Episode 166 - Pedantry with Arnoud Visser Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:16] David: The podcast where your two favorite pedants talk about philosophy and everyday life.

[00:00:21] Ellie: I am Dr. Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:24] David: And I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:26] Ellie: Alright, so nobody likes to be called pedantic. The figure of the pedant has an unquestionably negative connotation. The author of the book we're gonna be talking about today, which is aptly called On Pedantry, defines the pedant as somebody who exhibits an excessive display or use of learning. And so the idea here is that the pedant is a very learned individual, but they misuse their learning.

They often lord it over other people. They use it in an annoying fashion. The pedant is not somebody you wanna be stuck at a party with.

[00:01:06] David: They're the know-it-all of the group, they're the grammar Nazi, the person who's always nitpicking at everything everybody says, and behind their back. Everybody wishes that they weren't invited to the party in the first place. And s ocial groups tend to have a pedantic character, and so if you don't know who the pedant in your social group is, who knows? Maybe you are the pedant in your social group and you just don't know it.

[00:01:30] Ellie: Okay. I will say, David, maybe this is pedantic of me, but I don't think that's true.

[00:01:35] David: That is pedantic of you.

[00:01:36] Ellie: Yeah, so one thing that Arnoud Visser, the author of the book, talks about at length, and we will talk to him about this in the interview, is that the pedant is usually a masculine figure. And so he says like the most common figure of the pedant in the present day is the mansplainer.

And another common pedant that one finds today in public discourse is the person on social media who corrects somebody's grammar or use of a word. And I think that there is like obviously a time and a place for such corrections. An example that comes to mind for me, which I think is an example, not of pedantry, but of a righteous display of learning, was on this last season of the Traitors where Rob, everybody's favorite traitor.

I loved him, he's like a love island reality TV star. So not particularly associated with higher learning. He corrects another contestant, this like awful, really obnoxious mansplaining guy named Michael Rappaport. He corrects Michael Rappaport's use of a word, and he is like, can you please stop using this word that way?

This is in a round table discussion. This is actually the definition of that word and you're using it wrong. And it was just like such a great moment because it was this guy who was on a dating reality TV show and therefore like kind of assumed to be a himbo who was like talking to the Mansplainer and being like, I actually know what this means better than you do. I was like, yes, go for it, Rob.

[00:03:11] David: But, so I have a question for you about this because I wonder to what extent that does not get experienced as pedantic because of the stereotype of him being a himbo. I wonder it was like a nerdy character who was like a lawyer or who had a more quote unquote intellectual profession, whether the same thing would've landed very differently with you and the audience.

[00:03:33] Ellie: So I think that's fair, and I think this prefigures some of what we'll be talking to Arnoud about, which is the fact that what gets defined as pedantic is very much a question of what the definer experiences as an excessive use or display of learning. But back to what I was saying before, I feel like I slightly lost my train of thought, but we've got the mansplainer, we've got like the grammar Nazi online, and so the pedant is often pretty masculine coded.

And I have to say, when I read this part in the book, I was like, yes, this makes so much sense. And so I wanna say in groups of women, I don't usually experience there being a pedant

[00:04:16] David: At all?

[00:04:16] Ellie: No.

[00:04:19] David: Like I said earlier, you're the one, Ellie, you just don't know it.

[00:04:22] Ellie: I mean, certainly my friends know that I like have a PhD and I'm like really intense about grammar if I'm grading a student's paper or something. But I learned my lesson when I was an annoying pedantic kid on the playground who actually did- David, this is like one of the least appealing stories of like my entire life.

I'm so ashamed of this, but you know, I grew up quite Christian. I was very serious about religion when I was a kid, and I was also very serious about learning. And I was the nerdiest kid in my third grade class. Like absolutely, if you asked somebody who the class nerd was, like, it was me and my best friend.

So luckily we had each other, but I used to go up to people on the playground and quote bible verses at them.

[00:05:05] David: Oh my God. That is a know it all biblical proportions.

[00:05:12] Ellie: And so I was like, no wonder nobody liked me. Like I sucked. So now I don't do that anymore. Actually, now I'm very cautious, unless it's like in an academic space where certain displays of learning are welcome not to be annoying in that fasion.

[00:05:26] David: So I really like the image of a Christian pedant because one of the things that viser points out in the book is that historically actually Christians were sort of opposed to learning, and they often had this distrust of people who were too learned because they would move them away from living a good life.

And so you were living the good life and also embracing learning.

[00:05:49] Ellie: Yeah, but there's also a very long Christian intellectual tradition, especially in medieval Catholicism that is associated with higher learning. So I think it's oversimplified to say that it was like Christian versus secular pedant, because Visser also talks a lot about how monastic schools in the Middle Ages were places where people were learning like really arcane Latin and other forms of knowledge. And they're still Christian.

[00:06:13] David: But then they became targets of the accusation, like the Scholastics were the embodiment of pedantry in the Ages.

