Excerpted from “Writing In The Age Of The Idiot,” this week’s WND.COM column:
“The reasons for addressing readers’ responses to last week’s column, “Paleoconservative Hypocrisy” [not my title], lie not in an exaggerated sense of self-importance, but in a sense of urgency. For some particularly jarring retorts (these have become ubiquitous over the years) are emblematic of the triumph of twiddle dumb and twiddle dumber in American culture and politics. And that’s a problem.
Super smart sorts still predominate in the few professional niches in which advanced skill and aptitude are necessary if bridges are to keep from falling, airplanes to remain airborne, and their human cargo pacified with electronic gadgets. Otherwise, an intellectual underclass has risen to dominate America in almost every field of endeavor.
Once upon-a-time simpletons sought self-improvement. No longer; in the Age of the Idiot they are groomed to be oblivious to their shortcomings—and will proceed loudly and aggressively against those who fail to mirror their mindset. … On encountering someone he might learn from, he unfurls an “untamed Id” and an inflated Ego in all their fury.
So it was that Ivan Poulter wrote to inform me that … although he meant no insult, he nevertheless needed to inform me that I ‘also appear as some kind of dumb-ass in [my] exaggerated intelligence.'”
Believe it or not, but one Founding Founders forewarned of the “Idiocracy,” although not quite in those words. More in the column “Writing In The Age Of The Idiot,” which can be read on the weekends on Taki’s too.
Update I (Oct. 9): George Pal’s comment hereunder about the association between democratic mass society and mass stupidity is an important one. I wanted to include this observation, plus a reference from a “dumb-ass with an exaggerated intelligence”—can’t recall if it was Hoppe or Huntington—but I dropped the idea. Too many ideas in one column might have caused a riot.
Update II: Regarding Clay Shirky (whoever he may be, posted by anon): the man belongs to the postmodern tradition—a “tradition” that has managed to almost completely dismantle one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization: the intellectual discipline. (Hint: this is why you “study” so-called “social sciences” o “cultural studies” in secondary and tertiary schools and not history.)
“Intellectual disciplines were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)
The concept of the intellectual discipline is inseparable from Western canon and curriculum.
