Disgust with anti-intellectualism
I was appalled at the contents of two emails I recently received. The first was from someone within the UEW community, who had discovered a coven that would not work with her because she was on antidepressants. The second was from a bright young Wiccan in the pharmaceutical industry who stepped up to educate our local list and felt the need to apologize for her vocation.
Both of these things represent what I consider to be one of the most shameful things about Wicca and paganism. For a young pagan to repeatedly apologize and feel that she was "sure that you all hate me now" after writing a brilliant, well-reasoned rebuttal to a panicked, urban-legendish e-petition represents an absolute failure of our community. Further, to insist that the members of your coven eschew antidepressant medication in order to focus on "herbs and magic" to cure their ills is a failure of an equal magnitude. This failure is anti-intellectualism.
Anti-intellectualism is a disease of society. It works by taking away the critical faculties of reason, making one susceptible to demagoguery, charismatic charlatans and manipulative groupthink. It is, perhaps, the most dangerous disease, bar none, that infects the world today, because its attacks our own ability to diagnose and cure every other ill, physical, psychological, or cultural, that exists or will exist. In that sense, it is more dangerous than addiction, more dangerous than racism, more dangerous than sexism, and even more dangerous than terrorism.
I committed myself to Wicca because in it I found a religion that was equally committed to the spiritual and the intellectual, a religion that was not in danger of being co-opted by fundamentalists because its roots were mostly in the soil of academia and scholarship[1]. While it would be overly idealistic of me to believe that there are few anti-intellectuals in the Wiccan community, to have such crass anti-intellectualism on par with any screed coming from a fundamentalist Christian church[2] or a jihadist Muslim fatwa[3]. We can do better than this.