House of Eratosthenes

Yesterday, during our skewering of David Brooks’ New York Times column, we highlighted a “big reveal” or two but glossed over the really huge one. It’s something we’ve discussed before, but I think I like the job John Hawkins did with exploring the exact same idea. His explanation is easy to read, easy to understand, and one can quickly see it meshes with what’s going on and makes good sense.

Besides, John Hawkins quotes from smarter people than I do:

Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous. — Morgan Freeberg

The New York Times’ pretend conservative, David Brooks, got some attention for his latest column sneering the Tea Parties, but I found his misguided view of the “educated class” to be more interesting:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

David Brooks is getting something backwards here. You see, it is not the general public that looks at the views of the “educated class” AKA “intellectuals” and turns away. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

That’s because intellectuals gain notoriety either by saying something that no one else is saying and making a case for it or by making a particularly clever argument that disagrees with the generally held wisdom. An “intellectual” who agrees with common sense positions and traditional ways of doing things generally isn’t considered an “intellectual” at all. Why is that? Well, how can you be smarter than everyone else if you have the same opinions held by the common man?

If you wonder why college professors and other intellectuals, who dedicate a lifetime to research and study, can often have less common sense than the average teenager, that’s the reason for it. They spend their lives in an environment where coming up with clever and novel theories are rewarded, even if they don’t work, while taking a common sense approach is at best considered dull and uninteresting at best — and at worst, it’s considered to be a flaw.

The average informed person, who doesn’t live in that world, can see that manmade global warming is joke and that “multilateral action” often doesn’t work out so well in practice. Many members of the “educated class” hesitate to admit something so obvious exactly because it is so obvious. How can they be these extraordinary minds if they come to same conclusion as Joe Sixpack — except a few years later? That has a lot to do with why the decision making process of the “educated class” in this country often goes so tragically awry.

It has been my general experience in dealing with people, that if you know what you’re doing, you can mold and shape their opinions not by attacking some arguments or bolstering others, or by introducing new evidence, but oftentimes by simply coming up with names for things. “Teabaggers” is one such example of this. Typically, it works best if the public is swayed away from the thing being named, and for this reason, our “intellectuals” tend to come up with new names for some viewpoints when it would make more sense to come up with a name for the opposite. “Laffer Curve,” for example — which says there’s a bell curve of tax revenue, such that if you raise the tax rate there will come some zenith point, at the far side of which revenues drop as the rate is raised. Wouldn’t it make far more sense to name the opposite viewpoint, so it can be targeted, mocked and ridiculed? Something like “The Sky’s The Limit” economics? “To Infinty And Beyond” economics?

And there are a lot of other examples. “Bush Doctrine,” which says — well, let’s not get into that again. Wouldn’t it be sensible to label the opposite so it can be similarly denigrated? The “Leave Saddam Right Where He Is And Let Him Do Whatever He Wants” doctrine?

However, in this case perhaps it makes sense to come up with a label for what is to be defended. The surreal and ridiculous, after all, has already been named: “Intellectualism.” This seems to me an exercise very much like the leftists coming up with the name “Political Correctness.” They managed to promote this, even with a confession right there in the name: Political Correctness. Alright, so we’re coming up with a new strain of correctness. “Correct” is a fairly simplistic concept, so we must have been more-or-less in agreement about what exactly the old flavoring of “correctness” was, which some powerful advocacy group deemed to be out of harmony with their desires. So we’re re-defining what it means to be correct.

That should have turned the public off of it. But it’s thirty years later, and Political Correctness is still going strong.

I think we should follow the example, and come up with a name for the kind of intellectualism that has earned the enmity of people like Brooks, as they rush to embrace this surreal, new-age “intellectualism.” This new name should make the point that, like “correctness,” “intellectualism” is a primary-color within the human palette and there never was a logical need to go re-defining it.

My new name should also make the point that, when you expect the experiments involving your novel new idea to outlive you, there is no incentive to make sure you get it right. So nobody comes up with a novel new idea that humans breathe water; disproving that would be quick and easy. We have these novel new ideas that we’re emitting carbon and burning up the planet, or that a country can live in solvency and comfort after embracing a socialist economic model…things that can be surrounded by logical arguments, or things that look like logical arguments, for years and years, perhaps centuries.

