“There’s the father that you have, who is a human being, and a man among other men, but then you have the father AS SUCH, and that’s the spirit of the father. And insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have your personal father, just like anyone else’s father, but insofar as that man is your father, that means he’s something different than just another person. What he is, is the incarnation of the spirit of the father. You don’t want to disrespect that carelessly. You think about Noah, when he makes his mistake of getting drunk on wine and Ham mocks his nakedness. And you might think, ‘Well it’s hardly Ham’s fault if his father is in such a state,’ but Genesis, there, is showing us a danger: perhaps you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, but if you’re disrespectful, then you transgress against the spirit of the father. And that loss of respect for the spirit of the father is likely to turn you into a slave. That’s a very interesting idea. Particularly when you consider our current cultural situation. We’re pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our fathers, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed toward the West. We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and ‘nakedness’, and—there’s nothing wrong with criticism—but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff, it’s not to burn everything to the ground. The goal is not to label everything as bad, but to retain what is good and move towards it. To be careless about that is deadly, because you’re inhabited by the spirit of the father insofar as you’re a cultural construction, and to be disrespectful towards that is to undermine the very structure that makes you—well, not all of what you are, certainly not all of what you are—but a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized cultural entity. If you remove the foundation you have underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It seems to me that anyone who lives in the West, at this time in history, who isn’t grateful, is half-blind at least. Because it’s never been better than this. And it’s been so much worse. In fact, it will likely be so much worse again, because for most of human history ‘so much worse’ is the norm. So we mock the nakedness of our father at our peril.”
—Jordan Peterson—
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Around late 2006, just a few months after I’d turned 15, there was a movie that came out called Accepted. The film starred Justin Long (as the 18-year-old underdog protagonist named Bartleby), Jonah Hill (as Bartleby’s screwball best friend), Blake Lively (as the hot girl Bartleby had a crush on), and comedian Lewis Black (as a disgruntled shoe store employee), and was essentially about how Bartleby didn’t want to disappoint his father by not going to college despite him being rejected by every college he applied for.
At a loss as to how to remedy his conundrum, Bartleby and his friends hatch a harebrained scheme to lease an abandoned psych ward to create a fake university called the South Harmon Institute of Technology (SHIT). Unforeseen complications occur and hijinks ensue. Unaware that the college is fake, hundreds of students flock to attend this “new kind of school” where courses on making out, skateboarding, and hookah etiquette fill the story’s 90 minutes, and Jonah Hill dons a hotdog suit while shouting to passerby women “Ask me about my weina.” It was a fairly standard 2000s teen comedy (among many which tried to mimic the success of 1999’s American Pie), but one which I think had an interesting subtext beneath its raunch and raging hormones: modern academia is itself a farce.
I look back on this otherwise very forgettable film three weeks after the American Historical Association held its annual conference in New York City, where attendees (comprised of 40% of the AHA’s membership) were treated to panels about: “Teaching Trans History in the Undergraduate Classroom”, “Navigating Current Issues of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion as Historians”, “Disrupting History: Incorporating a Native Lens in Museums”, “Trans & Queer Histories Between Germany & The U.S.”, “After Roe v. Wade: Reproductive Rights In Peril”, “The Evolving Black Freedom Struggle”, and “Rightwing Extremism Across Borders: New Perspectives on the Transnational Right”.
But if a room full of stuffy, pallor, out-of-touch academics devising schemes as to how best to cater to perpetually-aggrieved minorities weren’t enough, what later followed at the conference was the introduction of a resolution as deluded as it was unsurprising: a resolution, yea or nay, that the American Historical Association would formally accuse the State of Israel of—and this may not be a new word, but it’s certainly the first time I’ve heard it—“scholasticide”; defined as “deliberate mass destruction of education infrastructure in a specific place”. The contention being that by bombing buildings in Gaza including schools (believed to be used as headquarters by Hamas and other jihadi militants), Israel has been adding “cide” layers to its “genocide of the Palestinian people” - “scholasticide”, “domicide”, “urbicide”, “ecocide”, etcetera. (Layers that, presumably, could be turned into separate charges against Netanyahu and his cabinet members in an imagined future war crimes tribunal.)
