, at the very least, inconvenient and useless.
Together, they impose an impossibility of dialogue. For outsiders, that is, those who do not participate in the group, the only possible option is subservient solidarity and the permanent reaffirmation of their own personal guilt.
The first assumption (the uniqueness of the experience in the group) is tensely combined with the notion of “intersectionality”, however mobilized by the same voices. Indian theorist Gayatri Spivak famously spoke of a “strategic essentialism” that subalterns should mobilize to advance agendas linked to their identities. Later, she herself regretted that the strategic aspect was being left aside, in favor of an essentialist identitarianism tout court.
Perhaps it can be said that the use of intersectionality has become strategic, that is, the fact that multiple overlapping oppressions generate distinct social positions, remembered or forgotten according to the convenience of the moment.
The second assumption (knowledge is born from experience) is the affirmation of the epistemic privilege of the dominated. It is no longer a question, as in the initial use of the notion of “place of speech”, which leads to formulations such as the concept of social perspective developed by Iris Marion Young, of remembering that all discourse about the world is situated and that, therefore, the Visions that circulate as universal are in fact linked to dominant positions that are able to present themselves socially as not situated.
Instead, we slip into a naive and frankly indefensible understanding that the member of the dominated group, simply by experiencing domination, understands it better than anyone else. This means throwing in the trash can the entire perception, present in critical thinking, that we live in a social world marked by ideology and alienation.
From Marx and Engels indicating that the dominant ideas are the ideas of the ruling class to Simone de Beauvoir writing that in patriarchal society women are forced to signify their lives through the consciousness of others, there is always an understanding that critical consciousness is not available to not through work to deconstruct dominant discourses and collectively produce new perceptions.
Finally, the third assumption (the other is necessarily harmful) guarantees the inviolability of the spontaneous perceptions of the group members. Nothing that comes from outside can deserve attention, much less destabilize already deep-rooted convictions.
This feeds the anti-scientism that contaminates many of these perceptions; an anti-scientism that is also strategic, as science can be mobilized in defense of vaccines against Bolsonarist or Trumpist denialism, but then rejected as narrow-minded and limited when it comes to defending homeopathy or astrology. Or research data is flaunted when it reinforces the group's beliefs, but refuted in limine when it contradicts them or introduces greater complexity to the issues.
A well-known example: the information is repeated over and over again that the life expectancy of a trans person in Brazil does not exceed 35 years, an estimate without a source and which most likely refers to a study that calculated the average age of a sample of people trans murdered.
Recognizing that this data is false leads to accusations of transphobia. But what would be better to establish effective policies to protect the physical integrity and health of a given group: sealing numbers or reliable information?
Criticism of Western science does not only focus on its harmful effects, such as environmental degradation, the production of weapons with ever greater destructive potential or the growing capacity of governments and corporations to control populations – issues that are linked to the social environment in scientific practice takes place and the interests it serves.
Criticism is directed at the foundations of science as an instrument for reading the world, denying, for example, the scientific method itself. The procedures for validating observation, controlling bias and generalization are accused of being positivist and Eurocentric, which already betrays the idea that nothing can be elevated to the status of universal heritage of humanity: we are all trapped in our own tribal traditions.
Thus, all scientific knowledge is relativized in favor of valuing traditional wisdom with an undeniable mystical element. The strict division between scientific practice and mythological thinking, which was fundamental to the advancement of science from the Modern Age onwards, is rejected by a discourse that claims to be “decolonial” and emancipatory.
This refusal of the scientific method is based on nothing other than an extreme relativism, which denies any possibility of progress in proving or falsifying views of the world through the production of data recognizable as legitimate by everyone.
It is easy to point out the excesses of so-called “identity politics”. It is easy to condemn her for her most shallow and strident demonstrations on social media – but what political aspect could we not say the same about? However, this cannot justify the return to an abstract universality, determined either by class cleavage, as in left-wing traditions, or by citizenship rights, as in liberalism.
With or without excess, the recognition of the plurality of axes of oppression in society, without a priori possible hierarchization, places us before a complex reality, to which our political imagination is still unable to provide an adequate response, but which is not ignoring the fact that will disappear. If our goal is to create a more just world, we must account for the multiplicity of injustice in the world.
Attention to the place of speech, when it is well understood, provides means for a less naive reading of all speeches, to support the demand for an effective pluralism of voices in the public debate and, also, to guarantee to the members of the group itself the final word on the agenda of demands and the political strategy to be adopted.
But if the objective is not mere self-expression or the production of market reserves in discursive disputes, but rather the overcoming of patterns of social domination, then the search for adherence to factual reality, with the best instruments we can dispose of, cannot be left aside.
The problem is that this debate continues to be banned in much of the left. This prevents us from moving forward.
* Luis Felipe Miguel He is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at UnB. Author, among other books, of Democracy in the capitalist periphery: impasses in Brazil (authentic). [https://amzn.to/45NRwS2]
Originally posted on the author's social media.
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