November 13, 2002

Marx was an intellectual. Adam Smith was a greedy capitalist pig. Lenin and Stalin were moral because they embraced Marxism. Reagan was evil because he opposed depriving people of freedom in order to make them all equal.

It has always seemed to me that a lot of things are more simple than the intelligentsia would have us think. Education is a good example.

Nice essay and an interesting list: Churchill, Truman, Ike, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Reagan. What do they all have in common?

No no, it's not that they were leaders of the free world standing fast against the forces of darkness during the Cold War.

It's that none of them ever won the Nobel Peace Prize like this guy
http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/2002a.html
or this guy
http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/1990a.html
or this guy
http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/1994a.html
or this bunch
http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/1985a.html

That says a lot more about intellecutals as the inability to figure out how a microphone stand works.

"An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike." --Spiro T. Agnew

(--Andy, a philosophy student who rides his bike to school)

Wow. I just don't know where to begin here. But I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get rude.

O.K, nice epiphany you had about all them useless intellectuals, and I'd just like to congratulate you on your quick action in helping the poor shy, helpless intellectual lady out. Oh no wait, you didn't do anything either. Does this mean that you are an intellectual? If so, nice intellectual self-hatred thing you got going there.

I'm someone that would probably be characterized as an intellectual by some people. Then again I might also be characterized as a crazy bastard by others, and a totally immoral one by yet a third group, so let us not become too persnickety in our definitions, instead, in hopes of getting somewhere in this post I will accept the designation, I am an intellectual.

Now despite my status as an intellectual I have in my time been employed in practical occupations, despite not being especially suited for them; I am a great ditch-digger but a lousy construction worker all around. I remember one job that I was not suited for, which involved moving big prefabricated concrete walls around and setting them up on temporary platforms. I had to face the contempt of one of my co-workers because frankly I just sucked at the job. This contempt however was involved with obvious feelings of intellectual inferiority on his part, seeing as how whenever he wanted to take a jibe at me he did so in a quasi-professorial tone for which his limited vocabulary was unsuited. I never made fun of him for being an illiterate boob, who thought that Twisted Sister was at the forefront of musical development in our culture, nor for any other failings of both his intellect and reasoning capacity which suffice to say were numerous.

This "reinforced what I had long suspected" that, while it is the intellectuals who build great theoretical structures explaining why there are multitudinous forms of intelligence out there and write paens to equalitarianism those without the mental skills necessary to build such theoretical structures or write such paens will give the intellectuals any credit for their capabilities. NO, intellectuals are just useless.

There have certainly been examples throughout history of people whom if described in the abstract might elicit a definition of "intellectual" yet that have surely been the most likely to roll, if not to say "let's roll", my personal role model(for intellectuality) Sophokles will do as an example.

Sadly Western Culture does not currently seem to have any public intellectuals of that stature. I would suppose that the saying "Every age gets the art it deserves" also indicates that every age gets the public intellectuals it deserves. This post is already overlong, I will not explicate here on what our public intellectuals indicate about our age, although I have done so at length elsewhere.

Would I say "let's roll"? No, at least not without cracking up, the phrase is ludicrous. A simple "OK, you ready? Let's go" would do it for me. Despite my incompetence at certain forms of construction work I am reasonably capable with my fists, having in my twenties led the life of a usual dissipated Romantic, survived as a punk rocker on the streets, worked in various criminal occupations, and of course done my time in various American Resorts reserved for the lower class rulebreakers, i.e Prisons. I am 6'4, 195 lbs, train capoeira three times a week, weightlift twice a week(press 220 lbs 3 sets of 5, although I prefer a toning workout rather than a bulk-building one), and shit from a great height on any suggestion that my capacity for abstract thought somehow incapacitates me physically.

By the way, why would an intellectual not know how to park a bike? How do intellectuals get around, by car? Do they know how to park a car? I don't, I hate cars, never learned to drive one, I have other people chauffeur me around. On the one hand, your being a philosophy student and the quote being credited to Spiro Agnew would cause me to take the post as a jest, on the other hand I haven't much respect for the academic 'licensing' of philosophers.

just to clarify in case anyone gets confused. The last paragraph obviously refers to andy's post, not to Yale Kramer's original post.

