House of Eratosthenes

Cylarz is invoking language I’ve heard before. The person from whom I heard it was me, and the timeframe in which I heard it last was sometime during Bill Clinton’s administration. So I’m getting my own words thrown back at me here:

No matter what your agenda is, you do not rise to that level of power by being an idiot.

It’s not Obama’s intelligence that I call into question. Rather, I question his priorities, his values, his judgement, his character, his friends, his advisors, his agenda….and yes, his patriotism.

But idiot? No.

Now to be clear, I did not call Obama an idiot and I would not call Obama an idiot. I made a cutesy reference to the 50% of the people writing Him letters, whom He Himself reports are calling Him an idiot. And that is almost certainly out of a sense of exasperation, not the culmination of a sincere effort to assess intellect or lack thereof.

I’m currently working my way through Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, so I’m keen on the idea that there are multiple ways to measure intelligence. Perhaps the most reliable way to measure intellect’s most fundamental layer is with raw resourcefulness — wriggling one’s way out of, or through, a tight spot. Both Clinton and Obama have demonstrated this in spades.

Getting tripped up by something, does nothing to refute this quality. We all make our little “oopsies.” Clinton had his Monica, Bush’s public-relations handling of Iraq was a disaster, and of course Obama has Afghanistan. Bush’s Dad had a “read my lips” moment. Reagan had Iran/Contra, and retreating from Lebanon. Pobody’s Nerfect.

But why do people screw up? If you investigate this, here and there you can, at least, find some limits. With the Iraq thing, my firm conclusion is that George Bush simply didn’t try. It’s a Bush family attribute. You have this thing called “political capital,” you never spend more than you have, but at the same time you spend all that you have because whatever doesn’t get spent is useless. Follow those two simple rules, put your faith in God, and everything will work out. This time, it didn’t work out. That doesn’t show George W. Bush is stupid, however; it shows he is stubborn.

Bill Clinton was not stupid because of Monica, I don’t think. He was impulsive and reckless. He demonstrates a lot of qualities common to addictive personalities. If he labors over part of a lifetime building something, and a sexual dalliance can wreck it, there’s a part of him that just doesn’t care. It’s as if the sex itself takes place in an entirely different universe from whatever it is he’s been building, and he doesn’t think about the damage until after it’s all done. By which time it’s too late of course. The man really needs psychiatric help, but he isn’t stupid.

On Afghanistan, I have some real troubles with Obama’s intellect. I’m convinced His I.Q. is well above the national average. But there’s a lot of functional intelligence He’s missing. It doesn’t hurt His efforts in any area in which He possesses some actual experience — but as we all realize now, some of us belatedly, there are many areas of life in which He does not possess adequate experience. He doesn’t have the common sense to run off and get help in these areas. His lack of humility will not allow for it, and His sense of judgment is not that sound.

Ultimately, my indictment against Obama’s intelligence is that when & if the moment comes along in which it’s demonstrated He doesn’t know something that He needs to know, He fails in the department of — curiosity. He is incurious. Is it fair to categorize curiosity as a kind of intellect? Perhaps not. But it ultimately has a weighty influence on what you know, over the long term. And it has a bearing on the outcome of what you are trying to do.

To be fair to President Obama, I suppose this is a long-standing curse upon that high office. It’s really tough to get there, and once you’ve made it there, it’s even tougher to keep in mind there might be some other people who know things you don’t know, that you need to go find out. Obama is not the first President with this problem, and He most assuredly will not be the last.

Would I trust someone like Him to do an important job for me? Yes…maybe…but only so important. Delivering my newspaper. I don’t think I’d let him in my house to fix something or haul something away. Not unless I was there to supervise. And spare me the comments and e-mails about race, please. I’ve spent an entire lifetime working in high-technology fields. I just don’t trust people who “know everything.” I’ve seen them break too many things, and have spent too many thankless hours fixing it after Mister Wonderful has moved on to break something else.

And this is what I’m seeing now. No, Obama is not an idiot. But He’s in “King Midas” mode — deep inside, I think He has this delusion that when Congress puts together some dangerous, ramshackle health care bill, it isn’t even going to matter what’s written in the bill. Holy Man will lay His hands upon it, and that will make it wonderful. So I would say, yes, He is very smart in some ways. But His hostility toward reality interferes with His ability to perceive reality, to learn things He needs to learn. And so here & there, there are some key places where His intellectual gifts really don’t matter very much. He offers an incomplete package of these intellectual gifts. Not incomplete in magnitude, but incomplete in coverage.

Update: Right here. This is what I’m talking about.

I, too, am reading more Sowell — this time “A Conflict of Visions”.

And I think I’ve figured out one thing, or a way to put one thing I already knew but didn’t quite know how to do it.

I’d rather have a person in office with a lower intellect but who sees mankind through the constrained vision of man than someone with a higher intellect and the unconstrained vision.

This is one reason I was concerned much less about how many Supreme Court cases Sarah Palin could recite or which newspapers she read, and more about how she viewed the world; specifically, the nature of man and how best to deal with it.

As a matter of fact, and I intend to post on this if I ever get a moment to sit down and think through something coherent and worthwhile … but while reading last night it occurred to me….

Fantasy novels. Didja ever notice that Wizards rarely rule, and when they do it is invariably not a good thing? Now I’m not sure this is intentional on the authors’ part — it actually might be some of that accumulated, dispersed cultural knowledge Sowell suggests that mankind has obtained over the years.

No, Good Wizards always play an advisory role to those in power, but they are never in power themselves. The only Wizards that ever gain power are wizards who have gone bad.

This has to do with the fact that Wizards wield great power, and great power corrupts greatly, to paraphrase an old saying. Galadriel refused The Ring when Frodo offered it to her freely. Gandalf would not touch it for fear of what he might delude himself into thinking it would be ok for him to do with it. What do you think Saruman would have done with it? You see where I’m going with this.

When Progressives get power, they have grand visions of what Mankind can be, and they want to rush it along with inapporpriate disregard for those living in the present. They feel it will all be justified later, and they imagine themselves credited with the glory for making it happen. They also tend to over estimate their grasp of social and economic mechanics, and underestimate the possible undesirable consequences their actions.

With Afghanistan, Obama has painted himself into a corner. It was his ace in the hole to show he was not weak on national security, because there is an actual concensus that that was the “good”, uncontroversial war. If he should back out of it, he breaks down the last percieved barrier between himself and Jimmy Carter. Plus, he wants oh so terribly to catch Osama Bin Laden as a feather to stick in his cap along with “his” fine achievement in Iraq.

One can be a humble intellectual, and one becomes a wizard. But pride is blinding. An intellectual without humility should not only not be allowed to be in power, he should be kept far from its reins.
- philmon | 03/12/2010 @ 20:08
Brilliant stuff, Philmon. You really nailed it and your comments made a fine addition to Morgan’s post.
- cylarz | 03/13/2010 @ 21:12

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