[00:06:20] Ellie: Yeah. But they're still Christian. It's Christian on Christian accusation here.

[00:06:26] David: Yeah. Fair. And so a lot of people can be pedantic. One thing that comes out of the book also is the association of Pedantry with just somebody who commits to the life of the mind.

And that's something that you and I both have done as college professors. And I'm wondering whether you have ever been accused of being pedantic by somebody that you care for, or whether that accusation and the possibility of it has been in the back of your mind.

[00:06:53] Ellie: I'm not sure if it counts as an accusation of being pedantic because as I mentioned, I'm actually pretty careful not to display too much learning in a lot contexts.

[00:07:06] David: Which is interesting in itself, right? That you're conscious of it and go out of your way not to be perceived in that way.

[00:07:12] Ellie: Yeah, and I think that's because I spend a lot of time in my life in Los Angeles with non-academics, and so I'm aware of the possibility of seeming annoying and that is kind of a bummer because like I like to nerd out. But you know, it's also fine. I think I remember when I was a young grad student, learning from an older philosophy professor that a lot of senior philosophy professors actually don't love to talk about philosophy when they're in their free time. And I was shocked by it. I was like, why would you wanna do anything else? And now I totally get that. And I feel like that's very much the situation for me.

I will say I do get accused by Trevor of being too principle and logic oriented.

[00:07:53] David: Oh, I accused you of that myself.

[00:07:56] Ellie: But like, okay. But like for instance, he never lets the microwave go down to zero seconds. He just like stops it at, you know, anywhere between 12 and three seconds or something of that sort. And I get so frustrated by this because I'm just like, just let the microwave go down to zero, and I have two reasons why you should let the microwave go down to zero.

One, if it doesn't go down to zero, it displays the amount of seconds that are remaining rather than the time. And so if you're using the microwave as a clock, which I sometimes do, that function is rendered moot by you leaving some seconds remaining on the microwave. And two, I have to press the button in extra time when I put my thing in the microwave in order to get it back down to zero before adding time.

So those are my two reasons why you should put the microwave down to zero seconds.

[00:08:41] David: I love that you enumerated reasons for the microwave clock going all the way down.

[00:08:47] Ellie: And I think those should convince him. But instead he says, you're just OCD. And I'm like, no there's a difference between having principles that you enumerate and like you can offer counter reasons why you think you shouldn't put the microwave down to zero, but you're not gonna convince me otherwise unless you provide those other reasons, and it's really unfair of you to reduce my reasons to just like apersonal preference, or in this case actually a pathology.

[00:09:14] David: Yeah, A vice, a moral vice. No. So I really relate to your claim that you have to think about it and that you have to be conscious of other people's perception of you as a potential pedant, because that's something that I, after reading this book, realized I've been doing for a long time.

And I think there are two, also talking about enumeration, there are two ways in which this has played out in my life. One, I left Mexico as a teenager and I came to the US and then I became a student, a graduate student, and then a professor with a PhD. And in Mexico, there is this suspicion that academics are removed from the vital life of the community.

That they are hiding away in their office, among dusty books, and that they think the world of those books is more real than the real world that surrounds them. And so there is a stereotype of the intellectual who has removed his connection from the life of the people. And even in Spanish, the term that we use for somebody who has a PhD is, catedratico, which comes from the Latin cathedra, which is the chair that a bishop sits in, in the church, like an armchair.

And so literally when somebody asks me what I do and I tell them, and then they figure it out, they often will say, oh, you are a catedratico, meaning you are sitting on your armchair philosophizing from way up high and talking down at the rest of the people, almost like a bishop or a priest. And to be honest, I've been petrified by the possibility that other people see me that way to the point that sometimes I conceal what I do .

So when people ask me.

[00:10:57] Ellie: Well, luckily, you're already petrified in virtue of being a idol professor sitting in an armchair, so I don't think you need to worry about that.

[00:11:04] David: No, but when people ask me at a bar, what do you do? I won't say I'm a professor. I'll say I'm a teacher.

[00:11:09] Ellie: Yeah, you have talked about that before

[00:11:11] David: Yeah. And so now I realize that it comes from this anxiety of being seen as pedantic.

[00:11:18] Ellie: Yeah, but I think what you're tracing is interesting because it allows us to draw a distinction between the ivory tower intellectual and the pedant. And I'm not saying that you're not talking about the petin here, but I also think there's a construal of what you just said that is maybe more accurate for the ivory tower intellectual.

The pedant, although oftentimes, you know, also an ivory tower intellectual is really somebody who conveys their learning too readily and in an unwelcome fashion to a broader public. And so they're sort of like the bad side of the public, intellectual the wrong face of it.

If what we try to do on Overthink is make challenging ideas communicable to a broader audience in a way that's like engaging and empowering for people, the pedant does it in a way that is belittling and obnoxious, and I think the charge of pedantry has more bite to it than the ivory tower intellectual bite, because there are good reasons why people might defend the idea of an intellectual as not always coming into the fray. We've talked about this in our intellectuals episode, whereas it's more difficult to defend the pedant.