Could I use this venue to proffer a question that has always bothered me - what are the qualifications of an intellectual? Do you need a license? Are they board certified and regulated like architects, engineers, lawyers, doctors, nurses even electrical contractors? I mean isn't this term over-used, over-abused and under-defined? What you had in that room were ordinary, not extra-ordinary, humans with the fraility of lacking good mechanical aptitude coupled with an inability to understand the dynamics of error or confusion. It paints an interesting and fleeting visual of befuddleness and inaction amongst a varietal of New Yorkers but is probably nothing more than that.

Jack, in your ceaseless search to determine what exactly being an intellectual 'means' I hereby determine that you are one. Neat, huh?

Mr. Kramer is of course also one, because he ponders about the definition and deficiencies of intellectuals as all intellectuals must. He ponders furthermore on the matter in print for public perusal, therefore he is a public intellectual, and he didn't fix the microphone either, therefore he is an example of why public intellectuals are just bad, bad, bad.

Bryan,

I thought you were gonna get rude! You couldn't even do that right! ;-)

As an intellectual I thought it best to keep the rudeness in the upper reaches of abstraction in such a way that my missive could be interpreted as respectable and civilized to the utmost. Although I did write "shit" in the first post.
Also I planted a couple of nasty anagrams in there, if anyone wants to feel really really insulted they should attempt to parse the assembled posts from me on this page to see if they can construct a suitably rude response. If they cannot construct a suitably rude response from my posts they must forthwith return their intellectual secret decoder ring to the Partisan Review.

note: in reconstructing the incredibly rude and vulgar anagrams I have planted, anagrams which reach to a level of crudeness and invective that I can only characterize as Gargantuan in nature, it is allowed to toss out any letters(filter the noise) that do not fit your final result.

I am a former academic turned businessperson. A few years ago, in the middle of winter -- before I had made my career transition -- I was sitting on a suburban train freezing and wondering when someone was going to pass by and close the door to the train so the cold air would stop coming in. Within a minute, a guy in a suit got up off of his seat and went to the door and closed it. I had a sort of epiphany -- half, "why couldn't I have done that" and half, "what the hell is wrong with me?" Today, I would get up and close the door myself.

Obviously, Yale's mini-essay is a generalization and needs to be taken as such, but there is more than a grain of truth in it.

Trust me bryan.... you're no intellectual. You're more likely one of the show-boaters mentioned in the story.... maybe.... but no intellectual.

While so-called intellectuals sometimes exhibit a surprising lack of common sense or knowledge of the more mundane things of society, I don't think Kramer is suggesting that these intellectuals didn't know how to put a microphone back into a stand. Rather, he is talking about the assumption that someone, somehow - somebody ELSE - would step in to fix the problem. After all, it's not an intellectual problem, and that's what those other people are for, aren't they?

Perhaps the conclusion is wrong, though. Intellectuals are not so much USELESS as they are HELPLESS. They may know a lot about a little, but when their cars break down, or their appliances go on the fritz, or their plumbing backs up, their lives are in the hands of the people who can fix those problems. Personally, I think this helplessness manifests itself in a contempt for those very people, in order to minimize the helplessness in their own minds.

It sort of reminds me of the most recent TV ad for Apple Computers that I saw. An obvious self-styled intellectual man was complaining about having to open up his PC case to install new peripheral cards. "I felt like I had to do maintenance in my own house," he complained.

Perish the thought!

"I'm someone that would probably be characterized as an intellectual by some people. Then again I might also be characterized as a crazy bastard by others, and a totally immoral one by yet a third group, so let us not become too persnickety in our definitions, instead, in hopes of getting somewhere in this post I will accept the designation, I am an intellectual."

Bryan, based on that paragraph I would primarily characterize you as a lousy writer who badly needs a refresher course in the proper use of punctuation.

"Sophokles"? Titter...snort... as Jane Galt would say.

You're all guilty of having a quasi-political discussion which has already gone on for 15 posts without quoting Heinlein. Well, I'll fix that ...

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Robert A. Heinlein

(I can pitch manure reasonably well but am not so sure about the rest of the list.)

Jay Manifold wrote:

"I can pitch manure reasonably well..."

Sounds like you have what it takes to be an intellectual, then.

Seems like quite a few posts are trying to clarify the meaning of intellectual. Based on those posts I would take the word to be a synonym for a*****e.

Was a time when Americans were revered for their pioneer spirit. Any who have never encountered the real thing won't understand. A pioneer was a person who had to rely on himself (or close neighbors) for all things. This is no small accomplishment and means that one must understand and do a HUGE range of things. So many that most modern people would not be able to list a significant fraction of those things.