This resolution at the AHA conference overwhelmingly passed by a margin of 428 to 88. Despite the fact that the charge against Israel of genocide has been widely and definitively debunked by reputable journalists, and even by leftwing institutions that are quite adversarial to Israel like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), who made it clear in their January 2024 ruling that they found no evidence of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In fact, during Israel’s purported “genocide”: the population of Gaza increased by 2%, the IDF routinely dropped leaflets in densely populated areas warning Gazan civilians to evacuate before launching air strikes, and over 20,000 aid trucks were allowed into Gaza by Israel to save the lives of civilians amidst the fighting. (Thinking back on other known genocides, we can recall when—in 1994 Rwanda—the Hutus warned the Tutsis to evacuate the areas they were about to enter, or when—in 1995 Srebrenica—Serbian militias gave food and medicine to the Bosnians. Oh… right... never mind.)
But the purpose of this essay is not how 40% of members of the nation’s #1 association of history scholars believe it’s their moral imperative to use the field of history to lecture students on the “correct way” to view abortion, race relations, and transgenders, or how they’re so full of shit on Israel that it’s oozing out of their ears, or how both of these things together mean that the average AHA conference attendee has an IQ low enough to keep meat safe. No, the only reason I point out the comical and tragic goings-on of the American Historical Association’s conference, is to highlight the simple fact that we are long overdue for a course correction on how academics and “experts” are perceived by the American public; especially academics and “experts” who are vocal in mainstream media outlets.
Not even seventy years ago, to be an “intellectual” meant you had a habitual curiosity you couldn’t break. It meant that you were prone to pondering great questions—of existence, of truth, of custom, of past and future—in company and in solitude, and that you had a reputation for steering conversations in philosophical, historical, scientific, or mathematical directions. It meant one of your personality traits was that of being intellectually insatiable. It meant you told witty jokes at dinner parties, and talked at length about your favorite artistic movement, and liked to read long novels by the sea. There was no barrier to entry. No committee to confer upon you worthiness or unworthiness. You could be an intellectual if you decided you wanted to be, just as one could decide upon a number of other characteristics like being stylish, outdoorsy, or athletic.
But by 1963, designating someone an “intellectual” meant something entirely different. Being an intellectual meant you went to college. It meant you were good at sitting at a desk for hours each day and listening to another person talk. It meant having the right piece of paper with the right words on it in order for you to tell others who didn’t have that piece of paper that you knew more about a subject than they did.
Why 1963 specifically?
Because that was the year Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter published his bestselling book Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, which defined someone who was anti-intellectual as “one who is suspicious of those who represent the life of the mind and has a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life,” with him later bemoaning “the categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. And the heated rhetoric about professors and those who are ‘burdened’ with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic honors.”
In other words, if you squint your eyes and cock your brow in skepticism at the artificial value placed on university credentials in the job market, or the transparently Marxist and Foucauldian bias of the majority of professors, associate professors, and administrators, it is not merely these things you attack, but the pursuit of knowledge itself.
An ardent leftist and communist (who made excuses for the crimes of Stalin as late as 1938, until the Moscow Show Trials proved too much even for him), Hofstadter took aim in his book at the American right, whom he accused of “hostility”, “pretension”, and of being “quasi-fascist” and “pathetic”. This cuts right to the heart of Hofstadter’s work: though Anti-Intellectualism In American Life was disguised as a dispassionate sociological study (which Hofstadter so desperately wanted to be viewed as in the tradition of Tocqueville), the book was a partisan project from its inception.
But the icing on the cake comes when Hofstadter flatly asserts, without evidence, that “The functions of government have become more complex. And as it has done so, experts are in greater demand. In the interest of democracy itself, the old Jacksonian suspicion of experts must be abated. The tension between democracy and the educated man now seems to be disappearing. […] Expertise must now learn to value democracy and democracy must now learn to value experts.”
