A request for a defense.

[Iain Sparrow]

There is a difference between snobbery and having certain standards and attempting to live up to these. It seems to me that what was described in the original post was a form of reverse snobbery... a sort of anti-intellectualism, which sneers at anything which requires intellect, or achieves a high standard. We've have seen examples of such increasingly in our culture in which academics and those who are passionate about learning are deemed as "geeks" and politicians can dismiss those who have graduated at the top of their class from a rigorous university as "un-American elitist snobs".

I try not to pigeonhole people like that.
If it's done to me, well who cares. If we are truly intellectuals around here, and we live to those higher standards you speak of, we shouldn't need the approval of others.

[Marbles]

Oh my, so much snobbery in this thread?

And what label would you apply to the attitude the opening poster is complaining about?

Come to think of it, these attacks are reserved only for literature and social sciences. I'll see if these people dare dismiss scientific research and scholarship with the excuse of real life experience and defend remaining on the margins of education.

If we are truly intellectuals around here, and we live to those higher standards you speak of, we shouldn't need the approval of others.

No, I don't think it's about needing approval of others; it's more about holding your ground when you are unreasonably attacked and dismissed by unqualified people who you know, know very little.

Everyone has a different context to their lives, different problems, opportunities, interests etc. It's fine by me if reading or aspiring to higher forms of education doesn't fit their particular life trajectory. I'm at home with the fact of life that everybody has a certain or special place in the bigger scheme of things and therefore I, personally, do not disdain people for not knowing but I disdain those who flaunt their not-knowing arrogantly.

[Iain Sparrow]

Everyone has a different context to their lives, different problems, opportunities, interests etc. It's fine by me if reading or aspiring to higher forms of education doesn't fit their particular life trajectory. I'm at home with the fact of life that everybody has a certain or special place in the bigger scheme of things and therefore I, personally, do not disdain people for not knowing but I disdain those who flaunt their not-knowing arrogantly.

Then my friend, you are no better than those you disdain.

[Marbles]

Then my friend, you are no better than those you disdain.

I don't see how. If someone is proud of their ignorance and make fun of those who strive to higher forms of education, how am I the same as them for criticising their behaviour?

[Ecurb]

Language is essential to humanity. When apes have been raised like human children, they are as capable and intelligent as the human babies until humans learn language, at which point the humans far outstrip the chimps and gorillas. Language not only offers humans a non-experiential way of learning about things -- it also offers an organized way of thinking about things. WE can even remember events more accurately if we put them into words.

Nonetheless, I think Anna Quinlen's "immortality" argument is a little silly. Plato does not live "forever" through his writings; the 2500 years his work has survived is a mere blink of the eye in terms of "forever". Walter Pater suggests that:

Great passions may give us this sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure that it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

To each his own, I suppose. However, the "desire for beauty" need not be limited to an appreciation for art. Perhaps the best mountaineering book I've read (and I've read them all, almost) is Jonathon Waterman's "In the Shadow of Denali". One chapter is about the disastrous summer of 1991, when many climbers died on "Denali" (climbers call Mt. McKinley,the highest mountain in North America by its native name). Included in the death toll was Mugs Stump, one of the greatest Alaskan climbers and Waterman's friend. He fell into a crevasse. Waterman dreams about him:

In my dream about Mugs just after he died, he disapproves of my life with its lack of action and my brooding with words on paper.... He is disappointed that I am not going up Denali anymore, and he tries to talk me into a climbing trip that will last forever, with granite rasping our palms and frozen clouds coursing through our lungs.....

I've had other climbing friends echo these sentiments, decrying "armchair climbers", who read the books instead of visiting the mountains. Since I rarely climb anymore (well, I did do a decent route on Mt. Whitney's East Face recently) I can't quite agree. Like Marbles, I think it's a false dichotomy. Nonetheless, the refutation of the OP isn't all THAT simple. We appreciate climbing literature all the more from having done some climbing ourselves, and love stories all the more for having been in love.

[Iain Sparrow]

Language is essential to humanity. When apes have been raised like human children, they are as capable and intelligent as the human babies until humans learn language, at which point the humans far outstrip the chimps and gorillas. Language not only offers humans a non-experiential way of learning about things -- it also offers an organized way of thinking about things. WE can even remember events more accurately if we put them into words.

I totally agree with you... we essentially think in words. In fact each of us think in our native language and therefore cultural differences are important. A person who speaks French will tend to see the world slightly differently than say, a person speaking English, or Spanish, or whatever. Not only that, but the written word is what set humanity apart and put us on this road. For thousands and thousands of generations humanity was stuck, and very primitive... until the development of symbols that represented words and thoughts. It is generally agreed that true writing of language (not only numbers) was invented independently in at least two places: Mesopotamia (specifically, ancient Sumer) around 3200 BCE and Mesoamerica around 600 BCE. It's curious that after the invention of a written language, we humans catch fire and make more gains in the next thousand years than the previous 10,000.

[Marbles]

Martin Amis in Money drives the point home.

"Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how hard, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

Emphasis mine.

Succinct, innit. . .

[Ecurb]

The "Sapir / Whorf Hypothesis" that "language has a tyranny on thought" is well known to anthroplogists. Sapir studied among the Inuit, who had 23 (or something like that) words for "snow", and he thought the Inuit actually saw snow differently from how we see it as a result.

The question is still being debated, but one famous experiment casts some doubt on Sapir /Whorf. Berlin and Kay did a study on color terms. They had some 160 cards, all of different colors, and asked native speakers of almost every language in the world to identify each color. From distant memory, the results were that languages varied between 11 and 3 different "basic" color terms ("basic" being defined by a certain level of statistical agreement among native speakers) English had 11, although American women could "agree" on 20.

Here's the interesting part: every language that divided the spectrum into the same NUMBER of basic color terms had the exact same basic colors. Those with 11 agreed on the same 11. Those with 6 agreed on the same 6. If language has a tyranny on thought, we might assume that this would NOT be the case. The results of this one experiment seem to suggest that a commonality of human perception has a tyranny on language, instead of the other way around.

[kelby_lake]

Literature (and other forms of art) teach us imaginative empathy and also open up our knowledge of other periods/cultures/social groups that we wouldn't encounter in our everyday lives. It's not a substitute for life but it can enrich our understanding and appreciation of it.

For the interpretation question, that is of course what makes art so interesting. How unfulfilling would life be if there was one correct answer to everything. Even science is full of interpretations and unanswered questions. Of course you could come up with really facetious interpretations but that does not prove anything.

I would scoff at the people who profess to have some sort of special knowledge of life. The ones who genuinely do don't have time to be telling other people.