My new name should further make the point that ideas don’t mean very much if they aren’t based on observations — or if they’re based on observations that have been cherry-picked.

My new name should be laced with a frosting of irony. It should subtly make the point that we have been gradually acclimated, in recent years, to a rather phony brand of “intellectualism.” The kind Hawkins was describing above.

My new name should fit on a bumper sticker, just in case someone wants to carry it into 2012. It is, I perceive, the primary subject of the elections in that year: What kind of “intellectuals” are we putting in charge of things, and how exactly is it we decided they were “intellectuals” at all? It should point out the dirty trick the enemy has been doing: “We’re intellectuals, because that’s what we call ourselves, therefore if you disagree with us you’re not an intellectual!”

And so my new name, for the kind of intellectualism we used to embrace…and must embrace again, if we are to have any kind of hope for the future…is…

Real-World Intellectualism.

The kind of intellectualism that, before it spins its mental gears, first recognizes the world and the things in it for what they really are. It recognizes that when you’re neck-deep in debt and it’s become a big problem — you need to spend less money, not more. That safe things are safe. That dangerous things are dangerous. That when a terrorist tries to bomb a jetliner with his underpants, and he fails only because a fellow passenger tears his clothes off and the fuse is a dud, maybe it’s fair to say the system didn’t work. That when you promise food and money for Kim Jong-Il so he doesn’t build any nukes, and he goes ahead and builds them, maybe yet-another-treaty isn’t necessarily the best way to go.

That when you go several years saying “Jimmy Carter might have been a bad President but he’s still a wonderful human being,” and then Jimmy Carter goes on record behaving like a perfect asshole, and then does it again and again and again — maybe he isn’t that good of a human being either.

That if there was any policy enacted in 2009 that’s any good, someone somewhere should have something good to say about how 2009 shook out; and if that’s not the case, then the policies should be brought under serious scrutiny at the very least. That generally, when we want a problem solved, it might be a good idea not to make it illegal or impossible for someone to make a profit when they solve it.

The kind of intellectualism that looks & listens before it talks.

This is what we’ve been losing. This is what we need to bring back. Because thinking about any complex problem, or for that matter even simple ones, is like pulling something with a chain. If one link breaks it really doesn’t matter how glittery and shiny all the other links are.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Laying aside the rest of your argument for a moment, Morgan, I’d like to know why Brooks or anyone else would say that the US is becoming increasingly “isolationist.” As far as I can tell, it’s just the opposite – we want to win these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sure, there’s always that sliver of voters over on the hard Left who wants us to simply “pull out” and throw both countries to the wolves, consequences be damned…but I suspect the majority of us want to finish wars that we have started, whether we agree with them or not.

For that matter, I see no evidence that any of these “educated people” among the so-called “political class” want more aggressive and interventionist foreign policies. Quite the opposite – wasn’t Harry Reid up on the Senate’s podium day after day, proclaiming, “This war is lost!” ?

An “isolationist view” is what a lot of Libertarians hold – they want all foreign-based American combat forces withdrawn inside our own borders. Some among this number even think that US troops based abroad is the sole reason we have problems with terrorism today. This sort of thinking has not been popular or mainstream since the 1930s…a world war demonstrated the folly of the idea that the US has the luxury of ignoring emerging threats.
- cylarz | 01/07/2010 @ 11:36
I think what Mr. Brooks is talking about is over here.

At my last job we were asked to fill out an associate survey annually, and everybody’s favorite question was “Poor performance is not tolerated.” Answer was multiple choice: -5=strongly disfavor to +5 strongly favor. The joke that went around was that if you were a poor performer and you knew it, you’d take +5 to mean “yes we do tolerate it and I’m damn glad because I get a paycheck for doing nothing.” But it really wasn’t a joke. If 20% of the respondents misinterpret the answer scheme, then the results are knocked 40% out of whack. Naturally, this was the question with the greatest skew, and upper management wanted to make a big ol’ hoopty-do out of it every year.

