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Oct. 12, 2005 Only in America is “intellectual” a dirty word. Normally, an intellectual is someone who acts because he thinks. In America, an intellectual is someone who thinks instead of acting. We scorn the intellectual who fears to act, but we ought to prize a thinking man who carries his beliefs into action. The ability to think, and to handle oneself in an intellectual circle, is a virtue. America doesn’t always treat it as such. We catch a glimpse of this in the case of Harrier Miers. Critics charge that she’s a poor nominee, and defenders now complain that the critics are just being elitist because Miers doesn’t come from the Ivy League. Critics demanded an intellectual, and defenders whisper that the demand is elitist. A confession: I have no shame about not having an Ivy League degree. I went to a Catholic college in Philadelphia (St. Joseph’s), not an Ivy League school by any means. I confess that for a while, I did attend a Jesuit theology school in Cambridge, Massachusetts that’s associated with Harvard, but I left the Jesuits before getting the doctorate. Still, my bachelor’s degree is in philosophy. The Plato that we read at St. Joe’s was exactly the same Plato that Harvard students read. They didn’t offer the Ivy League a better translation; in fact, the texts were exactly the same. The symbolic logic that I studied at St. Joe’s used the same symbols and techniques as they taught at Harvard. Russell’s paradoxes were just as paradoxical to Harvard students as they were to us. When we studied Kant’s categories, we didn’t get an abbreviated list. We got them all. You can be an intellectual, even if you didn’t go to an Ivy League school. Being an intellectual isn’t an upper class privilege, or a personality flaw. It’s a commitment. It’s where a person takes reason seriously. An intellectual doesn’t merely swallow popular opinion and call it his own, simply because it’s popular. An intellectual examines, analyzes, considers, tests, and scrutinizes his own opinions. What matters is that you engage ideas, and you live your life around those convictions. You don’t have to be a professor or author to be an intellectual, but let’s face it, we expect more from professional intellectuals. Professors subject their ideas to public scrutiny, and they have to withstand the criticism of their colleagues and rivals. We place more credence in the opinions of intellectuals because they’ve gone through that process. In philosophy, I may not agree with everything Bertrand Russell says, but I have tremendous respect for his opinion. I respect him, and I think twice (or three or twenty times) before disagreeing with him, precisely because he put his views out there for all to see. He supported his views with page after page of rational argument. His name remains in the upper ranks of philosophers precisely because he went through the process. He rose through the intellectual ranks precisely because he fought the fights. He put his opinions out there, and defended them. Naturally, before your opinions can withstand criticism, you have to put them out there. You have to engage, publicly, before you can be a true intellectual. I like to think that I live an intellectual life. I’m not a professional intellectual, obviously, but I try to live the life. I take ideas seriously. When I form an opinion, I present it publicly. Mostly I do this through conversation, but sometimes (like now) I try to write an argument and present it for consideration. When others criticize my arguments, well, that’s why I put them out there in the first place. If the criticism is just a personal attack, I sometimes respond in kind, even when I know I shouldn’t. If their criticism is fair, I revise my argument. (Of course, I never admit that at first, but usually I’ll find myself, weeks later, making the same point and claiming it was my idea all along!) Most of the people who publish their writings have the same commitment. They take their ideas seriously, and they want to share them. They engage ideas. Of course, we expect professional intellectuals to have the same commitment. We expect them to write, publish, defend, and to engage ideas on the highest level, because that’s what professional intellectuals do. The Supreme Court is the most consequential intellectual job in the country. What should we expect? Harriet Miers, however, has almost no evidence of engaging any idea publicly. We see no sign of that intellectual commitment. She hasn’t published anything. You would expect that of a professional intellectual. It isn’t enough that the she might vote “correctly” on hot-button issues. She’s nominated for an intellectual job where her opinions dramatically affect the freedom, and perhaps the life, of every citizen in this country. What’s worse is that she was clearly nominated for qualities that have nothing to do with an intellectual job. She was nominated because she’s loyal to the president, and indeed, she has no “paper trail.” She was nominated to the job precisely because she isn’t an intellectual. That turned her nomination from being an intellectual appointment into a merely political one. As we said, an intellectual is someone who acts because they think; but a politician is someone who acts because of what others think. That’s the wrong approach to the job. There’s a good argument that it’s really the Senate Democrats fault, because they hold nominations hostage, unless the nominee agrees to uphold Roe v. Wade. However, when the president gives into that strategy, and politicizes his way around it, he winds up validating the strategy. Instead of defeating the strategy, he agrees to play the game their way. I have no bias against Harriet Miers because she isn’t from Harvard. I oppose her because when you’re nominated to a highly intellectual job, you have to be an intellectual. That isn’t elitist. That’s logical. Only in America could we say that a nominee must be an intellectual, and yet watch others whisper that we’re snotty. If you’re applying for an intellectual job (and they don’t come much more intellectual than a Supreme Court justice), you have to show that you can handle an intellectual argument. Some people want is to wait until the hearings, claiming that we really don’t know her yet. Ironically, that’s precisely the point. If she was a true intellectual, that we have every right to expect, we should have known about her already. The fact that we don’t is why the hearings are irrelevant. We deserved a nominee who could fight intellectual battles with fellow professional intellectuals. Instead, Harriet Miers was nominated to avoid a fight with lightweight (prima donna) senators. Good Lord, if you can’t handle Dick Durbin, you clearly shouldn’t be facing Stephen Breyer. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville holds graduate degrees in philosophy, and is an ex-Jesuit. Now a husband and father of four, he is a programmer for databases and for the web. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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