Comments on Charles Murray on Elites

• Posted by commenter on September 2, 2008 at 6:00pm EDT

• I should preface this by saying that I have not read the book (yet) but
  have seen some advance notes.

  It seems to me that Murray (and others) are saying that there are valuable,
  satisfying, even high- paying jobs that must be done where a college degree
  is unneeded and irrelevant.

  The economy and society need, at random, construction workers, police,
  farmers, fishermen, and a myriad of other jobs where college MAY be a waste
  of time and money.

  Nor are these jobs necessarily badly- paid. As a member of the "cognitive
  elite" (writer with six books published) I sometimes envy friends of my age
  who are carpenters, construction workers, even ranchers, who do a lot better
  than I do.

  By the way, great blog. I came to it originally to look at your gun posts
  via Chas Clifton of Nature Blog but have stayed for the rest.

• College
• Posted by UD on September 2, 2008 at 7:05pm EDT

• commenter: Many thanks for the kind words.

  I agree with you that plenty of good jobs don't demand a college education, and that plenty of people in college shouldn't be there -- not only because they don't need a BA for what they want to do, but also because college is expensive, and you don't want to drop out because you can't do the work, or are uninterested in studying, and then have all those loans to repay, etc.

  So I'm with Murray to this extent: I agree that far fewer people should go to college than currently go. But I also believe that lots of people should make an effort to go to the best college they can, and to take what colleges have to offer seriously. Not merely because with greater knowledge and skill they can get better jobs than they otherwise might, but because higher knowledge of the world, and a more disciplined and powerful intellect, enhance one's quality of life.

• Posted by Mike on September 3, 2008 at 5:45am EDT

• Regardless of who gets elected to office, Murray is correct that a highly-educated elite runs much of the bureaucracy, many of the corporate board rooms, and many of the foundations.

• Bumpkin-Positives
• Posted by UD on September 3, 2008 at 6:40am EDT

• Correct. And he's also correct that we should want the best possible education for this elite.

  UD only points out the oddness of so many Americans apparently preferring that the people who have by far the most power over their lives -- far more than that of corporate and non-profit leaders -- be a bit on the bumpkin side.

• Essence of education
• Posted by Small d democrat on September 3, 2008 at 8:15am EDT

• How far our country has come from the vision of its founders! Jeffersonespecially believed that "the people" could and should govern themselves, and therefore needed to be educated. If the Charles Murrays of the country have their way and only the elite are educated for leadership, we have truly lost the ideal of democracy.

• Posted by PN NJ on September 3, 2008 at 11:45am EDT

• Many voters share William Buckley's opinion of rule by elites: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

• The Booboisie
• Posted by UD on September 3, 2008 at 12:15pm EDT

• My point is forget rule by elites. They NEVER win. Let's try for rule by non-booboisies.

• Cause or Effect?
• Posted by thinker on September 4, 2008 at 11:30am EDT

• I think a question to ask is: do elite people excel at education or do people become the elite because of education? Or, perhaps more clearly, what effect does education have on intellect, if intellect is defined as ability to interpret and synthesize information?

  We have to be careful about mixing up correlation and causation. After all, literacy is strongly CORRELATED with shoe size, but not many people would argue that an increase in the size of your feet CAUSES you to be able to read.

  Full disclosure: I haven't read the book, and I have a strong emotional investment in the idea that everyone can learn.

• Elites
• Posted by Kevin Baker , Eric Hoffer, Anyone? on September 5, 2008 at 2:40pm EDT

• Ah yes, government by "the elites" - people who know better than the rest of us.

  There is much to be said for the idea.

  And much more to be said against it.

  Eric Hoffer is probably the best voice out there against it. Certainly most people do not need to go to college. Somehow over the last few decades a college degree has become, in the minds of Americans, an entitlement.

  I would be much less inclined against universal higher education were the halls of academia not populated by people whose personal philosophies could not survive anywhere but in the protected hothouses of tenure.

  Look at the people in America who have actually achieved something. How many of them first achieved a graduate degree? Our first (and only) PhD President was Woodrow Wilson - a racist and (real!) fascist. But he believed that He Knew Best!

  No thanks, I'd rather have someone with real-life experience and a reasonable IQ than someone who has spent 6, 8, or more years in the halls of academe being indoctrinated in Political Correctness. Pick up a copy of Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U for just a taste of that.

