Comments on: Cranky

By: Mique

Mique — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:47:21 +0000

“And that fourteen year old kid of mine, the one with the talent and the drive and the passionate commitment to the life of the mind, will get the impression, yet again, that anything to the right of Keith Olbermann is antagonistic to everything he loves.

It’s bugging me that I seem to be having a very hard time getting this across. ”

Sheesh! I’ve blown away two attempts to answer this point in detail.

To heck with the detail; let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

Your sons and, I suspect, most other kids with the ability to achieve a life of the mind will either come from privileged backgrounds with sufficient family intellectualism and relative wealth, or simply be so brilliant, like Sowell, to make it despite the real and perceived obstacles to be faced by most adequately talented people. But the reality for the rest is relative poverty, the need to work to survive all levels of their education, and to compete for limited opportunities in academia against more privileged people while
still trying to live a semblance of a normal life among family and friends who most likely share neither their talents nor their
ambitions.

Given all the real obstacles in the paths of the average life of the mind aspirants, the sort of concerns you express above about the discouragement perceived in the criticisms of “intellectuals” -
however defined, whether such criticism is informed, like Sowell’s, or ignorant, like mine, simply pale into insignificance.

Neither your son nor anyone else with the talent and ambition will take the slightest notice.

By: robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:18:42 +0000

OK, first lesson: If your primary objection to Sowell’s new book is that the title will discourage kids who don’t read it from examining conservative ideas, don’t begin the tirade with “Sowell is wrong, because by defining ‘intellectual’ differently, I can come to a different conclusion.” Start with “Sowell’s title damages his cause and mine.” For that matter, don’t wait three or four days to say that whether he’s right or wrong is immaterial to you.
(“What IS the title of Sowell’s new book, anyway?” he asks.)

Second lesson: It’s ALWAYS a bad idea to be sarcastic about a subject when you’re normally fanatical. That confuses readers. And you’re very defensive normally about the upper half of the First Tier and their degrees.

As for defining intellectuals not by what they do but by what they are, didn’t we start with a definition of an intellectual–a Jane definition, not a Sowell one–as someone working with certain ideas? That sounds more like an activity than a condition. I don’t like “definitions” which say, in effect “we know who we are,” though they can be very handy when the time comes to discard embarassments.

Which is, of course, the primary reason I dislike them.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:26:36 +0000

Maybe the word “intellectuals” has been skunked – misused so often that it either no longer has a single meaning, or has one that isn’t necessarily the ‘life of the mind’, but it soften something closer to “political polemicist”.

I can see it must be infuriating to realize that so many young people don’t even know that they can spend their lives learning, thinking and debating the really big ideas that underlie our civilization, or which are proposed as replacements for or amendments to these. And it’s even worse if they think they can, but think they have to adhere to a particular political or philosophical orthodoxy to do so. I suspect that last hasn’t always been an unusual problem, though.

But what to do about it? It’s all very well to identify a problem, but then you need a solution. Or at least, a partial solution.

And deepest sympathy for your struggles with the copyeditor. I’ve never written a book, but remember my sufferings through the editing and revision of the longest paper I ever wrote – if the person doing it had been that clueless about English, the process would have been intolerable!