A review of the life of a Founding Father such as Jefferson will reveal that one can be an intellectual AND practice practical skills such as horticulture, architecture, etc.

The Heinlein quote mentioned (one of my favorite) points this out in a definition of a modern renaissance man. To limit oneself to a narrow world of ideas to me shows no intellectual prowess, but a profound misperception of the true opportunities for a full life. To think and never do is the height of stupidity.

Robin,

That's the first original AND intellectual thing that anyone has said on here so far.

"Sophokles"? Titter...snort... as Jane Galt would say.

to which I reply:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_sophocles_philoctetes1.htm
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~sgcole/greek102.html

Sophocles is an anglicized version of Sophokles.

Harry, I'm sure there were quite a few errors in my post - it was damn long.
That particular paragraph was intended to be humorous, since stepping up and claiming "I'm an intellectual" seems rather an absurd thing to do.

I believe Abraham's interpretation has some merit.

"Sophocles is an anglicized version of Sophokles."

I know my Greeks; I've seen that Steve Reeves movie, Herakles.

"That particular paragraph was intended to be humorous"

Now that statement IS funny!!

This whole article was very painful to read. What makes this group of people different than any "not in my job description" slobs? To relegate this lack of action only to intellectuals is pretty lame. Equating one person who might want to jump onstage and help a lecturer with Mr. Beamer is really lame.

Whatever.

Bryan: Don't call me stupid.
Wanda: Right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've met sheep that could out-wit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQ's. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, Ape?
Bryan: .....Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Bryan. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a few things. Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not Every Man For Himself. And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are mistakes Bryan. I looked 'em up.

Intellectual: "A person whom is an expert in one field, but only speaks out in another"

---Tom Wolfe, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists"

(therein you will find your answer)

The US currently has two intellectual elites. There are the people who actually keep things running: businessmen, engineers, computer specialists, mechanics, etc. All jobs that require a training and a fair amount of thinking, grounded in the real world. Then there are the self-selected "intellectuals", who get paid, or think they should get paid, simply for sitting around talking. These groups weren't always distinct - the leaders of the American Revolution were simultaneously intellectuals and practical farmers or men of business. Or among the ancient Greeks, Socrates the philosopher was also a skilled stone-mason. The Romans expected a great man to be both a successful business man and a brilliant debater in the Senate when in Rome, and both a good provincial governor and an effective general when appointed as a consul.

There have also been many, perhaps the majority, of civilized societies where the intellectuals were quite distinct from the practical men. Medieval Europe could afford only a few intellectuals, churchmen sheltered at the few small surviving universities. Medieval nobles had full-time jobs practicing for war and supervising their manors, leaving little chance for education beyond bare literacy, and even most churchmen were undereducated and isolated in small villages. A few centuries later (taking France as an example), the universities had grown and secularized, while the nobles' responsibilities of war and administration had largely been turned over to professionals, leaving a wealthy class with nothing particular to do but admire and discuss the arts and literature. Of course, most of them were utter ninnies with no taste or common sense. We seem to be well down the path of growing a similar parasitic class...

Well, the wealth of such odious characters like the Borgias and some popes paid for the likes of DaVinci, Rafael, Machiavelli, etc. The Ken Lays, Grubmans, Martha Stewarts, etc. would never think of subsidising a writer or artist. Madonna collects Frida Kahlo, but that's about the only exception of somebody with money today using it like the above-mentioned gentlemen.

See "Sons of Martha" by Kipling.

To Whatever:

I agree. It was very painful to read. I took it as an example of something I see more and more of on the net, using intellectual as a form of insult.

Brian:
That herakles comment was good I'll admit, much better than "titter...snort," I suppose it means that you thought the use of Sophokles instead of Sophocles an affectation, the fact is I've never been fond of adapting the names of people or places for a language not their original, it strikes me as rude. In Danmark, Danes always want to misspell my name Bryan as your name Brian; in the English-speaking world everyone spells Danmark as Denmark, and København as Copenhagen. I am of the opinion that the original spelling should be maintained wherever possible.

Harry: we're posting on the internet here, not preparing for eventual publication. It has long been held that different grammatical rules hold for texts meant for publication and, let us say, letters. For example, in a letter one is allowed to use sentence fragments. I suppose that in a post on a blog grammatical rules are more relaxed, although no rules have ever been formulated for such a medium. At any rate I have never been especially good at writing off-the-cuff on the computer, as I find it difficult to read off the screen as I write, I prefer to do my writing longhand, correcting it, typing it into the computer, and correcting it one final time before sending it off; this process is not especially useful when making posts on a blog. This sort of grammatical fastidiousness is best applied to those regrettable many that post such howlers as “Hah I read what you wrote. Your stupid.,” because the poetic justice of applying it is too good a thing to forego.

