BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I’m Brittany Luse, and you’re listening to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. A show about what’s going on in culture and why it doesn’t happen by accident.
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LUSE: Our show today starts with a story of viral outrage. In November, an academic named Ally Louks posted a photo of herself on X, holding her thesis. After years of work, she was celebrating finishing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University.
ALLY LOUKS: My thesis is titled, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics Of Smell In Modern And Contemporary Prose.” So I look at why certain authors of the past century use smell to indicate social hostilities, and I connect these literary examples with the real-world understanding of smell and how we think about smell in society.
LUSE: Ally thought she’d get a couple congrats comments and go on with her life. That’s not what happened.
LOUKS: It didn’t even occur to me, actually, that it could blow up in a negative way. After it was retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts who had kind of mocked the idea of my thesis, and actually the fact that I was doing a Ph.D. in English literature.
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LUSE: To make it clear, just the title alone of her thesis, which you could see in the picture she posted, was enough to make it go super viral. It now has over 126 million views. I’m sorry to say I was on X the day that this went viral and let me tell you, that comment section was rough. Here’s a taste of it.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #1: Ten years of childbearing youth that she will never regain.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #2: A Liberal Arts education is worth nothing.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #3: Academia is a disaster.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #4: We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense. Make education great again.
LUSE: It seemed like a perfect storm of cultural threads converging. Alt-right misogyny, the anti-woke crowd, calls for disinvestment in the humanities. And to me, it all pointed toward a larger thread, anti-intellectualism. That is hostility and mistrust towards academics, experts and education. And I’m not the only one seeing this. Researcher Matt Mata found that one in three Americans holds anti-intellectual views, but who benefits? I sat down with Dr. Ally Louks…
LOUKS: Just Ally is fine.
LUSE: … And Dr. Jason Stanley, professor of Philosophy at Yale…
JASON STANLEY: Thank you so much.
LUSE: …To dig deeper into anti-intellectualism and what it means for the future of our democracy.
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LUSE: To jump right in, Ally, I want to start with you. Despite a lot of the negative attention that came your way, you’ve really taken this and kind of run with it. I see you connect something new happening in culture back to your dissertation all the time. You know, I think about how Cardi B recently posted about how she smelled, kind of touting her lack of smell, in some ways, as an asset.
And you tied it back to your research. You were like, this is kind of what I’m talking about in my research. It’s really cool to see how – to see you show people how to think a bit more critically about smell, despite everything else that happened.
LOUKS: Yeah, well, that’s the thing. I mean, smell is a sense that almost all of us possess. But it largely goes unacknowledged and uncritiqued. And olfactory language is really pervasive, too. It’s just that we’re not used to thinking about it critically. So it’s not difficult for me, actually (laughter), to recognize these instances where my work is relevant in the world. It’s something that I’ve been doing for years.
It’s just that I haven’t been posting about it on social media. I’ve been putting it in my thesis.
LUSE: (Laughter) So, Jason, I heard you’re not online like that anymore.
STANLEY: Yeah.
LUSE: But you did read about what happened with Ally’s thesis and the reaction to it. What was your initial reaction?
STANLEY: Well, it’s interesting that the far right targets exactly the scholars who are studying elements of the far right. So they’re trying to attack the aspects of scholarship that allow us to understand their politics and their propaganda. A lot of the politics of the far right is the politics of disgust. And smell is, of course, a central feature of disgust. So I’m seeing that aspect recur.
And then, of course, the very idea that there’s scholarship that may problematize the ordinary status quo, and that scholarship is done by women, is taken as an existential threat.
LUSE: It’s interesting. We actually had a disgust scholar on this show, Josh Rottman, and he talked with us about disgust. We were actually talking about it in terms of dating and getting the ick, like, that immediate feeling of disgust that makes you just not want to date someone anymore or not find them attractive. And you know, to your point, one of the things that we – well, that I discovered in talking with him, is that there are so many other little assumptions that kind of undergird that ick, there are so many other societal expectations and norms that form disgust.
LOUKS: I liked your comparison to the notion of a romantic ick, because at least in a social context, smells are not going to harm us. Smells are harmless, even if they’re uncomfortable.
LUSE: Whoa, waking up. I’m sorry.
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LUSE: That is true.
LOUKS: There’s a very real and distinct difference between harm and discomfort, and when we’re talking about smell and using it to create prejudices, i.e. to make prejudicial statements, what we’re doing is we’re mobilizing disgust. And disgust is a particular emotion that induces fear, even in instances when fear is not necessary. And smell is one of those instances.
LUSE: Going back to the post, I want to get deeper into some of the threads that we saw in this viral attack. Some of these posts were engaging in anti-intellectualism. Jason, can you tell us how you see it fitting in here?
STANLEY: Well, I believe Trump once said, I love the poorly educated.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.
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TRUMP: We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.
STANLEY: Education gives us the foundation to understand changing aspects of culture. What happens in the university is critical inquiry into the status quo. And so if you can attack that and represent it as somehow deviant or decadent, then you can go back to representing critique of the status quo as something terrifying.
