The American Spectator

Bob| 12.11.08 @ 3:40PM

Here is the definition from wikipedia:

"An intellectual (from the adjective meaning "involving thought and reason") is a person who tries to use his or her intelligence and analytical thinking, either in their profession or for the benefit of personal pursuits."

Guess who made this statement:

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant."

So intellectuals need to say things that are not immediately obvious or do not occur to the man in the street? Therefore, since you don't see yourself as an intellectual, everything you post is self-evident. Then you are clearly wasting your time here.

If you attach victimization to intellectualism, then you clearly do not understand what it means to use reason and analysis. Too bad...

Mary| 12.11.08 @ 6:38PM

Thanks so much for the link. I just bought Not With a Bang But a Whimper, and it's marvelous.

In one of the essays in the book he explains how the degradation of language imprisons so many.

He cites a book written by Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct.

I've not read the book, but apparently, Pinker's book was written to testify to the parity of dialects when weighed against an academic and sophisticated understanding of language, using rules of grammar, etc.

The thing that he wrote that seemed so apparent once I read it, was that without decently devoloped language skills the problems an individual encounters and their resolution become much more difficult. When you don't possess the language to unfold thought, all insight and feeling and reconciliation remain an inchoate and potentially destructive mass.

Mr. McCain, I can't do the explanation the justice it deserves. Do read the book, if you haven't already.

One thing I've asked myself, along the same lines, is how well can we understand the thoughts of those who lived so many centuries before us?

I'm not sure we can. Maybe the consciousness of time, place, economy and politics can't even begin to be imagined, but maybe one of the ways you can begin to try, is by studying a group's idioms and the bottom-up development of their expression.

Back in the late 90s there was an effort in Italy to preserve the regional dialects because they were being lost. I know how to speak both proper Italian, and the the dialect of the region in which I was born. The dialect is rich with so much woe-gone-wistful that it can and does pierce.

When I visit, I spend most of my time with those of my parents generation because they're superior to many my own age, and to those much younger than me. Their thoughts and extrapolations are superior in the first place because they have lived, but also because they think deeply and possess the language (both proper and dialect) to unfold their thoughts.

I thought the following from your link worth repeating:

***BC: Dr. Dalrymple, congratulations on the release of your latest book. Most of its essays concern England but would you say that we, in the United States, are but a few years behind your native land in terms of societal degeneration? Is Western culture, on aggregate, on the brink of suicide?

Dr. Dalrymple: Thank you for your congratulations and support over the years. Certainly Britain appears to be suicidal, but I am more hopeful about other countries. Britain is performing a valuable service, by setting such an obviously bad example for others to avoid.

I am always worried about predicting decline and fall, because men of my age seem constitutionally liable to do so. Nevertheless, there certainly does seem a thinning out of our culture, and a terrible narrowing of horizons. Here is just one very small example: a friend of mine who teaches Cambridge medical students — the elite of the elite — tells me that in many years he has met about three who have heard of Chekhov. The tragedy is that, when he tells them to read some, they love it; in other words, our educational system has deliberately failed to inculcate an interest in literature in them, though they are more than capable of developing one, and indeed are probably avid for something of the kind. This has not come about accidentally; it is the result of an ideology that has insinuated itself into power.***

I don't know about a clash of civilizations, but I do know that vigor matters.

The ideology that Dr. Dalrymple references has insinuated itself through vigor. To combat it, we need vigor too.

Orwell said a long time ago that "some ideas were so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."

Mike M| 12.11.08 @ 9:13PM

The best definition of an intellectual is an individual who constantly examines his [need I say "or her"?] assumptions.

Alan Brooks| 12.11.08 @ 11:28PM

an intellectual like Richard Dawkins gets more stridently anti-God with every book; his latest is "the God delusion".
But what about a book called "the Richard Dawkins delusion"?

Mary| 12.12.08 @ 12:02AM

I don't know if Mike M's definition of an intellectual is the best, but it made me re-read my post. And made me aware of its defects.

I stand by my take on my parents generation, but I didn't explain myself properly or fully.

I enjoy their company and conversation more because it is richer in years lived, but that's nothing a younger generation has any control over.

To hear these octogenarians grapple with the present, and where they think the future is headed, based on lives lived in a past that included misery but also included great hope, is like reading a great novel with the advantage of living voices and deeply moving gestures and knowing glances.

J David| 12.12.08 @ 8:48AM

Typical statement from an "intellectual": "There is no God"...Need I say more?

Richard Cummings| 12.12.08 @ 11:04AM

Eisenhower's definition of an intellectual: "Someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing."

R Brooks| 12.15.08 @ 8:48AM

The defining trait of an intellectual is a person that has become so open minded that his brain has fallen out!