I see this issue in exactly the same light, because the people who are strongly isolationist with regard to invading Iraq, all of a sudden are hardline-internationalist when it comes to, let us say, a new “tax on breathing” from the United Nations. And the people who are isolationists with regard to world-government authority, like Yours Truly for example, are the ones who call Saddam Hussein by the same three words I use to describe him: “A great start.” So without some exceptionally precise technical wording, that’s easy to intepret in a unified way, that’s a stupid and nonsensical question to put on a poll.
- mkfreeberg | 01/07/2010 @ 12:01
In the spirit of “RealPolitik,” how about “RealIntellekt”?
- lordsomber | 01/07/2010 @ 12:56
Trouble with that is, the “real” in “realpolitik” pertains to the politics, and not natural forces of the universe. Also, it’s a pejorative term; and why help the enemy?

This guy (criticizing the common Brooks bulls-eye) uses the term CAS, referring to Complex Adaptive Systems. That’s good too. But it doesn’t quite rise to the level of instilling curiosity in the naturally incurious…an audience I think David Brooks has done a better job of reaching, compared to his “real-world intellectual” counterparts.

Not that I think my own phrase is perfect. Anybody else have some ideas? “Two and two make four” intellectualism? The kind of intellectualism you’d want to have at your back, when you’re charging into a burning building. NOT-DAVID-BROOKS intellectualism.
- mkfreeberg | 01/07/2010 @ 14:21
I very much like Hawkins’ explanation of the difference: Intellectuals whose entire careers depend on new interpretations of old ideas will always specialize in the novel theory over the proven practice, merely because the practice is proven.

I’ve seen the same phenomenon in movie critics: The more films the critics have to review, the more familiar they become with the classic tropes and patterns, such that eventually they burn out on even good stories because they become altogether too skilled at predicting them. This is why the thing that the really jaded critics love more than anything else is novelty, something that surprises them and makes them pay attention again. But the more jaded you become the harder and harder it is to produce novelty save through more and more outrageous works, and eventually you wind up with excrement like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

(This is the process of decadence in sexuality as well, which we are also seeing more and more evidence of these days.)

As for the new name for the kind of real-world fact-based thinking you’re talking about, I’d like to avoid “real” or “fact” ideas because progressivist advocates have reveled for years in calling themselves “the reality-based community”. Instead, I suggest simply this: Hard-Hat Logic.

You do not go on a construction site without putting on your hard hat (and other safety gear). You cannot build a real building without going on the construction site. And a building designed by someone who doesn’t know anything about real materials or real forces is going to fall down. Plus, it evokes “hardheaded practicality” and formal precision in “logic”; it’s a hat, so it evokes the “thinking cap” image; it sticks to a two-syllable word at its longest, no polysyllabic euphony; and doesn’t have the faintest breath of “-ism” in it.

So in future, whenever anybody says, “But the intellectuals say X,” you can always say, “Yeah — but what does Hard-Hat Logic say?”
- Stephen J. | 01/08/2010 @ 23:01
[…] Stephen J. came up with the name for which I was searching. What is the opposite of this “intellectualism” being promoted, defended and apologia’d by people such as David Brooks of the New York Times? What is the proper moniker for that style of thinking in which you indulge in such rustic and primitive fantasies as…up is up and down is down? Terrorism is perhaps more dangerous than climate change? You know, that neanderthal mindset that ensnares most of us as we go about our laughably simple lives just, uh, you know…building things that people will actually use? As opposed to writing drivel that will line birdcages and end up as targets of dark comedy in the blogosphere? Or coming up with plans that seem to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do…ratcheting up the public debt to cure our financial ills, trying Kalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian courts to show the world how fair we are, feeding the terrorists three squares a day making sure they’re comfy while we wait for them to talk…et cetera. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/09/2010 @ 07:33
Stephen,

“Hard Hat Logic.” That is perfect. Thanks, man.

This process of decadence-through-irony has an irony of its own, I notice. From cinema to sex, from government policy to literature…these ideas that are designed with these novel “kinks” end up being machine-built, unfeeling, mass-produced and predictable. Eventually they end up being targets of parody. They end up trope-ish, they get listed on TVTropes, Family Guy makes fun of ’em. And for a truly new idea you have to put on your hard hat.
- mkfreeberg | 01/09/2010 @ 07:52
[…] Lives Who is Wesley Mouch? Definitely a Player Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXVIII “The Problem With the ‘Educated Class’” His Blank Slate X Cut This Story! David Brooks on the Tea Party Movement And That’s Three […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/09/2010 @ 15:53

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“The Problem With the ‘Educated Class'”Thursday, January 7th, 2010

“The Problem With the ‘Educated Class'”
Thursday, January 7th, 2010