All: I apologize for my earlier post, which was perhaps somewhat over the board, the grandiose statements were made as a way of establishing, in a humorous manner my grounds for action, I should have tried to be clearer about why I wrote as I did but I didn’t want to post too long a post on a blog that wasn’t even mine. Yet here we are and I will try to clarify what originally prompted me. I have been called an intellectual before, and the use of the term was meant as an insult. I have been useful or not useful in various situations, such is life.

When Mr. Kramer writes, “It was at that moment that I understood the place of intellectuals in the world. Here was a roomful—perhaps two hundred of the country’s premier intellectuals—totally paralyzed in the face of a crisis,” I am still confused as to what he did to save the crisis, why was he not paralyzed?
If he were not paralyzed then why did he not save the situation but instead wait for the husky individual, either the ghost of Steinbeck or the Janitor, who did save the situation.
And by what rights does he assume, if he were not paralyzed, that everyone else was? Is he or is he not one of the paralyzed intellectuals?

I like Mr. Kramer’s writing style, it has vigor and that is saying something in these days. But if he had done something to save the situation, for example gone up himself and reattached the microphone to the necessary height and so forth, and then had looked out at the roomful of Intellectuals and announced, “You lot are practically useless,” then I would not have gotten my temper aroused, either sitting here before my computer screen or even if I had been at the event and I was one of the practically useless lot so addressed. Rather I would have resolved to better myself and help shy lady novelists with the microphone stand in the future, and Mr. Kramer would have been my hero for the day.

If the husky individual had turned out to be the janitor, and had, upon doing the necessary microphone work , turned to the audience and said, “I get $10 an hour for that, how much do you jackasses get to write,” I would have, if in a pleasant mood, applauded the janitor and, if in an especially jolly mood, tried to take up a collection as a way of rewarding the man, although I admit I would not have felt the same respect I should have felt for Mr. Kramer because, after all, it was the Janitor’s job do the necessary microphone work.

If the husky individual had turned out to be the ghost of Steinbeck, I would have felt the mystery and awe one should feel upon such a supernatural visitation but would not have respected him for showing up and doing the necessary microphone work, for who can say with ghosts what is appropriate or not.

If the husky individual had been the ghost of Steinbeck but put out that he was in fact the janitor I would be very disappointed that he should try to fool us poor mortals so.

Hello, Horsefeathers! I came across your site and found this interesting discussion on intellectuals, a subject of interest to me. If you're wondering about me (you surely aren't, but cut me some slack), you should know that I am a 21-year-old student at a dinky Nebraska college who is interested in all sorts of fun stuff, like politics, history, sports, and generally making my opinions known. I have added a rather informal essay regarding my generally pessimistic views on intellectuals that's been rolling around in my head for a while. Seeing this discussion gave me a good excuse to put it on paper. It doesn't exactly have a standard beginning (I just started writing right away), and it isn't the best paper in the world, but if you don't like it, you are certainly under no obligation to read it. Thanks!

*******************************

Regarding the generally painful subject of intellectuals and their propensity to say and do stupid things, here's what I believe I've found: intellectuals, taken as a group, have had a TREMENDOUSLY destructive impact on the history of the 20th Century, literally espousing ideologies that were responsible for the deaths of...ballpark figure...maybe 150 million people. Indeed, as Paul Johnson has pointed out in his excellent book on the subject, if you trace the origins of a dictatorship back far enough, you can usually find a group of intellectuals huddled around a table smoking pipes and discussing their nonsensical ideas. South African apartheid was the creation of the social psychology research department at Stellenbosch University, while the Khmer Rouge was controlled by a group of Paris-educated bourgeois fanatics who had no working-class experience (as a gory sidenote, I'm told that at the Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh, a painting of Pol Pot has BLACK eyes, because Cambodians put out their cigarettes in them). Marxism and Naziism both trace back to 19th Century German philosophy.

My interest in this matter started when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14), when I first began to notice that remarkably intelligent individuals often had absolutely atrocious political views, espousing social theories that could not possibly be regarded as remotely plausible by any normal person. I was a klutzy, bookish kid and prone to have a lack of common sense in some areas, so I began to additionally notice that a lot of these people were absolutely clueless when it came to operating in the real world, a condition I shared to some degree (I remember feeling dramatically confirmed in this suspicion when I discovered that Bertrand Russell was unable to follow his wife's simple instructions for making tea).