[00:12:24] David: Well, the pedant is inherently negative, whereas the intellectual is more neutral.

[00:12:28] Ellie: Yeah, but I think the reason for that is that the pedant is essentially in relation to people to whom they're trying to communicate their ideas, whereas the ivory tower intellectual may not be, and I think perhaps more substantively than that, the pedant to me, even though it is usually associated with somebody who isn't intellectual, very often shows up as the mansplainer or the grammar Nazi that is as people who show an excessive display of learning, but who don't necessarily actually like work in academia or have a PhD.

So I might wanna disambiguate those because when I think about who my experience as the most pedantic, it is like somebody's husband at a dinner party who wants to tell me about the most recent evolutionary psychology thing he read that I'm just like ugh. Or sometimes I experience the reaction of another person, usually a man to what I do as unwelcome because they think it's an invitation for them to like share their hot take on my area of expertise.

And I just don't think that lends itself to a productive discussion. I do also think there's an aspect of this where in as much as the pedant tends to skew masculine as a figure, if I come across as pedant in a conversation with a man, it's gonna come across as especially annoying to them because it's at odds with gender presentation. And so I'd rather just like talk about Love Island than talk about Nietzsche.

[00:14:01] David: Yeah, but you know, I still can imagine a world in which somebody might listen to our podcast and experience it as pedantic, and that's the kind of relative nature of the charge of pedantry.

[00:14:12] Ellie: Yeah, but then luckily they don't have to listen to it. Whereas the pedant is usually somebody who's like holding somebody captive.

[00:14:17] David: Yeah, I'm not sure that that's an inherent, that's a necessary definition, but I do agree with you that there is a power move that is perceived in the character of the Penant. The penant is making a display of their knowledge, not simply for the sake of educating others, but for the sake of raising themselves above others and positioning themselves above their social station, right?

Like the pedant is talking down at other people and doesn't see other people as peers or equals. And so it has to do almost with a combative understanding of conversation where it's about who has more knowledge. And I think that's what rubs so many people the wrong way.

And when you are dealing with a conversation in which different members of the group have different levels of knowledge or expertise. It's very difficult to avoid that imbalance because that's in the nature of expertise, right? That it's not democratic. And so you and I as experts in philosophy, risk automatically being seen as pedants when we talk about our area of expertise.

[00:15:20] Ellie:Although Visser points out that actually the figure of the petant has become less associated with professors, with the increasing influx of women professors. So in his chapter on professors, he talks about the kind of 1960s post-1960s stereotype of the professor as an egghead, as kind of shabby dressed in like a corduroy suit, which I actually didn't know until reading this book was traditionally a working class signifier.

And so there's a sense in which the professor is self styling as an ally of the working class, while also being part of the intellectual elite, and that's experienced as pedantic. By the much more revolutionary post 1960s revolutionary students. Especially if you think about like the May 68 protests where there were some professors in the fray, but there were also some professors famously hiding in offices.

And so there we get this idea of the professor as pedant, but he says that doesn't actually have that much cultural purchase anymore because now there are so many more women professors in the university.

[00:16:23] David: I know not women's presence automatically making things better for the men in the profession socially.

[00:16:30] Ellie: Take that, that columnist who wrote the Feminization of the Workplace article last year,

[00:16:34] David: Well after I accused you of being a pedant early on in our conversation, but it's actually thanks to you that I can get away with not being seen as a pedant. Another aspect of pedantry that I think is really important to point out has to do with neurodiversity and the way in which pedantic speech is often associated, with autism.

[00:16:54] Ellie: It's funny you say this. I was thinking about that too. It doesn't come up in the book 'cause that's more of a cultural history, but I'm so glad you're mentioning this 'cause I was wondering about that.

[00:17:03] David: It didn't come up, but I read a couple of articles that talk about this and they point out that people with autism are often seen as pedantic because of their precision with language and especially their prosody, like the, their rhythm, ethnicity of their speech, and their fast speech. And when we see that level of precision and control over language, especially in young children, so this connects to the professorial part, it makes those children seem like little professors. That's the expression that the researchers used, and that often leads to social exclusion, of course, of those children in the playground. But even by adults who experience those children as eerie or uncomfortable because it mixes categories in the minds of the adults.

Am I dealing with an adult who speaks with high precision or am I dealing with a child?

[00:17:52] Ellie: Like, why is this kid mansplaining to me?

[00:17:54] David: Yeah.

[00:17:55] Ellie: But yeah. And also I wanna mention special interests. So the tendency of, at least, you know, some people with autism to have special interests that they then wanna tell other people about whether or not that audience. Is a welcome one and kind of a challenge sometimes knowing in what context, sharing that knowledge is welcome or not.

Yeah, I think we have to be careful about these accusations of pedantry from that neurodiversity perspective. And I will say I think there has been a lot of positive attention that public discourse has placed on this recently, I'll say even my own classroom, I think people are like a lot more accommodating of such an expression of neurodiversity than maybe they would've been when I first started teaching over a decade ago.

