Citaten uit ‘The house of intellect’ van Jacques Barzun
The worst, and even the mediocre, must be taken for granted as a cultural constant. It is waste of time to belabor shady schools, corrupt journals, stupid government officials and unscrupulous exploiters of the eternally gullable. The ignorance of the unlettered takes no scrutiny to establish. What we need to plumb is the ignorance of the educated and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual.
They (de intellectuelen) blame capitalism, the machine, the masses - everything outside themselves, and thus attain the desired status of victim. The beleaguered intellectual - it is a badge and a position in life.
This is not to say that ‘thoughtful men’ today are less intelligent, but that their powers have habitually put to other uses than reasoning. They are ‘sensitive’ minds, quick to suspect hidden bias, to note an odd turn, to assess unconscious motives in spoken and written words. All this they do with much expenditure of feeling and a penchant of communicating to their friends not their thoughts but their anxieties.
Torn between the fear of error and the fear of being thought inhuman, hating to be misunderstood and hating even worse to be misliked, we verbally cast off self-confidence and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, saying ‘frankly’ before every sentence and giving warning when we are going to be ‘candid’.
This latest substitute (kinder- en gezinsverheerlijking) for status and privilege gains strength by domesticating everything - love, study, pleasure, ambition, liberality, and the broken remnants of intellectual curiosity and conversation.
‘But Intellect isn't everything!’ Of course not. Nothing is. Only in a century that patterns its feelings on those of children, the primitive, the weak, and the unworldly, would intelligent people so readily believe that whatever is represented as good must be a panacea. Compared to food, love, and medicine, the good that Intellect brings to life is small.
The greatest danger to a democratic state is probably the contamination of its politics by Intellect. At the same time, the sound instinct which keeps apart the work of Intellect and the work of government can turn into an anti-intellectualism that is equally dangerous to both. (-) The educated voter is expected to study issues, so that he may choose programs rather than men. And it is clear that if he continues to develop his political ideas he is but a step away from intellectualizing politics. Where in all this is the menace? It lies in the possibility that, for him and others, ideas will come to seem more important than public service and social peace. The scrimmage of politics is for the purpose of determining who shall transact the government's business. If in the struggle the desire to accomplish one's purpose turns into a desire to annihilate one's opponent, the outcome is civil war. Historically, this desire to annihilate finds its support and justification in Intellect, in ideas, for ideas are clear-cut and divide. Material interests can be compromised, principles cannot.
Think of the innumerable articles that begin: ‘The term delinquency is a broad one; it covers every kind of infraction of rules, from ...’ You know at once that the chances are poor of finding an idea among the tautologies. Yet this strain is able to elicit respect, concern, and even admiration. This bland speech evacuates the mind and in the end makes it incapable of retaining anything solid.
The Middle Ages, for all their fits of puritanism and supposed fears of eternal punishment, knew how to wash away panic in laughter and make room in civilization for the dionysiac as well as for its sublimation in work. We have lost all three forms of release and can only look for ‘relaxation’, wondering why we are timid and tired, afraid of power and looking for shelter in little huts - art, the home, the religions of the East - like sufferers from agoraphobia.
Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect is as a sublime convention. (-) No scheme of inequality can be defended as corresponding to natural fact. And natural fact itself is elusive. Superior or inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. Nor can a man's qualities be added together and averaged to give a final score of merit. In short, men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal.
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