Anyway, after a while I started to realize that very intelligent people would naturally overestimate the importance of intelligence in ordering society; furthermore, they would feel angry and resentful at a social order that rewarded people on the basis of money and not on their intellectual abilities, therefore leading to many cases of profound alienation from society. Their belief in a rationally ordered society (run by them, of course) is naturally very congenial to political liberalism, which seeks to move people around like blocks of wood; after all, what is a conservative intellectual to promulgate? Once the state leaves you alone, what does the conservative have to offer besides occasional nagging over societal mores? Using the machinery of government to get immediate results in an intellectual mind-game would be much more exciting. It explains why intellectuals are so quick to disparage groups of people (businessmen, primarily) who compete with them for attention. Additionally, they look with suspicion on any societal result that comes about from the interactions of a large number of autonomous individuals not working under the leadership of a single mind or group of minds--hence, a distrust of the free market, which is not subject to their control. Likewise with traditional morality, which intellectuals, in their shameless arrogance, believe is "irrational," even though they could not possibly contemplate all the factors that go into the creation of moral systems over hundreds of years and with the input of millions of individuals with a collected wisdom much greater than their own--the "democracy of the dead," in Edmund Burke's words.

Furthermore, despite much baloney about "objective standards of evidence" in scholarship, it is quite clear that such standards become more nebulous as you travel farther from hard science and into social science, where left-wing intellectuals are particularly predominant. For sociological, or historical, or even psychological or economic questions, it is common for debates to rage for decades over a subject without resolution, and this means that bad ideas almost never meet the same test of reality that is met by a scoreboard, or a balance sheet, or an employee report, or any other objective quantifier whose results cannot be explained away through semantic juggling--an area of mastery for intellectuals. They are what Thomas Sowell has called "masters of the world of unverified plausibilities."

This aversion to evidence has profound consequences, for intellectuals often take political positions which, if implemented, would almost surely lead to the dismemberment of their own societies (i.e. unilateral disarmament, excessive reform of penal institutions so that almost nobody goes to jail for any noticeable length of time, etc). Despite their often open hostility to their own societies, I find it hard to believe that they actually desire the calamitous consequences that would follow--I don't think, for example, that Neville Chamberlain meant to produce the downfall of Britain with his appeasement of Hitler. But Malcolm Muggeridge called much of modern liberalism--which is interchangeable with the ideology of most intellectuals--a death wish, and he told stories of seeing pacifist tourists to the Soviet Union overjoyed by the sight of military parades, feminists ecstatic over the sight of a woman bent under a hundredweight of coal, etc. Their hostility to their own societies led these 1930's intellectuals to pronounce effusively on what they perceived as the virtues of one of the most totalitarian and ruthless governments ever to exist in the history of the world (A number of amusing comments on the "wonders" of communist societies by goofball intellectuals can be found in Paul Hollander's book "Political Pilgrims"). The history of Western intellectuals prostituting their credibility to Stalin in the 1930's is a subject which deserves a great deal more attention that it has received. Sovietologist Robert Conquest wrote in a book of his that the statements of such individuals "will be incredible to later students of mental aberration," to which a reviewer of his book replied, "It seems fairly incredible now." Indeed it does.

The statements of their fellow intellectuals in the West have often seemed less so--although not by much. Following an observation of Thomas Sowell's, how are we to explain the practice among intellectuals of referring to "the so-called free world" when millions of people wish to come here? How to explain their reluctance to put a moral imprimatur on military force when it will be utilized against terrorist savages who treat women like children and children like unwanted property that can be disposed of at will? What appears to matter to such individuals is appearances, not results--an explanation, perhaps, of former president Jimmy Carter's recent Nobel Peace Prize for the relatively safe task of talking about peace rather than achieving anything concrete to advance it (the Israel-Egypt peace might be an exception, but I consider that diplomatic relationship extremely tepid). Indeed, like many members of his political tribe, he seems to believe that the sheer power of his goodness and rationality was able to, or will be able to, overcome all obstacles. Again, we run into the appalling vanity of Western intellectuals. If they have managed to sniff reality, it is not because they have overcome the Siren song of their well-crafted fairy tales.

