. . . . Check out # 43, with thanks to grey_whiskers for alerting us to an excellent post.
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Posted on 03/08/2012 1:16:40 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
As a card-carrying member of the media elite, it’s hard for me to say something nice about Newt Gingrich. But here it is: He doesn’t wear blue jeans in public.
[SNIP of SNARK due to excerpt limit]
For many Republican primary voters, the only thing worse than a regular elite is an intellectual elite or a media elite or especially a liberal intellectual media elite.
[SNIP]
More to the point, does the fact that a guy reads books and deals in ideas disqualify him?
For many Americans, it does. Anti-intellectualism has been a consistent theme throughout American history. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.”
This was in 1964, and Hofstadter was writing about the 1950s, in the wake of McCarthyism and Adlai Stevenson’s “egghead” campaign. Hofstadter noted “hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far right wing, a categorical and folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed or cultivated.”
Now it’s back. The most prominent American conservative is not the erudite William F. Buckley but the seething Rush Limbaugh.
.....If ideas and knowledge are elitist, if you have to pretend to be ignorant to be elected president, then the country is in more trouble that we thought it was.
(Excerpt) Read more at hanfordsentinel.com ...
Well said.
Since about the same time that illegal aliens became "victims".
And, now might be a good time for "conservatives" to focus on defining for Horrigan what it is they value enough to "conserve." It is they who are most likely to have read great literature from the ages--not the likes of this newspaper writer and his pseudo-intellectual buddies.
This also may be a good time for conservatives to read or re-examine Dr. Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind, which can be read online, by the way.
In Kirk's last chapter he reviews the works of poets and writers, quoting lines which now seem to bear a strikinig resemblance to the players on the stage in American politics and mainstream media today.
For instance, in Robert Frost's "A Case for Jefferson," Frost writes of the character Harrison:
"Harrison loves my country too
But wants it all made over new.
. . . .
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens.
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it made over new."
The pseudointellectuals who occupy the White House, the media, and much of Congress fancy themselves "intellectuals."
By their words and actions, however, they display a provinciality reminiscent of that Dr. Kirk recalls as having been described by T. S. Eliot--one of time and place, having no intellectual grounding in ideas older than their own little experience in dabbling and discussing Mao, Marx, and other theoreticians.
America's written Constitution deserves protectors whose minds are out of their teens in terms of their understanding of civilization's long struggle for liberty.
The Constitution certainly deserves protectors who do not consider it a "flawed" document because it does not permit the government it structures to run rough shod over the rights of its "KEEPERS, the People" (Justice Story).
Blasting it "all to smithereens" seems to be the goal of the current Administration and so-called "progressives" who control the Executive and one-half of the Legislative branch of government.
The Founders' Constitution's strict limits on coercive power by elected representatives are being ignored and disavowed; the free enterprise system which allowed individual citizens to achieve and excel in their chosen pursuits is being co-opted by elected and unelected bureaucrats; and the rights of conscience, speech, and religion are being trampled as we post here--yet, the persons who could influence minds and hearts are quibbling about petty politics of the day instead of debating great ideas such as how to preserve liberty, or, in economic matters, discussing the conclusions of the great moral philosopher, Adam Smith's "Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations."
When, in 1776, our ancestors felt the heavy hand of the British government "taking" their earnings, regulating their lives, interfering with their beliefs, and asserting coercive control over their actions, they did not waste their time on such trivia.
They wrote great treatises such as "Thoughts on Government" and "Common Sense." They educated their young on the merits of liberty, as opposed to slavery to government, and they did the groundwork which allowed for a written Constitution for self-government to be ratified in the states only eleven years later.
America is about to be bankrupt, both financially and philosophically, and those who have benefited from the Founders' ideas, who call themselves "conservators" (conservatives) of those ideas, should come together to place those ideas before millions of young people who must participate in voting in November on whether they desire liberty or slavery.
Women, youth, men, so-called "seniors"--all need to have the choice presented clearly that this election pits the ideas of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and America's other Founders against the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Keynes.
There are always "useful idiots." That's what every oppressive regime has relied upon. A "useful idiot" with a big megaphone is more dangerous to liberty than millions of ordinary ones, because of the ability to lull more people into a sense of complacency.
America, awaken! This decades-long battle for your liberty has been engaged. But, for decades, you have allowed the ideas of your liberty to be censored from your nation's textbooks and public discourse.
Your best weapon is contained in your Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which leaves all the power in your hands. Read them, amplify upon their principles and ideas by accessing the Founders' writings and speeches.
For a quick review of those principles and your nation's first 50 years under its Constitution, consult John Quincy Adams' "Jubilee" Address here, or a recent reprint of a 1987 Bicentennial collection of the Founders' principles, here.
James Madison stated: "Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant—they have been cheated; asleep—they have been surprised; divided—the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? ... the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government, they should watch over it ... It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."
Mr. Horrigan, "conservatives" do not express a "hostility" to "intellectuals." They admire and revere America's true intellectuals too much to be fooled by the very provincial and pseudo-intellectual ignorance parading itself before them today.
I tried. But even though I took the trouble to sign up for an account so I could leave a comment, the website would not accept it under the "discussion" tab.
Since academia was taken over by leftist radicals, the western canon was replaced by multicultural gobbledygook, the English language was replaced by Newspeak, free thinking was replaced by political correctness, and education was replaced with indoctrination.
Yours is a perfect response.
The classic work in that space is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. I recommend it highly. Written in the mid-90s, it is still very, very much applicable today.
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social/dp/046508995X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331246795&sr=8-1
Intellect and education are great things. Thinking that it makes you superior to other people and entitles you to rule them is NOT a great thing.
