re: #205 Slumbering Behemoth

You may have something of a point there, but where I think this analogy fails is the part where you have to be taught to enjoy it. That your lack of appreciation is due to lack of education.

The problem here is the conflation of the term ‘education’ with ‘formal education’ or even ‘teaching’, when what is meant is something like ‘acquired knowledge’— e.g., the kind of knowledge that one acquires through immersion in a culture.

This is one of the wingnut triumphs, btw— not only have they disseminated a general anti-intellectualism and distrust of formal education, they’ve succeeded in turning words like ‘education’ or ‘culture’ into pavlovian signals for ‘elitism’ and ‘evil liberal’.