Intellectuals vs. Intelligence

To which the typical intellectual will respond: a distinction without a difference! But we know better: for just as a manual laborer is someone who works with his hands, an intellectual laborer is someone who toils with his head. The designation implies no qualitative evaluation. Some intellectuals are geniuses, others idiots.

For example, Thomas Sowell and Paul Krugman are intellectuals, both being involved in the production of explicitly articulated abstract ideas. Which tells us precisely nothing about whether the ideas are good, bad, or even diabolical. Although if you read it in the Times, you can be pretty sure it's the latter.

Diabolical ideas. Note that only a human being can entertain and act on them. Speaking of evil ideas, yesterday I read that Pope Francis says it's “immoral” for nations to possess nuclear weapons. Criminals, Islamists, and Chicoms, you heard the Pope. Eliminate your nukes! Come to think of it, all you rioters and looters in Chicago and Portland? Stop being naughty!

Only an intellectual could believe objects can be immoral, or that there is no moral distinction between Iran and Israel possessing one of these objects. But thank God Truman had one and Hitler didn't.

In the words of Francis, “It has never been clearer that, for peace to flourish, all people need to lay down the weapons of war." Which proves that, in the words of the Aphorist, "In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other." Score one for leftism.

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot (Dávila).

Back to the main point, which is knowledge and the people who know it. As we mentioned in yesterday's post, intellectuals deal with articulated and abstract knowledge -- AKA ideas -- which is a small subset of knowledge per se. Sowell points out that a gifted surgeon, for example, is not considered an intellectual, even though he knows infinitely more than, say, Thomas Friedman or Charles Blow.

Political talk shows don't feature engineers, architects, or scientists, even though it requires more intelligence to excel in these fields than it does to succeed as a political pundit. For one thing, these activities offer immediate and decisive feedback that lets the practitioner know if he's doing an adequate job: the bridge falls down, the plane crashes, the patient dies.

But there is no penalty for a college professor being catastrophically wrong. He is completely insulated from feedback. Which is why leftists want all young adults to be indoctrinated by these credentialed buffoons at the taxpayer's expense. For

Until we come across instructed fools, instruction seems important (Dávila).

They say that people are always conservative with regard to what they know best. Which is why people who know nothing are the best leftists. Joe Biden doesn't even know what day it is. Perfect! Nearly as good are people who know things that can't possibly be true, but are oblivious to any kind of corrective feedback: the media, academia, AOC.

Wisdom is costly. Ideology is free. No, better than free, for it confers zero-cost omniscience: the ideologue has a ready answer for every question and a solution to every human problem, especially the permanent ones that are intrinsic to the human condition. Yes, Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. Which is why The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions (Dávila).

If there are intellectuals without intellect, there are religionists without God, so to speak: they know the words but have never heard the music which words can only distantly describe but never replace. Voegelin:

There were always Christian thinkers who recognized the difference between experiences of divine reality and the transformation of the insights engendered by the experience into doctrinal propositions.

There is, and must be, a dynamic tension between dogmatic and mystical theologies, which is precisely analogous to saying there must be a dynamic tension between the ideas of the intellectual and the reality which is prior to them.

Ideas -- whether secular or theological -- are true to the extent that they are adequations to real objects, whether God or world. In both cases, truth can degenerate into an ontologically closed and empty ideology.

But let no Raccoon suppose there is any intrinsic conflict between intellect and revelation, doctrine and experience, truth and being: "we believe that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation"; that this integral knowledge is "at once intellectual and spiritual"; and that this fruitful tension "is the reason for the existence of the human spirit" (Schuon).

One God, One Cosmos, One Intelligence, One Truth, One Post, etc.