In the interest of disambiguation note that a general definition of a fakir is simply an educated man. But what kind of education?

Among the purposes of liberal education is the inculcation of self-questioning and self-doubt, qualities that many academics have lately — and rightly — found lacking in our political and managerial elite. But can we honestly say that we have held ourselves to the same standard? After decades of jargon-ridden theorizing in the academic humanities, how sure can we be that President Eisenhower (as quoted by Hofstadter) was entirely wrong when he defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows"?

It's dead common to hear complaints about anti-intellectualism. It exists, and always has existed in America. It's related to a general disdain for aristocracies of all sorts, part of the long effort of humanity to throw off the yoke of kings and priests. It has never been as extreme or violent as in other nations, such as China, where such people were stripped of their riches and forced to toil in the fields and factories with the general population, but it's a semi-surly undercurrent to American culture and politics.

Note that it isn't intellect that is opposed, it is the peculiar lifestyle and behaviors of those who withdraw from everyday life.

Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to detect an irresistible current in our society of "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it"? . . .

Hofstadter's book is a good place to start in considering both strategies and prospects. Although not published until 1963, it was conceived in the 1950s, when, even more than today, the term "egghead" was an image of dysfunction and disloyalty. Hofstadter regarded anti-intellectualism as a kind of antibody in the national bloodstream — sometimes dormant, sometimes active — that reacts to "high" culture with an inflammatory response. He traced this attitude to multiple sources: including, in particular, the religious evangelicalism that flares up periodically throughout American history in reaction to the perceived decline of piety and morals and, more generally, public resentment toward those who, claiming expertise and "excellence," seem to condescend toward unlettered or uncredentialed people as somehow inferior or unworthy of respect. . .

The deeper implication of Hofstadter's book is not so much that Americans oscillate between periods of anti and pro-intellectualism, but that they tend to harbor simultaneously an "ingrained distrust of eggheads" and "a genuine yearning for enlightenment and culture."

And why shouldn't the aspiration be mixed with wariness? After all, it wasn't long before Harvard professors (McGeorge Bundy) and Rhodes Scholars (Dean Rusk) were ironically renamed "the best and the brightest" in recognition of their sponsorship of the Vietnam War. And everyone knows what happened when the liberal intellectuals of JFK's and LBJ's administrations morphed into the neocons of W's: We got (among other things) another disastrous war.

Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust.

IMV this is a mistaken and self-serving analysis of America that glosses over the history of the nation and its founding myths. Neither enlightenment nor culture are generally opposed, it is the assumption that a caste of priests are necessary, that they be seen as being "the best and the brightest", and that they should have a privileged position in society, like the aristocrats of the past. This isn't a groundless fear that afflicts the lumpen masses, it is precisely what the intellectuals seek.

There are practical concerns too, and other ways to describe the dichotomy. Segmentation of society leads to a variety of social pathologies such as bootlegger and Baptist coalitions where special interests negotiate, or extort, special benefits. Or as Jacobs described it in Systems of Survival. a guardian moral syndrome that views society as a whole as a threat that must be controlled, by any means necessary.

I see intellect and culture as being independent of the culture wars. Intellect is universal. Culture is universal. "High" culture is not high because it is superior, it's the culture of those who see themselves as being somehow superior. Perhaps this will be clearer when said by an egghead.

I don’t see in the outpouring of global popular culture the monolithic, unvarying homogeneity that most of the chief complaints about cultural imperialism attribute to modernity. I don’t see expressive culture as a zero-sum game. But it’s true that those forms of expressive practice which are fundamentally antagonistic to a cultural marketplace—the equivalent of usufruct ownership of land, the kinds of cultural practices that are unowned and unownable, collective and communal, and that require a protected relation to power, are threatened by the explosive force of market-driven popular culture. My feeling about that is the same feeling I have about gemeinschaft in general: good riddance. There is a thermodynamics to hermeneutics: almost no meaning, no idea, is ever truly lost or destroyed forever. The solids which seemingly melt into air are still there, and any sudden cooling of the atmosphere crystallizes them anew, often in surprising or unexpected places and forms. All that is lost are the forms of social power that reserved particular cultural forms as the source of social distinction or hierarchy, all that is lost are the old instrumentalities of texts, performances, rituals. The achievement of liberty loses nothing save the small privileges of intimate tyrannies. Culture, even in the premodern world, is ceaselessly in motion and yet also steady as a rock. In getting more and more of it for more and more people, we lose little along the way. The existence of South Park does not kill opera or gamelan.

Injustice and inequity exist widely in the world we have inherited. They matter, enormously, and we all bear responsibility for their existence, some of us more than others. The luxuriousness of my life against the poverty of many other lives matter. I have no easy answers for this, but I know we must answer to it.

But against the traditionalists, the censors, the snobs, the moralists, the monochromatic, those who want less not just for themselves but all the world, who want only their own vision of what is refined and elegant to propagate, who so fear the authentic popularity of global popular culture that they imagine its successes to be impossible save by conspiracy, subversion and subjugation—against them, I have an answer, from whatever ideological point of origin they hail. The answer is no.

Which high culture? Is it the bawdy raves staged by old wild Bill Shakespeare for the sausage munching groundlings packed into ye olde Globe theatre? Maybe it's the tats, piercings and ICT enhanced habits of your hooked-up children. The best that the soft handed scribes in the monasteries can do is to record some of what happened. This isn't a worthless activity, but it is also not as terribly important as the scribes claim. They would do their work better if they understood that. Some do.