  And let me close with a quote from Hoffer - one of my favorites, from an interview he did with Eric Sevareid:

  "I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I've observed in our time. I'm convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.

  "In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.

  "In America the intellectual has neither status, nor prestige, nor influence. We, the common people, are not impressed by intellectuals. We have a disdain for pencil-pushers. We actually define efficiency by the small number of pencil-pushers. If you asked me what I consider an efficient society I'd say the ratio between the office personnel and the producing personnel.

  "The smaller the amount of supervision the better, the healthier, the more vigorous a society. The highest supervisory personnel is where the intellectuals are in power - in Communist countries. There half the population is supervising the other half. The intellectuals have a tremendous contempt for the masses. Intellectuals can't operate unless they're convinced that the masses are lazy, incompetent, dishonest; that you have to breathe down their necks, and you have to watch them all the time. We in America are sitting pretty because the masses perform only if we leave them alone. That's where we are at our best."

• Measuring Mediocrity
• Posted by Brian on September 6, 2008 at 3:05pm EDT

• A premise in this posting is problematic--indeed, painfully, obviously so. Senator McCain and Governor Palin might not have been excellent students, but their performance as students is hardly sufficient to warrant the conclusion that they are "cognitively middling." Most of the UD readers have ample experience with students who are both quite gifted and quite unmotivated where their studies are concerned. Further, not a few cognitively talented students attend the Idahos of the world. Using the institution an individual attended as a proxy for measuring that individual's intellectual abilities is, at best, evidence of laziness.

  There are other and better ways in which to argue that McCain and Palin (and Obama, and Biden) are intellectually unimpressive.

  In the interests of full disclosure, I have no connection to the Naval Academy or the University of Idaho. As a National Merit Scholar, I both majored in communication and attended a fourth-tier national university.

• Middlingism
• Posted by UD on September 7, 2008 at 3:10pm EDT

• 'A premise in this posting is problematic—indeed, painfully, obviously so. Senator McCain and Governor Palin might not have been excellent students, but their performance as students is hardly sufficient to warrant the conclusion that they are “cognitively middling.” '

  It's Murray's premise, not mine. He would, on the basis of their performance in college, label both of them cognitively un-elite, with all of the implications for his point of view that this entails -- in particular, that they should never have gone to college in the first place.

  I'm arguing in this post that people like Palin and McCain should KEEP going to college in order to enhance their level of understanding of the world - hence, I'm arguing that they have the capacity - which neither was able yet to demonstrate in the college years they experienced - to demonstrate that they are not cognitively middling.

  They weren't just not excellent students, by the way. McCain was an atrociously bad one, and Palin was average.

  My own point was not that this means Palin or McCain is unintelligent; it was that Americans have a distinct preference -- revealed in the rhetoric of your own comment, and by the comment about Hoffer -- to be led by people whose educational background suggests -- it doesn't demonstrate, but it suggests -- that they are intellectually average. Given this preference, we shouldn't, like Charles Murray, assume that our political elites will be highly-educated people. We should therefore be prescribing MORE college for many people, rather than, like Murray, arguing for less of it.

  We will certainly not know how mentally nimble and well-educated Sarah Palin is until she gives her first serious press conference or appears in her first vice-presidential debate.

• Continuing education?
• Posted by Kevin Baker , Err... No. on September 7, 2008 at 5:30pm EDT

• I'm arguing in this post that people like Palin and McCain should KEEP going to college in order to enhance their level of understanding of the world....

  Sorry, UD. Since you are a professor I understand your bias, but no. It is not necessary to "KEEP going to college" in order to "enhance" ones understanding of the world. It's quite possible, and I think preferable, to do so largely outside the halls of academe. What is a college education, after all? Is it not (largely) reading books and analyzing their content? Applying the ideas and principles espoused and gauging their effectiveness? Why is attending college the "acceptable" way of continuing education? What does actually attending college do other than provide third-party certification that you've done the work?

  Eric Hoffer, as I mentioned above, was completely self-taught. You've seen what he thought of the intellectual elites. I honestly can't say that he was wrong.

  Americans have a distinct preference — revealed in the rhetoric of your own comment, and by the comment about Hoffer — to be led by people whose educational background suggests — it doesn’t demonstrate, but it suggests — that they are intellectually average.

