The Fool and the Intellectual

I am not an intellectual. At least, I hope not. If someone should accuse me of being an intellectual, I should examine my conscience for the behavior that led them to such a conclusion and, on finding it, repent my sin. All the same, it is true that for much of my life I aspired to be considered an intellectual. Even now, that aspiration lies in my soul waiting to trip me up.

Of course, I’m not against education, knowledge, or intelligence in themselves. But one of the fatal flaws of our culture is that we’ve confused intelligence with wisdom. In fact, we’ve discarded wisdom in favor of intelligence because “knowledge is power.” (The problem with anyone who seeks power is that they’re rarely humble enough to fear they may misuse it.) We have made intelligence totemic and advanced degrees the hallmark of superiority. And in the process, we often give too much credence to people who have, to one degree or another, taken leave of their senses and thought themselves into verbose functional idiocy.

I just spent the last few days immersed in natural philosophy, indulging my casual, neophyte Aristotelianism as Edward Feser battled with problems and errors brought on by the mechanistic view of the universe. As a break from the heavy work, I decided to crack open a collection of G. K. Chesterton’s work, selecting Alarms and Discursions.

In “A Drama of Dolls”, the Apostle of Common Sense relates his experience of watching a medieval German puppet show, translated into English, of the tale of Doctor Faustus. At the end of the play, as Faustus seeks to escape from damnation, he asks help from his former servant Caspar, now the city watchman, who suggests the doctor take shelter with his wife. “The devils are more afraid of her than you are of them,” he explains. Chesterton concludes, “Faustus does not take this advice, but goes on meditating and reflecting (which had been his mistake all along) until the clock strikes twelve, and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven. So Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little black imps; and serve him right for being an Intellectual.”

As soon as I read this, I thought of the postmodernists, whose rejection of Western thought (postmodern critique itself is a product of desiccated Western thought) has led them to preach that notions such as fact, truth, and even reality are all social constructs, essentially convenient fictions created through language which we can change at will.

I thought of the reductivists and eliminativists, who began with the assumption that all nature is machine-like, and have reached the inevitable conclusion that we have no free will, that thought and consciousness are persistent illusions, and that we’re essentially organic robots carrying out highly complex programs.

A quote from H. L. Mencken teased my mind about how such an intellectualism can be improved by “a good whiff of the Chicago stockyards.” Or physicist Alan Sokal, who told his poststructuralist critics, “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.” (So far as I know, no one has taken him up on his offer.)

Intellectualism began by celebrating the life of the mind and has ended in denying the existence of the mind. It began as a search for knowledge and has ended in questioning whether we can know anything. Isaac Asimov once argued that Socrates’ claim to know very little was really arrogant, but at least Socrates had the grace to include everybody in his state of ignorance. The modern intellectuals have unconsciously abstracted themselves from the human condition. Only this can explain why they congratulate themselves for committing mental suicide.

When people like me speak of common sense, the word common means “owned by or available to all.” It’s the kind of wisdom that allows us not only to survive but to thrive in our society and environment. It’s the kind of wisdom everyone should have, the kind of wisdom education should build on and supplement rather than contradict. Even people with advanced degrees can have common sense, and many do; they haven’t allowed multiple layers of theory to separate them from the real world.

But intellectuals take the word common to mean “ordinary, popular, average”, the antonym of “special” or “elite.” Common sense is a bane to intellectuals, who sniff at the pseudo-knowledge of the low-information sheeple. “Common sense is for common people,” they snort. “Common sense,” sneered Stuart Chase, “is that which tells us the earth is flat.” In the language of the postmodern left, common sense is simply the kind of reasoning which justifies “regressive” legislation and policies — the diametric opposite of critical thinking.

Postmodern “critical thinking” tells us reality is a social construct. For what it’s worth.

It may be a sign of health and sanity to rebel against tyrants; your mileage may vary. But it’s an even clearer sign of health and sanity to laugh at elites. Elites are classes of people who almost by definition have taken themselves too seriously, and as a result, have lost the ability to see their own errors and laugh at their own follies. Chesterton elsewhere reminds us that “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,” while “Satan fell through the force of gravity.” Sin makes you stupid, it’s been said, and nothing is so conducive to stupidity as pride.

’Tis not by guilt the onward sweep

Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;

’Tis by our follies that so long

We hold the earth from heaven away.

—Edward Rowland Sills, “The Fool’s Prayer”

I suppose intellectuals have their uses, and that we should thank them for having brought us some benefits, though many of the benefits have brought other problems in their wakes (vide Law of Unintended Consequences). However, they need to be reminded every now and again that they’re just as human as we are, prone to sin and error like the rest of us. We need to remind ourselves as well, lest we turn Intellect into a deity. And they need to be kept in their place lest — God forbid — we actually allow them to rule us.

As for me, I shall go on believing that there really is a real, that the redness of an apple is a property of the apple and not a projection of my mind, and that the unusual doesn’t invalidate the ordinary but rather highlights its ordinariness. Call me a fool, if you will; I encourage you to laugh at me. I laugh at myself. I have been a fool in the past and will doubtless be a fool in the future. And everything that’s unique about me cannot erase what’s in me that’s common to us all. For I am both a child of God and a sinner.

Lord, be merciful to me, a fool.