I guess if we’re going to be fair, we could say that the reason for Hofstadter’s interest in changing our concept of the intellectual in order to exalt academics and see them placed into the highest positions of power is “unknown”, in the same way we could be fair in using the word “alleged” to describe the actions of a sole suspect of a crime (the nature both of Hofstadter’s livelihood and politics provides a pretty obvious motive for why he would want to tweak the meaning of such a prestigious title). But regardless of why Hofstadter sought to change how Americans defined the intellectual, his book did change how Americans defined the intellectual, and only further quickened our culture’s transition from autodidactism to credentialism, generalism to specialization, and initiative to permission. In the six decades since, being in good standing with the “intellectual gods”—so to speak—has come to mean acknowledging the academic class as the new magisterium and ordinary people as their laity. The institutions in charge of learning have become sacrosanct rather than the act of learning itself. Intellectualism is no longer exploration, intellectualism is now expertise.
And it’s amazing how quiet this revolutionary shift happened.
No reviews of Anti-Intellectualism In American Life in the year of its publication batted an eye.
No one noticed the sleight-of-hand.
The first mention at all of something being amiss with Hofstadter’s thesis came in 2008; when cultural critic and Washington Post columnist George Will remarked on the ironically anti-democratic implications of Hofstadter’s consistent sentiment throughout Anti-Intellectualism that ordinary people aren’t to be trusted with steering the direction of the democracies they live under:
“First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed by judicial fiats.”
But other than Will’s brief paragraph (which came 45 years too late), that’s about it.
To this day, when Americans hear the term “anti-intellectual”, we imagine Hofstadter’s image of the blue collar redneck who doesn’t appreciate the role their fellow citizen with a Bachelors plays as a slightly elevated serf, nor (more to the point) appreciates the role Ivy grad degree holders play as modernity’s High Priests. If only the Little League coaches, aging farmers, and church crowds would look up from their feeding troughs at Golden Corral long enough to ponder the warnings “experts” paternalistically give them about “misinformation”… if only middle aged soccer moms and fanny pack dads would pause their excitement about discounted TVs at Costco long enough to take notice of the polished “analysts” bickering back and forth on cable news… then… THEN!… maybe those plebs would at last collectively acknowledge their complete inadequacy when it comes to forming opinions about Supreme Matters of Importance.
But equating a loathing for academics, statesmen, and their sycophantic minions in media with “anti-intellectualism” ignores the fact that many of the philosophers who shaped the West never did so in a modern classroom, and in fact, more than a few gained renown in austere environments, relative poverty, and whilst enduring poor treatment from others. Diogenes, for example, slept in a large jar and ate trash alongside street dogs. Epictetus was a slave. Socrates’ sole possession was a coat. Jesus—founder of a faith that dominated Europe for seventeen hundred years and the Americas for five hundred—was a carpenter in early life and a drifter later in life. Thomas Aquinas began his philosophical and theological training while a hostage in a castle, and was nicknamed a “dumb ox” by bullying peers. Benjamin Franklin only attended grammar school for two years between ages 8-10.
Equating a loathing for academics, statesmen, and their sycophantic minions in media with “anti-intellectualism” also ignores the fact that fancy people with fancy degrees from fancy schools have been responsible for the worst ideas and decisions of this century and the last: eugenics, lobotomies, the atom bomb, MK-Ultra, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, subprime mortgages, bank bailouts, Covid lockdowns, Modern Monetary Theory, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and nearly 16000 pharmaceutical drug recalls. Even if we ceded for a moment that “unwashed” regular folks who don’t know enough of the “right things” or believe too much of the “wrong things” posed some kind of threat to our society, you could not make the case that the crackpot podcaster who denies the moon landing or YouTube pastor who denies evolution have, in any way, done more damage to the nation’s stability, efficiency, and reputation than “esteemed” secretaries of state, presidents, congressmen, advisors, consultants, lawyers, scientists, and—yes—professors. I’m reminded of the quote (though I don’t remember its source) that “Dumb people can make a mess, but only an intelligent elite can create a catastrophe.”
But what really is my point with all this? What exactly am I driving at by railing against the monopoly academia now holds over the descriptor “intellectual”?
To be clear, universities have existed for over a thousand years, and attaining an education from one in a field that requires special knowledge and complex problem-solving is both impressive and necessary. To argue otherwise would be foolish.
We the public, after all, do have an interest in someone having proof of qualification to work as an engineer.