Is there anything that can be done about any of this? I doubt it. Intellectuals will always occupy societal places of honor from which they can hawk their faulty wares. The good news is that the American people--and indeed people everywhere--are always free to ignore them. Which Americans do with surprising regularity. It is worthwhile to contradict the American Revolution--a revolt led by intellectuals who doubled as businessmen and property owners, thus giving them a strong basis in reality--with the French Revolution--an uprising that was commandeered by the denizens of literary salons who had, as the saying goes, "never met a payroll." The French Revolution was to impose a specious notion of "equality," to which a fair follow-up question is: "Who is to enforce that equality, if everyone is equal?" History tells us the answer. Intellectuals never will.

I remember in a law school class, Property 1, the professor was having difficulty getting the drop microphone to drop from the ceiling so she could conduct the class. After several seconds I went up front (from the back row), got up on a table, and pulled the microphone down for her. She said thank you and I said you're welcome (an original conversation, don't you think?) Then I went back and sat down.

I admit it wasn't much, but there is the social thingummy about not putting yourself out, isn't there?

Matt:

I like your comments but I often get confused with this form of intellectual bashing, the confusion arises because while I can see that all the people you are bashing deserve it I am not sure exactly why they are called intellectuals, this is of course due to such a contextual breadth of meaning associated with the word that it becomes almost meaningless.

I suppose that I will focus on those people that you define as intellectuals in your post, which Mr. Kramer defines as intellectuals in his post, and that are commonly understood to be intellectuals by their admirers and detractors.

Just as there were intellectuals prostituting themselves to Stalin there were intellectuals who stood against Stalin. Some of these intellectuals were the ones began the Partisan Review; the magazine mentioned in Mr. Kramer’s originating post. Given that these intellectuals were still enamored of communism we can deride their practicality for that, but surely not for being Stalinists.

Some of the gains of the last hundred years for the good of humanity could be, if not attributable directly to intellectuals, partly the result of Intellectual participation. The civil rights movement is often pointed to as such a good, although I agree one should ask “What have you done for us lately” it seems slightly dishonest to criticize immoral actions in a specific time period without lauding highly moral actions in the same.

There have been intellectuals that were more active in withstanding Stalin and the Soviet system, mainly due to their proximity to that system, the names Solzhenitsyn and Anna Akhmatova spring to mind. One could argue that they were as blind as any other intellectual until the system came after them, but to their honor I should say that when they were made aware of the evils they faced they did not in anyway back down or knuckle under. If these two had been on Flight 93 I suppose that they would have done their part against their attackers with the determination required.

The term intellectual has been used in different ways as an insult through the years; Left-Wing Intellectual was once the usage that is now applied to intellectual as a whole.
Right-Wing Intellectual has generally been used through the last century with the adjective ‘so-called’, meant to call into doubt the idea that there could be any such thing despite the existence of such intellectuals as Kenneth Burke.

Finally, the term intellectual being of recent vintage we should reflect that there have been many people before its invention whose thinking and intellectual labor have done much to build the systems that we should consider worth defending against the depredations of terrorists, and that stood the test against the various isms of the twentieth century.

I see that a simple question always results in a simple answer around here! As for Bryan, I am reminded of Confuscius who said, 'There are three things the gentleman should guard against. In youth, when the blood and ch'i are still unsettled he should guard against the attraction of feminine beauty (you listening Matt?). In the prime of life when the blood and ch'i have become unyielding, he should guard against bellicosity (are you over 30, Byran?). In old age when the blood and ch'i have declined, he should guard against acquistiveness (guess that fits me to a tee).'

Jack,

Yes, I am over 30. I have often had worse problems with bellicosity in my youth then I have now, being more likely back then to go off on high-minded crusades against every little thing that drew my ire. I should probably guard against posting with more than four cups of coffee in me; hopefully this will help me guard against bellicosity in all its forms.

Bryan,

Coffee as Ch'i - now that is something I or Confucious never considered. Wonder if Starbucks would like to market that? Nah, coffee shops : intellectuals - won't work.

Jack

It's always struck me as rather instructive that the vast majority of world intellectuals are affiliated with institutions of higher learning. The academic life in the social sciences is uniquely insular in a way that is alien to the average citizen. Tenure and the relatively modest work expectations of most universities confers a certain immunity from the rigors of capitalism. Utopian daydreaming comes far easier when one doesn't have to worry about the next paycheck.

The tenured academic community spearheads most intellectual debate in the world and I would argue that much of it is highly suspect simply because the world in which most of them live and work bears little relation to the world the rest of us occupy.

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It's not all lies - not all of it. That's the age-old dilemma.

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