"The Necessity of Making Distinctions Between the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

"Sometimes it feels as if the world is divided into two classes: one very large class spurns difficulty, while the other very much smaller delights in it. There are readers who, when encountering an unfamiliar word, instead of reaching for a dictionary, choose to regard it as a sign of the author's contempt or pretension, a deliberate refusal to speak in a language ordinary people can understand. Others, encountering the same word, happily seize on it as a chance to learn something new, to broaden their horizons. They eagerly seek a literature that upends assumptions, challenges prejudices, turns them inside out and forces them to see the world through new eyes.
"The second group is an endangered species."


Steve Wasserman in The American Conservative asks, "[w]hen did difficulty' become suspect in American culture, widely derided as anti-democratic and contemptuously dismissed as evidence of so-called elitism?"