  No, ma'am. That is not what Americans prefer. We have a distinct preference to be led by people who do not look upon those they are supposed to be leading as though they are incapable of running their own lives without micromanagement - because we are not "intellectual elites."

  At this point I'll go out on a limb and guess that you have never read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy, nor Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass.

  Miller is correct when he says that the educated elite has an enormous influence on society. Hoffer noted it in 1946, but he noted something else as well:

  The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce, or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme -- the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

  The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.

  Hoffer also defined the intellectual elites Miller talks about in that interview with Eric Sevareid:

  I talk of a specific type of person when I talk about an intellectual. [...] To me an intellectual is a man of some education who considers himself a member of the educated elite, who thinks he has a God-given right to direct affairs. To me an intellectual doesn't even have to be intelligent in order to be an intellectual. He looked down upon the masses as if they were dirt.

  Sevareid: It's their attitude toward ordinary people that is the dividing line in your mind?

  Hoffer: That's right.

  Sowell noted:

  The views of political commentators or writers on social issues often range across a wide spectrum, but their positions on these issues are seldom random. If they are liberal, conservative, or radical on foreign policy, then they are likely to be the same on crime, abortion, or education. There is usually a coherence to their beliefs, based on a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world - a certain vision of reality.

  Visions differ of course from person to person, from society to society, and from one era to another. Visions also compete with one another, whether for the allegiance of an individual or of a whole society. But in some areas one vision so predominates over all others that it can be considered the prevailing vision of that time and place. This is the current situation among the intelligentsia of the United States and much of the Western world, however much their vision may differ from the visions of most other people. Individual variations in applying this underlying vision do not change the fundamental fact that there is a particular framework of assumptions within which most contemporary social and political discourse takes place in the media in academia, and in politics.

  The rise of the mass media, mass politics, and massive government means that the beliefs which drive a relatively small group of articulate people have great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society.

  And Dalrymple examined the results:

  (M)ost of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent).

  Literature and common sense attest that sexual relations between men and women have been fraught with difficulty down the ages because man is a conscious social being who bears a culture, and is not merely a biological being. But intellectuals in the twentieth century sought to free our sexual relations of all social, contractual, or moral obligations and meaning whatsoever, so that henceforth only raw sexual desire itself would count in our decision making.

  The intellectuals were about as sincere as Marie Antionette when she played the shepherdess. While their own sexual mores no doubt became more relaxed and liberal, they nonetheless continued to recognize inescapable obligations with regard to children, for example. Whatever they said, they didn't want a complete breakdown of family relations any more than Marie Antionette really wanted to earn her living by looking after sheep.

  But their ideas were adopted both literally and wholesale in the lowest and most vulnerable social class. If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.

  Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused at leisure - in conditions, be it remembered, of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung-fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealosy, the reverse coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.

  The connection between this loosening and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.

  The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism - a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals - has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects. When Professor Steven Pinker tells us in his best-selling book The Language Instinct (written, of course, in grammatically correct standard English, and published without spelling mistakes) that there is no grammatically correct form of language, that children require no tuition in their own language because they are destined to learn to speak it adequately for their needs, and that all forms of language are equally expressive, he is helping to enclose the underclass child in the world in which he was born. Not only will that child's teachers feel absolved from the arduous task of correcting him, but rumors of Professor Pinker's grammatical tolerance (a linguistic version of Pope's dictum that whatever is, is right) will reach the child himself. He will thenceforth resent correction as illegitimate and therefore humiliating. Eppur si mouve : whatever Professor Pinker says, the world demands correct grammar and spelling from those who would advance in it. Moreover, it is patently untrue that every man's language is equal to his needs, a fact that is obvious to anyone who has read the pitiable attempts of the underclass to communicate in writing with others, especially officialdom. Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste - a caste, almost, of Untouchables.

  --

  In the modern world, bad ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto. Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the attention of the school's head teacher and were told it did not matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone knew anyway what the misspelling meant.

  You wrote, A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country.

  What we, the average Americans, have noticed is that the intellectual elites all too often have bad ideas, and that the results of these bad ideas are, all too often, disastrous. The source of these bad ideas is, more often than not, professors pontificating from the safety of tenure, and the attitude of these intellectual elites is, all too often, one which treats non-elites like dirt.