It’s real simple - it’s all in how you define “educated.”
I agree with you on ‘Vision of the Annointed’. It is a classic, and -ought- be a textbook for a real education, as opposed to university indoctrination.
A lot of the elite think that knowledge is the same as judgment. Here is the difference between knowledge and judgment: You show knowledge by knowing that a tomato is a fruit. You show judgment by knowing that you do not put a tomato in a fruit salad.
You can reach him at khorrigan@post-dispatch.com
*PINGING* a veritable horde of other FReepers to quaff deeply from your fount of wisdom.
Folks, it's post #43 this thread.
Cheers!
1) From Pericles' final funeral oration in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin Classics):
Praise of other people is tolerable up only to a certain point, the point where one still believes that one could do oneself some of the things one is hearing about. Once you get beyond this point, you will find people becoming jealous and incredulous.
This describes to a T the smarmy, catty reaction of the annointed (in Thomas Sowell's term) to anyone who really is an intellectual.
As pointed out in Post #36 this thread,
Take Dr. Thomas Sowell's description of how intelligence is often recognized early, the child is treated special, given breaks, great education, inside track to great opportunities -- the works. Spoiled brats. (My words)
Take former Secret Service agent Dan Emmett's book “Within Arms’s Length.” He writes of during the course of his duties to protect the Clintons and staff "patient attempts to reason were met with childlike emotion born of a past where no one in authority--probably beginning with her parents--had ever said no to [the staffer] about anything.”
This is also seen in C. S. Lewis's essay Screwtape Proposes A Toast (warning: LONG! exceprt):
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you. The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”
Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.
All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
<snip>
In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already begun something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I should not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
That describes the program of the NEA down to the last nanometer, doesn't it?
Cheers!
Selective dyslexia strikes again!
Cheers!
. . . . Check out # 43, with thanks to grey_whiskers for alerting us to an excellent post.
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Excellent post. And thanks grey...for always being on top of things! =)
Your selections are appreciated. I'm reminded of another C. S. Lewis gem:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
All who doubt the wisdom of Lewis might watch the video of the President's recent remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. There, Obama arrogantly misappropriated Jesus's spiritual challenge to individuals, claiming those words as validating and authorizing abusive use of coercive power by himself and his cronies to "take" from some in order to buy votes and accumulate more power to themselves--all in the name of "helping" the beneficiaries of such unconstitutional "takings."
Then, there's more from C. S. Lewis: “We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present.”
Then, with reference to "presentism," or what Eliot deemed a provinciality of time and place, Lewis said, “a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
This, it seems, describes what is missing from voices like reporter Corrigan and those he deems to be "intellectuals." They listen to the "microphones" of their own age and may have missed the wisdom of the ages. As a result, they do not understand the great fountains of thought from which America's Founders drew their ideas of liberty and their understanding of the nature of tyranny.
Samuel Adams:
"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams
At the risk of making this response too lengthy, Michael Ledeen, on another subject altogether, wrote of the degree to which Americans have been "dumbed down" on some basic ideas underlying our freedom:
Ledeen said, "Our educational system has long since banished religion from its texts, and an amazing number of Americans are intellectually unprepared for a discussion in which religion is the central organizing principle."
In the Pope's speech in Germany a few years ago, he observed:
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
Ledeen put his finger on a problem that stifles meaningful dialogue and debate in America. Censors [disguised as "protectors" (the Radical Left's ACLU, NEA, education bureaucracies, etc., etc.)] have imposed their limited understanding of liberty upon generations of school children.
From America's founding to the 1950's, ideas derived from religious literature were included in textbooks, through the poetry and prose used to teach children to read and to identify with their world and their country.
Suddenly, those ideas began to disappear from textbooks, until now, faceless, mindless copy editors sit in cubicles in the nation's textbook publishing companies, instructed by their supervisors to remove mere words that refer to family, to the Divine, and to any of the ancient ideas that have sustained intelligent discourse for centuries.
Now, it is the ACLU which accuses middle Americans of "censorship" if they object to books, films, etc., that offend their sensibilities and undermine the character training of their young. Sadly, many of those books and films are themselves products of the minds that have been robbed of exposure to wisdom literaturein the nation's schools and universities.
Voters need to be grounded in enduring ideas in order to recognize tyranny camouflaged in "hope" and "change" and to be able to appropriately enter into what the Pope described as "the dialogue of cultures."
Thanks, NOGrayZone. See my response to grey_whiskers also.
” The pseudointellectuals who occupy the White House, the media, and much of Congress fancy themselves “intellectuals.”
By their words and actions, however, they display a provinciality reminiscent of that Dr. Kirk recalls as having been described by T. S. Eliot—one of time and place, having no intellectual grounding in ideas older than their own little experience in dabbling and discussing Mao, Marx, and other theoreticians.”
I read Russell Kirk’s book when I was 14. I was SOLD!....especially having grown up in the 60’s.
From my FReeper home page....
“”” ” As a result, intellectuals are free from one of the most rigorous constraints facing other occupations: external standards. An engineer will ultimately be judged on whether the structures he designs hold up, a businessman on whether he makes money, and so on. By contrast, the ultimate test of an intellectual’s ideas is whether other intellectuals “find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant, or ingenious. There is no external test.” If the intellectuals are like-minded, as they often are, then the validity of an idea depends on what those intellectuals already believe. This means that an intellectual’s ideas are tested only by internal criteria and “become sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality.”
An intellectual’s reputation, then, depends not on whether his ideas are verifiable but on the plaudits of his fellow intellectuals. “ Thomas Sowell
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