More Self-Assured Than Smart

One of many delightful moments in the movie The Fugitive occurs when a colleague of fugitive Dr. Kimble confidently informs Federal Marshal Gerard and his assistant that they will not succeed in finding Kimble. When Gerard wonders what makes him so sure, the colleague replies, “He’s too smart for you.” Upon which the marshal and his assistant don quizzical looks and speak just two words: “We’re smart?” The words are uttered less as an assertion than a question; they express not arrogant self-assertion but good-natured, sociable, wisely moderate confidence. In this scene, as in others, Gerard turns out to be rather charming.

This article, by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, is perceptive in its own way, but maybe a little too generous in its willingness to concede that those with democratic leanings are “smart.” Douthat proposes to offer some corrections to the recent well publicized article by Angelo Codevilla, which described the polarization of contemporary American political life into an elite class and a country class. Douthat thinks that the demarcation between liberal and conservative views is not nearly so clear as Codevilla claims it is. The real difference between liberals and conservatives, according to Douthat, is the one that Codevilla identifies as more a false difference than a real one: namely that liberals are smarter than conservatives. To his credit, it must be acknowledged that Douthat doesn’t beat around the bush. He works hard to help even the most challenged among us to understand that the Democrats on the whole, and especially the ones surrounding Barack Obama, really are smarter than the rest of us.

The truth, though, is that this is a deeper matter than Douthat suggests. It is true enough that the “country class” does not, on the whole, shine when it comes to intellectual sophistication — though there are some very significant, if not entirely well known, exceptions. But neither, on the other hand, does the ruling class shine when it comes to being sensible about matters of common ordinary judgment, such as being faithful in marriage, spending within one’s limits, or respecting religious traditions and customs.

The seeds of this division in the political landscape have been planted and sown now for over a century. Their garden has been the schools and universities, and the first gardeners were second-rate philosophers such as John Dewey, themselves heirs of the so-called enlightenment. At bottom, therefore, this dispute is about academic intellectual culture and its role in contemporary American life. And accordingly, the mode of discourse appropriate to resolving this dispute is not primarily rhetorical or journalistic.

There are, however, some fundamental clarifications and distinctions which can serve as universal bases for discussion, even in the coffee shop or town hall. One important distinction, which Douthat notes at least in passing, is the distinction between wisdom and “raw intelligence.” Contemporary American culture holds the latter in very high regard, to the point of confusing it with the former. It doesn’t help that most contemporary intellectual currents tend to deny that human intelligence is perfectible by anything but itself. This is an essentially Marxist-Hegelian view, which in the end makes raw intelligence and wisdom identical in their non-being. This is the sort of issue that is really at stake, if one really intends to take intellectual matters seriously.

But maybe even some smarter Democrats will instinctively shy away from such ethereal questions. That brings me to a further point. The Tea Party, which Democrats take such joy in maligning, is not founded on intellectual sophistication; but it is founded on something which we would all, if we understood it better, regard as the absolutely indispensable condition for any intellectual progress whatsoever. I am referring to common, ordinary conceptions: what the Greeks called axiomata, and later Latin scholars called dignitates. The names mean just what they suggest: that there are things which deserve to be recognized immediately on their own account. They are axiomatic not because they can be proven, but because they bear their own evidence within themselves without any need for proof. Many of them are the sorts of things about which Aristotle famously observed that they neither are nor can be imparted by argument, but only, if at all, by appropriate discipline.

Intellectual culture in the late middle ages became corrupt partly because of gross oversimplifications about what all this means. But it was never wrong to recognize that one must start somewhere, that there is a first vague contact with reality without which all the raw intelligence in the world gets us nowhere. Members of the Tea Party, not unlike our forbears in the early colonies, are indeed not burdened with what some people proudly refer to as “nuances.” Tea Partiers recognize the simpler and more fundamental things, the axiomata. For all the scorn that has been and probably will continue to be heaped on the Tea Party, the truth is that its members suffer from no greater evil than an unshakable awareness of first things. If more sophisticated “intelligent” people have talked themselves out of that awareness, they have no one to blame but themselves, and in the end their “raw intelligence” will come to naught. The turtle will defeat the hare.

At the end of the day, what must be understood is that the intellectual culture of the West is not Intellectual Culture itself. Its contours could have been very different from what they are. And while our more modern intellectual culture has, to be sure, many facets, there is one very large rotten pillar resting beneath it. That pillar is the rejection of God, which grew up in the classical modern thought of Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Rousseau, Fuerbach, and others. More elaborately: the view in question is that “God” is a hypothesis, useful for personal edification, quieting the masses, or perhaps mere psychological sedation, but not consistent with the new science, with the demands of reason, which has learned over the centuries how to be coldly positivist, open to alternatives, and wary about any connection between the concepts of “real” and “good.”

This view goes hand in hand with an immature and now outdated, but still remarkably influential, understanding of the role of reason in human life, and a consequently truncated view of our understanding of what reason enables us to do. The immature view treats reason as if it were some strange disembodied, depersonalized substance, separate from the I who owns it; it’s signature expression (though often apparently inadvertent) at one time was, “the mind knows….” In this understanding of reason, the forum of rational activity (at least when we are being “scientific,” which is what we must aspire to) must absolutely exclude intuitions about the the good, the honorable, the beautiful, or about metaphysical causality. Though this account of reason is far from axiomatic, many now treat it as axiomatic. It has led to an almost universal misconception concerning the role of faith in human life (not just religious faith, but any faith; even, for example, the faith you have in your mother when she says that she is your mother) which is grotesque at best, yet scarcely any longer recognized as grotesque. And so it was only to be expected that later such a disemboweled reason would come to be despised, and in its place installed a caricaturish sort of intelligence which never ceases to be raw, because we like it that way. And so now we witness this worship of raw intelligence, along with a declining scientism which is nothing but a peculiar vestige of the classical modern rationalism.

The irony is that this intellectual culture is only self-evident to its contemporary adherents in the way that familiar things are always self-evident — which is to say that it is not self-evident at all; which is to say that what we have been describing as the “ruling,” or “elite” class suffers from the very malady which it scornfully attributes to the country class: the malady, namely, of taking the familiar for the obvious. The country class at least bears the distinctive honor of remaining more or less familiar with real things, instead of the peculiar rational constructs of a discredited “enlightenment,” or its even stranger offspring. Is a return to reality, perceived on a relatively naive level, enough? Probably not. But at least it’s a start.

That’s more that can be said for the smart people.

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