On Elitism
A meditation, since the accusation has been made.
Someone said to me that some of my recent essays that centered various interlocutors who chose unwisely to engage me in intellectual combat on the social media platform, formerly called Twitter, that was started by a friend of mine, Jack Dorsey—made me come off elitist.
Jack is not an elitist. That much I will say about the man. I will defend him to the death on this point. If someone were to ask the question to Jack, who is more elitist—me or him—I can already hear and see Jack’s laugh in my head. And the embarrassed look that I would almost surely gesture in his direction as I recognized that, yes, I am obviously more elitist than Jack Dorsey.
But I don’t think I’m that elitist. Not really. I mean, I write and speak in a way that often gets conflated with elitism. But here’s the thing. I prefer to call it intellectual hygiene. I really care about thought. And the beautiful textures of it.
Your mind is a beautiful space. All of our minds. Inside our heads is a cosmology of meaning. We sit on a stage from behind our eyes, floating some distance from the ground, moving about the world. And none of that experience is ever something you really share with anyone else in your life. You use words to tell them about it. But you don’t really get to show them.
There’s no “share my desktop” option inside my brain, that allows an interlocutor to see into the space where your thoughts confront the sensory landscape. It’s a fascinating place, let me tell you.
I want to credit Sam Harris for turning me on to meditation. Not personally—through to listening to his podcasts, reading his books, and hearing him proselytize about mindfulness practice. I got really into it over the past years, and now much more seriously over this past year. When you really learn to meditate, you unlock new opportunities for self-understanding. And I have suprised myself, just how much of a psychedelic experience one can have in deep meditation. Seriously.
All of this is to say that we have entire inner kingdoms that we never get to share with the outside world, and one of the things that opens communicative opportunity with your fellow humans, is learning to be more expressive.
I think people should learn big words. I do. I think it’s worth the time.
Because here’s the thing, the more words you know, the more you can understand. This isn’t mystic wisdom. It’s science. It’s neurology. It’s epistemics.
Once you brain has a name for a thing. Philosophers might call it a category. Other theoritians in the various scientific arts might call it a symbol. See, we’re learning things right now. Philosophy isn’t so hard. These are all the same things. But they have subtle meanings, and connect to broader domains of understanding.
When you learn these new words, you’re not just learning a word. You’re giving your brain a new piece of material upon which to build understanding. You are building a world-map in your brain, of the epistemic arena you live in. In my metaphysics, I sometimes call this place, intersubjective space. Carl Gustav Jung might have called it the “collective unconscious”. It’s even, interestingly, related to a very interesting concept in epistemics known as “common knowledge”. A concept my acquaintance Steven Pinker, recently just wrote a whole book on. See this is fun. Learning new things broadens your view of the world.
I don’t know. If that’s all elitist, then I think we need a little more elitism in the world. Don’t you think?
And yes, I know “theoritian” is not a real word. It’s literary. It’s stylistic. I did it on purpose. It’s intellectually playful.
As a lifelong word nerd, I pronounce you “not elitist”. Live life to the fullest and use the big words!
There's an old Vonnegut story about a society so egalitarian it tied sandbags to its ballet dancers -- a silly take on egalitarian. If being egalitarian requires suppressing skill and knowledge, it's nonsense. The real issue isn't whether some people are better at something. Almost everyone is better than most other people at something.
Real egalitarianism is when we share generously from our abilities, and treat others as worthy of it -- the exact opposite of holding back and treating others as incapable of receiving the best we have to offer, hiding our light, pretending to more stupidity that we have in order to not offend, to blend in, to avoid being call "elitist."