We the public do have an interest in someone having proof of qualification to work as a surgeon.
We the public do have an interest in someone having proof of qualification to work as a pilot.
There are indeed quite a few professions where we’re going to need to see some kind of certification in order to trust that a person won’t accidentally kill or maim us in some horrifically grotesque way, and colleges are an excellent path toward attaining the crucial knowledge needed to earn that certification.
So I’m not knocking any of that. And I would never advocate for something so stupid as the abolition of the university.
No, my point in hammering this shift in the mid-20th century of who could be defined as an intellectual, is that at the same cultural moment Hofstadter and likeminded colleagues redefined who could be considered an “intellectual” (only academics and bureaucrats, and only from accredited places; no independent “self-taughts” in the general populace emerging from nowhere), there was also a successful concerted effort by the American left to infiltrate and take over educational institutions so that only their academics could be considered intellectuals while any who opposed them were on the outs.
It was double-gatekeeping.
In a decade, we went from “Anyone can be an intellectual if they have a deep internal life, sense of curiosity, and imagination regardless of educational background” to “You can only be an intellectual if you have the right credentials AND if your views are in line with the majority of your leftwing peers.” A heterodox academic then, just like the working class person without a degree, cannot be an intellectual in this system.
While one might try and argue (however weakly) that Richard Hofstadter was never actively coordinating along with fellow leftists a takeover of academic institutions, the same could not be said of his Columbia colleague, professor of sociology C. Wright Mills. Mills, who, like Hofstadter, was another zealous communist, became the first to articulate the plot’s implementation in his 1960 essay Letter To The New Left, when he preached:
“We [the New Left] have got to study new generations of intellectuals around the world as real live agencies of historic change. […] ‘But isn’t it all so ambiguous?’ Of course it is. History-making is always ambiguous. Wait a bit. In the meantime, [New Left professors] should help students focus their moral upsurge in less ambiguous political ways. Work out with them the ideologies, the strategies, the theories that will help them consolidate their efforts; new theories of structural changes of and by human societies in our epoch.”
This was followed two years later in 1962 by the Port Huron Statement from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who aspired to make their social movement “a vision and program in campuses and communities across the country”.
The SDS, by planning and doing so, was only foreshadowing German activist Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions” (1967), where every organization—not just educational but governmental and corporate—could be commandeered for the purposes of the left once infiltrated by a critical mass of likeminded fellow travelers. A strategy progressive political theorist Saul Alinsky echoed in his 1971 book Rules For Radicals, where he opined “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism but cut their hair, put on suits, and change the system from within.”
Over the course of the last six decades, the leftwing takeover of academic institutions was so successful and so thorough, it even caused the co-editor of Dissent magazine to gloat in 2021:
“Even if the radicalism of the professoriate is overstated, the spectrum of debate within most universities has moved decisively to the left. […] Both academia and the left get something out of their relationship: the former borrow the moral authority of progressive movements, the latter gains a foothold in a major institution with all the material benefits.”
2500 years ago, Socrates introduced epistemology to his fellow Athenians: a method that allows those who apply it to grasp a number of subjects in different fields by simply asking a series of cascading what/when/where/why/if questions until either an insurmountable contradiction is revealed or a root premise is reached. This Socratic method became such a cornerstone of Western philosophy and logic, that until sixty years ago American educators used to teach it as early as junior high. No longer. The most dangerous situation an activist class of “educators” can encounter is students who know how to think, because epistemological reasoning might cause some bright young thing to raise her hand and ask what the metaphysical assumptions and telos of progressivism actually are; so it’s imperative instead to teach students what to think.
