What's funny here is that this debate we're having presupposes the truth of what I've been arguing in this series of articles on the ancient cold war between intellectuals and the less reflective masses. You're exemplifying how the public has a grudge against intellectuals. And I pointed out that intellectuals have had an elitist grudge against less reflective people, at least since Plato.
What we're disagreeing about here is who deserves to win this cold war. Yet although my articles were slanted in favour of intellectuals, that wasn't my main interest. I was trying to stand back and to see these struggles as part of a larger conflict. Who deserves to win is a separate issue from whether there's a persistent struggle between these classes or mentalities in the first place.
Also, I'm defining "intellectual" in a wider sense. I'm talking about anyone who's interested mainly in ideas. A leader of the UK suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, for instance, was known to have been a keen reader from a very early age:
'Emmeline began to read books when she was very young, with one source claiming that she was reading as early as the age of three. She read the Odyssey at the age of nine and enjoyed the works of John Bunyan, especially his 1678 story The Pilgrim's Progress. Another of her favourite books was Thomas Carlyle's three-volume treatise The French Revolution: A History, and she later said the work "remained all [her] life a source of inspiration".'
And again, I'm not saying intellectuals are saints or that they're always right. Some ideas are dangerous. But liberal society had its leading intellectuals too.
Nor am I talking about solutions to this struggle. I'm not even assuming there is any solution, let alone that it should involve a fascist takeover or a forfeiture of your rights. If there were easy solutions, societies would have been divided along the lines of this cold war for so many thousands of years.
More likely, we're divided between those who dwell on the fact that there are no solutions, and those who just want to forget that unpleasant fact so they stop thinking so much about deep problems.