[00:18:33] David: Yeah. And what I, what I was gonna say also is that in the 1990s, this notion of pedantic speech was even proposed as a way of differentiating, what used to be called Asperger's from high functioning autism, now we don't use that term now.

We just use autism spectrum disorder as an encompassing term. But the idea was that that's what differentiates somebody with Asperger's is that you can make that distinction based on their manner of speaking and the degree to which it is experienced by others as pedantic, but it's not officially part of the diagnostic criteria.

[00:19:09] Ellie: Now would've been changed anyway.

[00:19:11] David: Yeah. And I just thought it would be good to bring up this angle when we're thinking about pedantry.

Arnoud Visser is a historian and professor of textural culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, which is the Dutch national research school for cultural history.

He has written a number of books on the Renaissance and the Reformation and is the author of the book we will discuss today, On Pedantry: a Cultural History of the Know-It-All. Hello Arnoud and welcome to Overthink. It's a pleasure to have you on.

[00:19:44] Ellie: Welcome.

[00:19:44] Arnoud: Hi. Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:19:46] David: Well, I have to say, your book was a pleasure to read the history of Pedantry, the philosophy of pedantry, all things pedantic. And so as a way of beginning, let's just get clear about what it means to say that somebody is pedantic on your view. So I want you to define pedantry for us, and also tell us who has been considered a pedant throughout history and at various points in time.

[00:20:12] Arnoud: Yeah, that's of course already quite a pedantic activity, trying to define something precisely, probably it's most familiar to people to start with , the current use. The dictionaries today would say that pedantry is about a fussy use of knowledge, marked by an obsession with details or rules.

A very formalist approach to knowledge. People often tend to think about specific kinds of, knowledge in particular, like grammar or spelling. Actually there's a much longer history to the term which also shows different meaning. So the term itself arises in 15th century Italy when pedant actually originally just meant teacher, but quickly it gained all sorts of negative connotations that had to do with negative aspects of teachers. So an overbearing style or arrogance , also useless knowledge became associated with the term patent, and it all indicates irritation. So the use of knowledge that provokes irritation. And if you look beyond this history of the term, you can see that this phenomenon is actually much older.

So already in classical antiquity, we can see that teachers provoked irritation, , with particular styles of teaching or intellectual habits. So my take, my definition of pedantry is about the phenomenon, not just about the history of the term itself. That's part of the history, but I define pedantry as being about an excessive use or excessive display of knowledge in particular. Learning at this more higher, learning type of knowledge. And that means that what is exactly excessive, what marks this idea of excess is in the eye of the beholder, and it can also differ per context and per time period. So it's historically specific. That also makes it interesting that you can see shifting views of what actually is excessive in the use or display of learning.

[00:22:23] Ellie: Yeah, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of those, like what are a couple of the characters? 'Cause I found your breakdown of different moments in history and like the stereotype of the pedant to be really fascinating.

[00:22:35] Arnoud: The intellectual can take many different guises, of course. So in antiquity with the soffits, I think that's an intriguing case because those were teachers, traveling teachers, who were very successful in the fifth century before Christ in Athens. And earned a lot of money by teaching, well, for instance, how to speak effectively but also created a lot of irritation with certain other intellectuals who thought that this was not the way to go about teaching proper knowledge.

So they were deemed pedantic for philosophical reasons you could say. So for teaching the wrong style of thinking, also for lacking a moral compass.

[00:23:16] Ellie: Yeah. 'cause they were just sort of trying to tell people like, here's how to win an argument. Right. Or something of that sort?

[00:23:22] Arnoud: Well, at least this is the perspective of course, that we have thanks to Plato.

[00:23:26] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:23:29] Arnoud: It's not the most friendly of perspectives and interestingly, to make things a bit more complicated, there were also comedians, writers of comedies at the time who all put these philosophies on one heap and criticized Socrates along with the other sophists for the same faults.

So there you can see that irritation was provoked by people who were intellectual, but that we would now classify as philosophers. If we would look in another cultural context, for instance, that of the Middle Ages, you can see that the irritation has to do with the setting that learning was guarded by.

The church may see a tension, a clash between Christianity and intellectual pursuits, and that the excesses have more to do with the fact that they are associated with improper handling of learning from a perspective of Christians.

[00:24:21] David: Yeah, and it seems like what the pendant has in a lot of these historical cases is a lack of sensitivity to etiquette and the norms of social interaction in a particular context, and thinking about the sophists, the philosophers would criticize the sophists for violating certain norms of ethics.

You know, like they will teach you to win arguments and to engage in this kind of intellectual sparring for the sake of winning and not really for the sake of enhancing your wisdom or ethically aligning you in some way. But I have to say that I really like your appeal to Aristophanes, the comedian who presents the philosophers as not that different from the sophists, because that's often been my view.