And for those of us who have paid any attention to the United States and Europe over the past 12-13 years, the “what to think” taught on college campuses and in high schools has not remained confined to those places, but has spilled over into every facet of cultural life: a hatred of Western civilization, a glamorization of indigenous peoples as “noble savages”, a belligerent celebration of sexual perversion, a glorification of Islamic jihadism as “anti-colonialist resistance”, a distrust of Christians and Jews, and an elevation of nature over man. Furthermore, universities’ emphasis on “deconstructing” a work of philosophy, history, art, film, or literature is no longer deconstruction in the Socratic sense of taking apart an idea to examine its pieces only to either reassemble it with a better understanding (if it was worthy) or replace the idea with a better one (if it was not); the new deconstruction is about rendering all ethical judgements as relative and all truths as subjective, until the mind enters into a mushy uncertainty about any topic or crises that fall outside the scope of progressivism (whose own moral pronouncements are ironically treated as objective and non-negotiable). A fungal rot of moral and intellectual impotence spreads in this way from its source to blooms once-promising and unsuspecting. You notice this about a lot of college students and recent graduates: the only stance they’re certain about taking is that of making vague paeans to “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion”, but beyond these they don’t think much about anything at all. There’s no good music or bad music, there’s no beautiful art or ugly art, there’s no sensible fashion or ridiculous fashion, they never remark on whether a meal is delicious or just so-so… at the end of four years they feel nothing about everything. At the end of four years they’re taught that all but a very limited amount of politically-approved judgements are uncouth.
This leads me back to the subject of what we need universities for and what we don’t (or rather shouldn’t) need them for: while university is essential for “hard subjects” like medicine or engineering or math or advanced chemistry (which due to their uncompromising equations, testing methods, and quick delivery of successful or failed outcomes, leave little room for error let alone ideological shenanigans), there are plenty of “soft subjects” that tend to invite ideological infiltration which at the same time—frankly—don’t require university instruction to become a true expert in: philosophy, history, and literature.
If you wish to pursue a degree in any of these “soft subjects”, that’s fine, as long as you either a) develop a high resistance to the rank bias you will encounter, or b) choose one of the few colleges explicitly devoted to resisting leftist indoctrination (e.g. Liberty, Hillsdale, Grove City, Franciscan, or New Saint Andrews). And sadly, due to the job market and a lot of companies currently requiring applicants to have a bachelors degree (in any subject) for jobs that don’t necessitate them, sometimes majoring in a “soft subject” is the only option for those of us not mathematically, scientifically, or technically minded. But my point, simply, is that given the history of how the definition of “intellectual” was changed to suit the needs of a particular political group, you shouldn’t feel like you have to get a degree in philosophy, history, or literature in order to be considered a good philosopher, historian, or writer. Anyone can become proficient in these subjects if they develop a genuine lifelong interest by reading enough books and watching enough documentaries; especially 30+ years into the age of the internet, where the majority of information is free and where it usually takes the application of half a brain cell to determine what sources are credible and which are not.
I am not convinced that an HVAC repairman “who really has a passion for coronary revascularization” can, after ten years of reading textbooks about coronary revascularization, successfully operate on my heart just like a doctor. But I am convinced that an HVAC repairman “who really has a passion for the Battle of Gettysburg” can, after ten years of reading about said battle, successfully tell me pretty much everything I want to know about that battle just like a PhD. And this instantly recognizable disparity between subjects should snap us out of the gross equivalency we have been taught over the last sixty years to apply when we consign competency and expertise, by viewing the history degree as being of the same necessity for its enthusiasts as the medical school degree is for its practitioners.
The divide between liberal/leftwing elites (who have monopolized “intellectual” like a knighthood they can award to the “worthy” like monarchs) and the rest of us has become no more obvious than during the rise of Trump in 2016 and in the near decade since. The derision and bitterness aimed at common folk by op-ed writers of major newspapers, famous tenured professors, Democratic politicians, and celebrities brought to the public’s attention for the first time how those in the top income and education bracket saw themselves as a different and more perfect species than the rest of us. And this “different and more perfect species” would only feign love and concern for the general public in the wake of misfortune or tragedy if we did what they told us to do. (Ever notice how the wildfires in “blue” Los Angeles were covered more frequently and for a much longer period of time than the hurricane of “red” North Carolina four months prior?) Their contempt, then, comes from this place of snobby resentment that the plumber dares have an opinion on foreign policy that’s not in alignment with the New York Times. It comes from this attitude that the electrician or the welder or the waiter ought not veer out of their depth into subjects pertaining to economics or culture war issues unless they’ve been thoroughly catechized by NPR. And it was certainly the mentality at play when New Republic, for instance, accused the right of “pandering to the uneducated and least sophisticated members of society”. Does this accusation not more severely indict the accuser than the accused? 77 million voters cast their ballots for Trump in the 2024 election. Are 77 million citizens really to be so flippantly demeaned as the “least sophisticated”? Well, New Republic thinks they are to be. And so does the rest of mainstream media, which functions as the propaganda arm of bureaucrats and academics who fancy themselves and are fancied by others as “intellectuals”.