  So we average Americans prefer people who A) seem to be tethered to the reality the rest of us share, and B) seem to be more like us than like the intellectual elites. We don't really care about their academic backgrounds one way or the other. We care about how they talk to US.

  I'd go on, but this is more than long enough as it is.

• Posted by orly on September 8, 2008 at 12:40am EDT

• It is a quintissentially leftist liberal viewpoint to repeatedly and incorrectly claim that this country needs running by someone, or that most people in this country believe the same. This country is a self-organized group of private individuals acting in their own self interest. People who want to "run" that are interfering with the basic premise of our nation. If you disagree, you're part of the problem.

• Hoffer
• Posted by UD on September 8, 2008 at 9:20am EDT

• Kevin: I appreciate the references to Hoffer in various comments of yours.

  All of his books were in my parents' library, and I know I read some of them when I was in my teens. But I don't recall much about him -- except his fascinating personal story.

  In doing a quick read of him on the web, I find much of what he wrote relevant to the Palin debate. I'm going to do some more reading of Hoffer, and then post about him at IHE.

  Again, thank you for directing me to his work.

  UD

• Hoffer on Intellectuals
• Posted by UD on September 8, 2008 at 10:11am EDT

• ... And if this website

  http://www.thoughts.com/bfparker/blog/eric-hoffer-1902-83-rememberedguru-of-the-1950s-130127/

  is rendering Hoffer's thought accurately, I think he agrees with me, and disagrees with Murray:

  "The modern age is the age of the intellectuals, those who are convinced that the masses are incapable of self-rule, that only they and fellow elites know what the masses need. The best defense against elite rule is to raise the intellectual level of everyone so that no elites exist and everyone is an intellectual."

  Of course, you could reject universities as important locations for raising intellectual levels. But Hoffer didn't. He was a professor at Berkeley.

• elites
• Posted by Clayton E. Cramer on September 8, 2008 at 10:35am EDT

• First of all, at least part of why college has become less and less elite--where 70% of graduating high school students go on to college--is a conscious decision to destroy technical and vocational education. I had a depressing conversation a couple of years back with a guy who used to be a shop teacher in Oklahoma. He told me that he was no longer a shop teacher because Oklahoma decided that shop classes were "racist" and abolished them.

  I don't know if he was exaggerating what they did or the motivation, but certainly, I have heard these sentiments expressed frequently by the left. Not everyone is intellectually suited to scholarship. Worse, primary and secondary education, especially that which is available to much of the black and Hispanic population, makes a lot of students unable to handle college, even if they have the fundamental intelligence to be scholars.

  Secondly, it is quite clear that the academic community in America has become a terribly narrow operation, cutting themselves off from any intellectual engagement with the values and concerns of people that work outside the academy. There's a reason that the range of political thought (with a few, often astonishing exceptions) ranges from liberal to Marxist, and it is because so many departments have no room for any other opinions.

• McCain's Class Rank
• Posted by Bill M. on September 8, 2008 at 11:20am EDT

• McCain went to the Naval Academy. His 894/899 class rank does not indicate how smart or academically inclined he was. Military academy class rank includes performance in military activities, physical fitness, demerits, etc etc.

  McCain could have been a brilliant scholar who couldn't be bothered to make his bed in according to military standards. I'm not saying he was, but we learn nothing from his class rank, other than he did very poorly at some of the things they ranked students on. But we don't know if it was the academics.

• Posted by Kevin Baker , Hoffer, elites, and education on September 8, 2008 at 11:50am EDT

• UD, I concur with your assessment of Hoffer's thoughts, but I'd like to point out to you your examples from your Palin piece. You quote Hoffer:

  "The best defense against elite rule is to raise the intellectual level of everyone so that no elites exist and everyone is an intellectual."

  Yet you note in the Washington Post piece that the majority of Americans - sixty years after Hoffer wrote True Believer - are ignorant, and thus not candidates for the intelligentsia.

  I do not "reject universities as important locations for raising intellectual levels." I think that's what they ought to be doing. Rather I point out that given the prevailing evidence that's not what they're doing. Instead they have become hothouses for the cultivation and nurturing of bad ideas - ideas that could not survive anywhere else. Ideas that are embraced largely because they are beautiful, rather than because they are true.