When I read Plato describing the life of Socrates, I get the sense that Socrates is really pedantic and more importantly, I mean, I think he's really annoying and unbearable in many cases, but I also get the sense that the idea that he differs from the sophists because he's doing what he's doing for the moral edification of others. I'm not sure that that's entirely clear.

So I kind of agree with Aristos a little bit. And so I want you to say a little bit more about this because , one thing that has bothered me for a long time about Socrates, and that is also my source of fascination with him. Is that we don't really know what he thinks about anything. He just goes around asking people to define terms, but he never really puts forward philosophies or theories of his own, and that seems like the ultimate pedantic activity.

[00:25:55] Arnoud: I think, so this elusive feature, I think is also why it is helpful to take irritation as a heuristic device. Because that shows you when the problem arises. And in the case of Socrates, we of course have this interesting evidence that he was convicted to death because of his habit of asking all sorts of annoying questions that were deemed subversive.

So that only goes to show the fantastic trick that Plato pulled off in turning Socrates into a intellectual martyr and a hero and turning the sophists into the bad guys.

[00:26:36] Ellie: And so for you to be pedantic is, as you mentioned earlier, kind of in the eye of the beholder, right? So David might think that Socrates is a pedant. I would say no, Socrates is not a pedant. I buy his claim that he is seeking after truth in a way that these sophists are not, and they're sort of logic chopping and encouraging a different kind of relationship to philosophy that I don't think is worthwhile.

But maybe I've just been Plato pilled because you talk about how there is a lot, you know of hate on the sophists that we get through Plato in addition to the ancient Greek comedians.

Something in what David said a moment ago. I think struck me because David, you mentioned that the penance violate etiquette, so they're annoying, they irritate us. It's like, come on, I'm at a dinner party. I wanna have a good conversation. I don't need you to correct my grammar right now, or I don't need you to ask for like a clarification on a specific use of a word, or the specific meaning of a word that I'm using that would be a very Socratic move.

And so, although the penance certainly violate etiquette, I think there's a question that we might ask about whether they also violate morality or ethics. And I think I see in some of your analyses in the book that kind of suggestion too. When we call someone pedantic, we're not necessarily just criticizing them on the basis of etiquette, but also at least sometimes on the basis of ethics or morality.

We're saying not just that you know too much and it's annoying, but also that you are abusing your knowledge. For example, you mentioned during the medieval period some drama around this, and specifically we see Christians accusing Pagan philosophers of being too bookish and worrying that scholarly pursuits undermine Christian piety.

And then of course in ancient Greece, as we were talking about a moment ago, the sophists we're accused by Plato and other philosophers of being great debaters, but lacking a moral compass. So how might we describe the moral flaw of the pedant? And I'm especially curious about whether you think we should hold onto this moral concern today, or whether we should just explain pedants as people who make others feel irritated because they make them feel insecure about their knowledge. What's the line between the etiquette and irritation and you know, the moral compass question.

[00:29:04] Arnoud: I'm not sure if I see a clear contrast between morality and etiquette. Sinning against rules of etiquette can also denote deeper vices, and that's I think very often the suggestion in anti-pedantic criticism. So what these intellectuals perceive were their ideas is often regarded by those who find fault with it or are irritated by it as behavior and as behavior that reflects certain vices. For instance, social vices such as pretension, arrogance, pride, those are very strong moral flaws in this pre-modern context. In a medieval context, the one that you mentioned, for instance, there's a significant religious dimension where pride also becomes very dangerous, dangerously aspiritual right. That's sort of thing you can see.

For instance, in the case of the philosopher Abelard, the irritation that he provokes also has something to do with that his enemies see him as really a dangerous thinker who overestimates his human capacity to understand. So there, I think what starts as etiquette or criticism against trespassing, against etiquette really reflects conceptions about moral flaws.

Another interesting example in this case is the 16th century philosopher Montaigne who offers an essay about pedantry or pedantism as he calls it, and in his view ,patterns reflect a lack of judgment. So they're not just annoying in their behavior, but it signals a lack of judgment and he calls them, in fact, he associates pedants with professional teachers, and those are by nature, the souls of the bassist alloy as he calls them, because they sell their knowledge.

[00:30:59] David: The audacity.

[00:31:01] Arnoud: Something us think about. Well, also because we often like to think of Montaigne as a sort of first modern thinker here you can see a deeply pre-modern aristocratic ethos in  Montaigne.

[00:31:15] Ellie: Interesting. Well, and lucky him to get to have the luxury of sitting in his office and writing his essays and not having to sort of, you know, tutor students as many of his contemporaries  would've had to do in order to make money.

[00:31:25] Arnoud: Exactly. And what kind of office said it was a castle tower

[00:31:30] Ellie: right.

[00:31:30] David: Yes,

[00:31:32] Arnoud: With all sorts of learning painted on the wall. So it's also very paradoxical in the case of Montaigne. That's a very fascinating.

