The evolving debate over the difference between us and the animals proceeds apace. Animals are now regarded as having true communication ability including language, generationally transmitted culture, even a wide range of what we had previously imagined to be solely human emotions.
My personal favorite has always been . . .
The star academic, part of the galaxy of high speed intellectuals at a prominent university, had gotten hold of what was being presented as a “big idea.” He professed, with the peculiarly misplaced condescension that this sort often affect, only to the most profound humility, but he knew he had this right, and that those who disagreed with him had it wrong. But, then, there was the problem of why they disagreed with him. . .
Some years ago I worked with a fellow who came from a reasonably privileged background, had enjoyed a fashionably elite education, and who was clearly on – and viewed himself fully entitled to be on – the fast track to dizzying heights in his career. For all that, he wasn’t a particularly unpleasant guy – just unabashedly self-aggrandizing. And he plainly thought that everyone was that way – or, at least, everyone who mattered.
Sometimes, we all make this error . . .
We saw, Friday, how self-styled intellectuals maintain a prickly sensitivity to who may, or may not, be esteemed as worthy of their “rank” in society. This would be harmless enough – but for their not-so-hidden ambitions and agenda. Intellectuals feel inherently entitled to rule – and to a privilege that extends to them freedom from the constraints they would (for the latter’s good, of course) impose on others. Consider our traveling intellectual’s chilling revelation of these during a discussion . . .
The overseas visitor travels about the United States, recording his impressions, examining them to divine the very meaning of the country, to psychoanalyze its current condition. But like many psychoanalysts, he reserves to himself – not to his subjects – the right to determine what constitutes psychological health. For you see, as he does not hesitate to make abundantly and repeatedly clear, he is an intellectual . . .
There is a rising debate about the role of intellectuals in modern society. Some decry the attack against intellectualism as arising in populism. It’s an odd idea, which presumes that intellectuals are solely possessed of rational enlightenment, and that the rest of us are merely the ignorant, drooling mob vulnerable to manipulation by any passing unenlightened, anti-intellectual demagogue. But the truth is that populism isn’t a state of intellectual development . . .
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