Various

A reader kindly draws my attention to an interesting and timely article on Victorian anti-intellectualism. An extract here:

The practical nature of the English mind, its deep respect for facts, its pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, its ready appeal to common sense - and therefore, negatively, its suspicion of abstract and imaginative speculation - have always been characteristic of the nation. What distinguishes the Victorian period is that the conditions of life tended to increase this bias, to lessen the contrary influences of theological and classical studies, and thus to make what may be called a kind of anti-intellectualism a conspicuous attitude of the time. 2 This is not to forget that many of the Victorians were intellectuals nor that the age of Mill and Darwin made significant contributions to thought......
If “the extremely practical character of the English people” made them, as Mill recognized, excel all the nations of Europe “as men of business and industriels,” their commercial activity, in its turn, deepened this inherited bent. The minds which made the machines, which organized factories and solved the problems of supply and distribution - and did so under high competitive pressure - received an indelible training in practical contrivance. It was, as Carlyle said in 1829, the age of machinery in the inward as well as outward sense of the word; “the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.” When Mill spoke in 1835 of the celebrity of England resting on her docks, her canals, and her railroads, he added, “In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense;… and for doing all those things which are best done where man most resembles a machine, with the precision of a machine.” [Thanks Robert]

Hear Badiou and others talk about Deleuze here. And a new (short) post by me at the increasingly busy Long Sunday.

Speaking of anti-intellectualism, K-Punk nicely skewers a (familar) contemporary example here. In the example cited, note in particular cases [see comments] a clumsy eagerness to demonstrate with one hand a knowledge that’s immediately made fun of with the other.