[00:31:41] David: Yeah, I have to say one of the first graduate seminars that I took in my PhD program was on Montaigne's essays, and I remember reading his essays, which are meant to be him exposing himself in a very vulnerable way, but they're very braggadocious and pedantic in many cases. I mean, he is guilty of many vices, including pride and potentially pedantry,

[00:32:04] Ellie: Was that the Dalia Judovitz seminar, David?

[00:32:06] David: No, it was a different class,

[00:32:08] Ellie: Oh, Ann Hartle.

[00:32:09] David:  Ann Hartle.

[00:32:10] Ellie: Oh, I took the Dalia Judovitz one.

Anyway,

[00:32:12] Arnoud: Yeah. He sort of makes this gesture, if I may, he sort of makes this gesture in this essay. He says, am I not doing the same when I'm constantly quoting and then he sort of tries to make a turn. And that's one of the points that everybody finds very intriguing of course in this as it as he shows his self-awareness.

But I think in combination with this remark about souls of the basis Deloit to describe commercial or professional teachers, that shows his attitude, his aristocratic ethos, I would say quite clearly. And it's not a modern approach.

[00:32:46] David: And I think this brings into focus another aspect of your analysis of Petry in this book that comes out, especially in your description of the enlightenment period and the salon culture of the 18th century in France, in Paris specifically, which is that you had people calling each other pedants, like the accusation was flying, left and right.

[00:33:07] Ellie: Montaigne's like you're a pedant, but I'm not. Oh, maybe I am too. Yeah. And obviously, I mean, he's writing before the salon period that you're talking about David, but it sounds like you're kind of wanting to move in that direction.

[00:33:18] David: Well, just the phenomenon that the people who get called pedant often respond to that by saying, no, you are the pedant. Because the kind of knowledge that I display is either righteous or is socially appropriate. And in fact, your accusation of pedantry actually shows the shallowness of your knowledge and wisdom.

And so it seems to be this. Multi-use weapon that has many sharp edges and it can cut in many different directions. What do you make of this interesting reality that it can go from one side to the other with such facility

[00:33:57] Arnoud: There's many dimensions to it. I think it's intriguing to see how in the 17th century there's an explosion of charges of pedantry. You can see it everywhere. And there's even reflection on this explosion. For instance, in the Encyclopédie there's an entry on pedantry. Where the author describes that the charge is now so often used that nobody dares to offer any kind of serious learning anymore for the fear of being accused of being a pedant. Well, I think it shows the versatility of the charge. So it shows that this was a very effective way to discredit opponents, intellectual opponents. And it shows also that, very often, this anti-intellectual rhetoric was used by intellectuals as part of what you could call boundary work. So the need to validate your own style of thinking in opposition to those who don't think are exercising valid thinking.

[00:34:57] Ellie: Yeah, and so much of what you just said, I think resonates a lot with the present day and the way that people are often charged with using kind of overblown intellectual language when they're actually just speaking in a way that, you know, it might not be accessible to everyone. It might exhibit some level of higher education, but that's not automatically a bad thing.

Hopefully, we'll have a chance to come back to that point about anti-intellectualism and how it relates to the present day a bit later. Before we do that, I wanna hit on something that I think is really fascinating to me about your analysis. And once you talked about it, I was like, oh, of course.

Like this is exactly the kind of connotation that our society has with pedants, and that is the connotation of pedants being gendered male. You know that the charge of pedantry is heavily gendered because it's usually men who have been accused of being pedantic, and that's not just a new phenomenon.

This is something we see over various periods in history. And the most common version of this today, of course, is the charge of being a mansplainer, which you discussed towards the beginning of the book. And here pedantry expresses the masculine stereotype that men are overconfident, especially regarding their own knowledge.

But you also note that many figures of Petry have been accused of not being masculine enough, of being a feminine, and so we tend to associate pedantry with masculinity, but kind of in a double-edged way. We as it on the one hand with an excess of masculinity and with a deficit of it. So I'd love for you to tell our listeners how this works and what you think of how gender stereotypes shape our views of pedantry.

[00:36:40] Arnoud: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I found it very intriguing to see. So of course it's probably very understandable or easy to understand that the history of the pedant is overwhelmingly populated by men, partly for the simple reason that institutions for higher learning were for a large part in history only accessible to men.

But, there's also the intriguing part of the assessment of knowledge in terms of masculinity, and that has something to do with the fact that the whole way of validating behavior was done in a language that was inherently gendered. So the whole notion for excellence for good behavior, virtus is manliness, literally means manliness. And this also means that assessing how intellectuals perform in terms of knowledge how they behave as intellectuals is measured against this standard of how they perform as men. So you can see actually there's three categories. So there's excessive manliness, there's a lack of manliness, and there's also this intermediate stage of being dry, having no sex at all. So you can see the whole range is visible in the history of pedantry.

