First thing we do, let’s kill all the intellectuals

Why? Here’s why:

Because the intelligentsia has displayed a consistent political pattern over the last 150 years: believing in its own intellectual and moral superiority, it has sought a leading role in politics, promoting a vision of itself as benign philosopher-kings who can steer society to virtue, equality, and fulfillment.

The vehicles of this belief have been many. At its worst, it has led the intelligentsia to endorse and propagandize for totalizing systems like Communism, which the intelligentsia conceived could be guided to good ends in its use of power by – who else? – intellectuals. It is forgotten, but true, that before World War II many intellectuals were attracted to Fascism for the same reason. In this way much of the intelligentsia of the 20th century became accomplices in and apologists for the most hideous mass murders in human history.

This is why I am not entirely comfortable with being called an intellectual. To many people who never went to college, “intellectuals” still equates to “those people who tried to betray us to the totalitarians”. There is enough justice in that charge to make me flinch. And it is not yesterday’s charge, either; the intelligentsia’s determined persecution of refugees from Islamic oppression and anyone else who dares speak truthfully about it are as disgraceful today as Walter Duranty’s paeans to Stalinism were in the 1930s.

I have argued elsewhere that the West’s intelligentsia were successfully subverted by Soviet memetic warfare, and I believe that Gramscian damage remains a central problem in Western politics. But my charge here does not depend on that model. The desire of the intelligentsia to become philosopher-kings predates the Soviets or even Marxism per se; it is already visible in the early 19th century, tangled up in debates about meritocracy and the establishment or disestablishment of religion.

Even where the intelligentsia has not attached itself to totalizing political ideologies, the effects of its belief in its own superiority have been consistent. Technocratic, credentialist, and statist – the intelligentsia perpetually urges us to cede control of our lives to the smart people, the educated ones, the experts, the selected elite – if not the intellectuals, then the bureaucratic machines guided by intellectuals.

But as is almost always true, they’re not as smart as they think they are:

To every action, a reaction. Much “anti-intellectualism” is a reaction against intellegentsian neo-clericalism. Of course the intelligentsia, sensing this, caricatures the opposition as yokels, know-nothings, and reactionaries. But the uncomfortable questions won’t go away. If you’re so bright, why the constant sucking up to dictators? If you’re so bright, why are modern art and literature such a depressing wasteland? If you’re so bright, why do so many of your grand social-engineering schemes end in corruption and tears?

They might be smart and learned and all that, but it doesn’t mean they’re wise. And in any event, they’re still human, and contrary to the Progressivist fantasy, humans ain’t perfectible. It’s not so much that anti-intellectuals hate intellectuals per se; it’s that they hate bossheads and enslavers, both actual and would-be.

(Via Bill)

Update! Related, in a small but grim way:

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.

Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands.

But certain of the intellectuals blast right by that humbling lesson, to arrive instead at the warm, soft cocoon of smug narcissism and arrogance…thereby reinforcing the contempt and distrust they’ve so richly earned from the rest of us. God has a sense of humor, all right–a very bitter and cutting one.

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