Against these types we ought plant our flags firmly and make our declarations clear: That nothing is more antithetical to wonder than enforced consensus, nor as ironic as enforced consensus about the ambiguity of morals and truth. Nothing is more hypocritical than worshipping nature in the environmental sphere whilst rebelling against it in the sexual one. And nothing is more repugnant than a person who hates their own tribe, their own people, their own country, and always blindly takes the side of those who oppose them. We ought to say in disbelief—to ourselves and to any who will listen—“These ‘values’ are held dear by the academic class and they still expect to be called intellectuals? What candle do such ‘intellectuals’ hold to Herman Melville (who did not go to college)? Who among them has bested Mark Twain (who did not go to college)? In what proximity are they to the titans of architecture, literature, industry, science, and politics like Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip K. Dick, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, or Abraham Lincoln (all of whom did not go to college)?
Having said everything I’ve needed to say on this subject and having said it to the best of my ability—that academia today is in a mess, that this mess has been a long time in the making and only now has reached the peak of its absurdity, and that even at the peak of its absurdity it still expects deference and reverence from “the peasants”—I’m deciding to end the essay by taking on a bit of snide taunting Hofstadter chose to engage in toward the beginning of his book that (again) highlights the disdain the elite in American society have toward the masses whom they see as beneath them.
He writes, sarcastically, as if the idiocy of the statement is self-evident:
“Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate, snobbish, and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools. Not surprisingly, institutions in which intellectuals tend to be influential, like universities, are rotten to the core. In any case, the discipline of the heart and the old-fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art. Even with elementary education, schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its conduct and threatens to produce social decadence.”
Chopping this up one piece at a time:
“Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate, snobbish, and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive.”
In most cases yes. The modern academic institution and majority of staff who teach at them are all of those things.
“The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools.”
Again, in most cases yes.
“Not surprisingly, institutions in which intellectuals tend to be influential, like universities, are rotten to the core.”
Absolutely.
“In any case, the discipline of the heart and the old-fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art. Even with elementary education, schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its conduct and threatens to produce social decadence.”
Well, rather than respond to the sarcasm of this last part myself, I’ll leave the rebuttal to three other gentlemen: G.K. Chesterton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Pat Buchanan.
When Hofstadter, for instance, says “In any case, the discipline of the heart and the old-fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art,” Chesterton no doubt would have been quick to retort about the alleged value of “trends in thought and art” that “Fallacies do not cease to become fallacies because they become fashions”, and further that it would not be wise for universities to produce “people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday”. Meanwhile Roosevelt would have simply reminded Hofstadter that “To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
When Hofstadter huffs and snorts, “Even with elementary education, schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its mode of conduct and threatens to produce social decadence,” Buchanan might reply that what the Columbia professor derides as mere “physical and emotional life” (separate from his hallowed “intellectual life”) instead should merely be labeled virtue and vitality. Buchanan also would have been quick to counter the charge of anti-intellectualism levied more broadly against conservatives by Hofstadter in his book, by answering “The ancient indictment against men of the Right is that, deep down inside, we are anti-intellectual. We distrust men of thought. We are more at home in the world of legend and myth and faith than in the cooler realms of reason. While understandable, the charge is itself simplistic and false. What we believe, rather, is that faith precedes reason, that affection precedes understanding, and that before we come to know we must first believe. Growing up, we did not have to have it explained to us that we should stand by our brothers and sisters and family and friends. That came naturally. To us, the right and honorable duty of men of words and men of thought is not simply to seek and record abstract truth, but to deploy our talents and arguments of the mind to defend the treasures of the heart: family, faith, and country. When a man of thought uses the weapons of the mind to attack his own—family, faith, or country—this, to us, is truly the trahison des clercs, the treason of the intellectuals.”