So in the 16th century, these pedants in Renaissance, Italy were often accused of being effeminate because they were working with children that also came with charges of sodomy even of pedophilia. The darker side of this anti-rhetoric. Whereas in the 17th century, in this context of the French salons, for instance, these pedants are represented as booers and boars, right? These bearded men with dirty togas who didn't know how to behave, and that's through the lens of the women who actually directed these salons and who determined the rules for polite behavior.

In the 19th century political context, for instance, politicians who were deemed to be a bit too academic or a bit to learn it were quickly associated with feminity again, and that's something that you can also see still happening in the 20th and 21st century. That learning is associated with femininity. And then the lack, the asexual side, because I find that fun, is something you can see particularly in a Victorian context.

So the Romantic age when you see pedants represented as dry as dust, dead from the waist down sort of thing.

[00:39:20] David: I mean, I think this idea that the intellectual or the bookish weirdo is dead from the waist down in the case of men, it takes a different form, I think in the accusation when it's geared towards women, where women who are seen as pedantic, especially in the enlightenment period, they're seen as frivolous and full of affectations.

[00:39:40] Arnoud: But also overly masculine, if I may. So women who were studying too hard, lost sight of their feminine duties, basically. You can see that also with Monier, who satirizes that mercilessly.

[00:39:55] David: Yeah. And what I want to return to is something that Ellie alluded to, which is the role that anti-intellectualism plays in all of this, because of course, the pedant, despite all of their vices or his vices, given the gender nature of the character is a learned character. It's an intellectual, it's somebody who has studied, right?

Nobody accuses the penant of not really having knowledge. We accuse the pedant of making a bad display of their knowledge. So their wisdom is not really in question as such. Maybe their wisdom in an ethical sense is, but not their knowledge. And so, one of the observations that you make very early on in the book that I latched onto is that the reason we should care about looking at this character throughout history is because it gives us a window into the dynamics and the machinations of anti intellectualism, right?

Because it's usually an anti-intellectualism motivation that leads to the charge, you are pedantic and you are making an unsightly display of your knowledge that violates social norms. And so my question here is, can you extract the lessons that we learn from looking at the history of pedantry about how anti-intellectualism works and maybe what it's ideological function is in our society?

[00:41:20] Arnoud: Yes. Well, as a historian, I'm always a bit hesitant to teach lessons. I don't believe that history teaches straightforward lessons, but I do think actually that diving into history can make you a wiser person, but not in the form of straightforward lessons. But it helps you understand, I think in this case, that there is a deep and long history to irritation about knowledge. I think that's where it starts. And so for me, the history of the pedant is a way to write the history of anti-intellectualism because it is a function of anti-intellectualism in this case, through the lens of this person, this type of the intellectual that provokes irritation.

If you then look across history, you can see patterns and those patterns show, for instance, roots, anti-intellectual roots that can be a social route, allergies against pretension and people who seem to not only know better, but also to feel better human beings through their knowledge.

So social roots, but also religious roots. So the idea that human knowledge can be dangerous for religious beliefs and there's economic roots to anti-intellectualism. So the perception that certain types of learning have no use, are useless and should not be pursued. So that I think is one dimension.

And then another important dimension is about the language, the images, the stereotypes, the, the tropes and the arguments. And there I think it's interesting to see that even now when we think that the situation is quite unique with completely different media system, that we still think and look and argue with categories and with language and with stereotypes that have been developed ages ago. And that I think is very interesting to look at how these images came about and what context they came about and how they have managed to survive.

[00:43:21] Ellie: I'm also thinking about how this might relate to the present day. And this might initially seem at odds with what you just said, which is that there are similar things today that have gone on throughout history and I really found that fascinating in your book to see this trajectory and some similarities to the present day.

And at the same time, I find myself thinking about new figures of the pedant, especially because, as you mentioned, the mansplainer is kind of a key figure of the pedant today. And what I find is that there are. Pretty much no fellow academics I would accuse of being pedantic. I actually think when academics hang out with one another, we don't really experience each other as pedantic at all.

The people I experience as pedantic are the guys I meet at a dinner party who listen to a podcast and wanna tell me about what they learned on that podcast. And one construal of this would be that, oh, well, it's just that that person is an outsider to my field. And so, you know, this is, this goes back to your point about the charge of pedantry just being kind of in the eye of the beholder.

It could be that another guy who just listened to a podcast and wants to talk about that doesn't experience this podcast discusser as pedantic, but I do. At the same time though, I do think that it's maybe not just as subjective as that because I think one thing that has really proliferated in recent years is this dilettantism in the US especially, where people think they have something to say about a topic.

If they just like read an article, a book, or more commonly nowadays, listen to a podcast about it. And so I often find myself having a hard time in those conversations, in part because I'm worried that if I come back with the full force of my intellectualism, I'm gonna seem really annoying. So I'm like, I don't wanna be the annoying person in this situation, so I'm just gonna kind of let you talk at me about this and like leave it at that.