LUSE: Quality of an access to formal education in America is often determined by how much money you have, from public pre-K to Ivy League programs. Obviously, formal schooling isn’t the only way to learn valuable information, but as a result, being knowledgeable is often associated with being a member of the elite. I wonder, what does the perceived connection between elite status and intellectualism have to do with this current wave of anti-intellectualism?
STANLEY: Obviously, there’s an element of truth of legitimacy to the critique of the elite. If you can connect these institutions to a kind of repugnant elitism, which they are connected to, let’s be frank, then you can marshal a populist movement against learning. What it enables is a politics that says, OK, the rich, snobby, elite. Those are the ones who are questioning your traditions.
Going into academia is an extremely difficult choice because it’s almost impossible to get a tenure track job. This idea of academics as somehow a economically privileged class is fictional. And then notice the people who are advancing this sort of, quote-unquote, “populist view,” are all themselves graduates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton. Ron DeSantis, Yale, and then Harvard, Tom Cotton, Harvard, Harvard.
But they’re promoting this, attack the university’s line, because it’s politically efficacious.
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LUSE: Coming up, there’s been so much disinvestment in the humanities. Do they still matter?
STANLEY: The humanities allows you to talk about anything. And that’s a threat.
LUSE: Stay with us.
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LUSE: I want to talk about the humanities of it all. Ally, I know that you’re in the UK, but we’re all in each other’s business together on X and on social media. But in the U.S., many universities have cut humanities majors and faculty, and only about 12% of students receive humanities degrees. I feel like there’s been so much focus on STEM that the humanities have become almost viewed as culturally worthless, to a larger degree. What is the value of the humanities?
LOUKS: I think the humanities study our social world, which is incredibly complex – at least as complex as the sciences – and requires research.
STANLEY: So building on Ally’s point, democracy is a system where we each play a role in the formation of the laws that govern us. You need to know history. You need to know the different social systems. You need to know the different perspectives of the citizens in your country. This issue that you’re asking about is the core of, you know, the most important debate in U.S. intellectual history – the debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois.
LUSE: Oh, that’s a throwback. They definitely were debating a lot of the same exact things that we’re talking about right now.
STANLEY: Yeah, and Booker T. Washington said Black Americans should forget about liberal education because freedom is just making money (laughter). It’s just economic freedom. And Du Bois said, no, everyone needs a liberal education. Everybody needs a free liberal education because that’s what democratic citizenship requires. The attack on the humanities is part of the worldwide authoritarian move. Like, you cannot speak freely in authoritarian countries. I can’t go to China and give a rousing talk about the evils of a one-party state. That’s not allowed. The humanities allows you to talk about anything, and that’s a threat – the idea that you can talk about anything. Particularly, you can challenge the dominant ideologies. You can challenge the nation’s greatness.
LUSE: To that point, I think there’s also a cultural premium on things like going to space or developing AI or something like that. And in some of the backlash, I would say that I saw a lack of interest in learning about human beings – like, learning about ourselves. Some people thought there was no application for your thesis, Ally, but you’ve been proving them wrong every day. And I think that’s one of the things that has been most stunning to me in thinking about all of this, is that, like, a lack of interest – not to be literal about it, but, like, a lack of interest in the humanities does kind of demonstrate a lack of interest literally in, like, what it means to be human, the people around you, and also in yourself.
LOUKS: My thesis, to some extent, centers those who are most marginalized, so I have chapters on homeless people, on Black women. White men on the right who would even self-identify as white supremacists are not interested in people who they deem to lack value in society, so it’s hardly a surprise to me that those people would not see any value in my thesis.
LUSE: I got one last question for you, Ally. Since this whole thing has happened, you have become the smell lady on X, aka Twitter, with people tagging you about the conscious and unconscious ways we interact with smell all the time. Is there anything that’s stuck with you from all this – from this entire experience?
LOUKS: The thing that has really stuck with me is seeing people mobilizing my ideas – not tagging me, not even telling me about it, just seeing it pop up on my For You page, or whatever it’s called. It’s so exciting for me to see my work being applied to contexts that I don’t even treat in the thesis. People are taking their own experiences, their own expertise and their own cultures and applying it to things going on that are relevant to them. And that is absolutely the best thing that could have possibly happened out of this – for me, anyway, as someone who always wanted to share my work with a public audience.
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LUSE: Thank you both so much. This was great.
LOUKS: Thank you.
STANLEY: Thanks for being in conversation with us.
LUSE: That was Dr. Ally Louks, professor at Cambridge, and Dr. Jason Stanley, professor at Yale.
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LUSE: And one more thing before I go. We’re working on a series about loneliness, and we want to hear from you. What does loneliness look like for you? How did you come to realize it was a problem, and have you taken any steps to foster more connection in your life? If you’re 18 or older, send us a voice memo to ibam@npr.org to tell us more. We’re especially interested in stories from men and moms, but we’d love to hear from everyone and anyone else, too. That’s ibam@npr.org.
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LUSE: This episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by…
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
LUSE: This episode was edited by…
JASMINE ROMERO, BYLINE: Jasmine Romero.
LUSE: Engineering support came from…
JIMMY KEELEY, BYLINE: Jimmy Keeley.
LUSE: Our executive producer is…
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is…
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That’s all for this episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I’m Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
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