[00:45:21] David: You would accuse people of being pedantic, but without coming across as pedantic

[00:45:26] Ellie: Pretty much. I know, yes. And also because I actually don't find those conversations very fun to have because I don't think the objective is like really coming to a common ground and to learn. I think the guys just like wanna talk at me. So I'm curious like if you have any thoughts about that, and the guy who listens to a podcast once as being a new pedantry.

[00:45:46] Arnoud: Well, I think it's fascinating to see that there's, traditionally the Association of pedantry is with elitism. So because higher learning was reserved to the social elites and we're now in a different situation, I think, but you could still use. I was thinking could still use this heuristic device of irritation.

When does irritation come up in the context of the use of knowledge and what sort of knowledge are we talking about? And that could help them perhaps to understand, to try to make sense at least of what is happening where this use of knowledge or this display of learning whatever kind of expertise it is, becomes irritating.

When does this use of knowledge becomes socially awkward. That is the sort of measure, I think in my case for studying pedantry. So there I go again, back to this broader phenomenon of patent tree, rather than the modern dictionary definition, which is perhaps a bit leads us in another direction.

I do think I have, if I may, two general lessons that I think the study of history can bring to us in this particular context two sort of mirrors to hold. On the one hand that's for those who are inclined to pedantry, to be more aware of the irritations that this type of behavior can provoke to become socially aware of what sort of power apparently learning exerts. And on the other hand, for those who who love to hate the pedants, I think it's really useful to try to explore a bit more where this irritation exactly comes from. So why is it that we accept correction in quite direct ways in the gym, for instance, and we don't accept it when it comes to knowledge?

Then it suddenly becomes unacceptable. And this intolerance to be corrected or learning perhaps in the context of knowledge is intriguing. And I think by taking a historical perspective, also by looking at ironic examples, anecdotes, funny stories that can help perhaps also to depolarize the situation a bit that can hold a mirror that I think might be useful.

[00:48:05] David: I mean, this is making me reflect about why I sometimes get annoyed when I'm corrected, not just in knowledge, also at the gym. When people tell me I have bad form, I'm like, you're being athletically pedantic. Leave me alone. So maybe there is a version of that that's emerging.

But I wanna ask you a question about the humanities in this discussion. Because when I think about the pedant, I think of somebody who was trained specifically in the humanities. I don't think of a chemist, 'cause there aren't a lot of opportunities for like a chemist or a physicist to make a public display of their knowledge at a dinner table.

It can happen, but in general it's the historians, it's the philosophers, it's the philologists, it's the grammar Nazis. And so I do think it's a specific kind of education that tends to trigger this irritation and lead to accusations of pedantry.

And so I want to ask you about the value of a humanistic education because often in our post-enlightenment world, we use phrases like, knowledge is power or knowledge makes you a better person, and that's often the justification, the big picture that we give for studying history, philosophy, poetry, and literature, which is that learning these disciplines makes you a better human. It makes you more empathetic, it makes you more worldly, more cosmopolitan, just more just in general. And I wonder whether this is true at all. Once we read your book, does that knowledge really make us more ethical beings?

And I'm here reminded of Terry Eagleton's observation in his very famous essay, the Rise of English, where he says that when American Forces went into concentration camps in Germany at the end of World War II, they found that the Nazis who were sending Jewish prisoners to their deaths, they were happily reading humanistic texts, they were reading Gerta in their free time, even as they were committing these atrocities. And so is the pendant further proof that learning does not make us moral beings.

[00:50:14] Arnoud: Well, as a historian, I think I'm hesitant to think that our type of scholarship improves characters, but there is a long tradition of exactly pointing out a difference between learning and wisdom. Also within the humanities. And so there's different types of knowledge, and I think many intellectuals in the past have also stressed the fact that becoming erudite learning doesn't necessarily make people wise and have stressed the need for healthy dose of self-doubt and against the risk of intellectual over confidence.

So I think those elements remain important, the inclination of some intellectuals to see resistance as a sign that they're right is dangerous. It's a, there's a long tradition of intellectuals, a bit in the vein of Socrates gadfly motive that they think, well, if I cause irritation, if I sting the horse of the state, in Socrates words, that's actually a good thing because I keep society alert. That is in itself not untrue. There is this critical function I think that can be very helpful, but it can also serve as a form of self-congratulation that is not really helpful. So it has been used also by examples in the past of people where it's less convincing. Yeah. So Abelard for instance, again, complaining that logic has made him hated by the world. That's not the whole story, I would say.

[00:51:51] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:51:52] Arnoud: And there's more examples also more recently of people who seem to think that provoking resistance is in itself a sign of moral superiority. And I think then in that case, the history of the pedant can show that there's more to that and that it's not only about ideas, it's also about behavior.

[00:52:11] Ellie: Yeah, and ultimately wisdom. I think that's a great note to close with here. We've really enjoyed your book. Again, it was just packed with so many fascinating stories and trajectories. I learned so much, and thank you so much for being with us today, Arnoud. This was wonderful to speak with you.

[00:52:30] Arnoud: Thank you very much. Thank you.

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[00:52:54] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.