  I think it ironic that Hoffer taught at Berkeley, given that it has become one of the larger such hothouses today.

  From my perspective, the destruction of the American public education system - the system that has produced the largely ignorant population the WaPo decries - has been deliberate. This raises the question, again, of "Why?" The only answer that I can come up with is that it's easier for the elites to control the ignorant. If the world were full of intellectuals, nothing would ever get done. So the elites did their dead-level best to ensure there would be a large and easily led labor pool of proles.

  And now they decry the fact that those proles don't vote for the elites, but instead vote for other proles.

• Class Rank
• Posted by UD on September 8, 2008 at 11:55am EDT

• I know Wikipedia's not entirely reliable, but it has this:

  "McCain came into conflict with higher-ranking personnel, he did not always obey the rules, and that contributed to a low class rank (894 of 899) despite a strong intelligence. He did well in academic subjects that interested him, such as literature and history, but studied only enough to pass subjects he struggled with, such as mathematics."

  A man after my own heart.

• elite
• Posted by mike on September 8, 2008 at 3:05pm EDT

• America should be run by an elite. As defined by good character and wisdom.

  Collge and University don't turn out an elite leadership class, they turn out brainwashed PC entitlement droids wihtout an actual thought in their brain, but who think that they are unique, special and elite. The more humanities college courses attended, the less likely they are of any use to anyone.

• Posted by Colin on September 8, 2008 at 10:25pm EDT

• The last paragraph rather reminds me of Robert Lowe's famous - and rather snide - comment after the passage of Britain's second refrom Act in 1867. That Act - which Lowe bitterly opposed - vastly increased the franchise. Lowe took the view that now all that mattered was education, saying something like "now we must teach our future masters their letters". Not nice then, not so nice now. And as for college class rank, I seem to recall that Bush did better than Gore - how'd that turn out?

• Posted by emdfl on September 9, 2008 at 12:35am EDT

• Being one of the educated elites is a wonderful thing, especially f you feel you are one of them.

  But being one doesn't necessarily mean you are smart. Case in point, my brother and his wife both are PhD's and both teach music at the college level; but I wouldn't trust either or both of them together to babysit my kids. Likewise my wife's father was Chief of Surgery at the largest VA hospital in the country; but the only light switch I ever saw him install was put in upside down.

  The problem with most of those who consider themselves elites these days, is that they FEEL they have the right to tell other people - who they FEEL are not their intellectual equals - how they should run their mean, miserable little lives.

  Sorry, wrong answer, the only life they have the right to run is their own sequestered one. The one that would be impossible to lead if not for the actions of so many of those that they look down on.

• Academic or Cognitive Elite?
• Posted by DirtCrashr on September 9, 2008 at 7:15pm EDT

• I believe there's a difference between the Academic and the Cognitive Elite - at any rate if you want to get an idea of what the country probably would look like under the wise and benevolent care and leadership of the Academic Elite, why look any farther than the living example provided by the great institutions and fiefdoms they already run?
  Fiscal responsibility? They rely heavily on grants and contracts with Federal benefits - few have actually worked a day in their lives or started a business except perhaps a "virtual" one taught in the BizSchool - who turn out also incompetence in the guise of elitist, out-of-touch MBA's who have never worked an actual day in their lives but expect to run a company. And if you've worked with these stuffy nitwits you'll know that many have - run them straight into the ground. Even those institutions with major income producing centers like a Medical School frequently find they have to balance a loopy budget spent by the Dean on his favorite pork-project activities, by initiating a fundraising drive among wealthy donors. At least the "Development Officers" (nice euphemism, that) know that the poor, newly graduated, "Annual Fund" newbies have not yet hit their income-stride and are not the ones to tax heavily - but they are being prepped by constant minor solicitations.
  Social Values? Meanwhile there is much in the way of Palace intrigue including nepotism and cronyism with the resultant backstabbing, all choked in a thick gas-cloud of professional jealousy.
  Those academics who tend towards aggressive self-promotion and administrative authority rise to become Presidents, totalitarian Princes ruling over a staff of minor administrative serfs and a student body that is subdued by speech and behavior codes - constrictions that are convenient for the powers that be. The Student Body is mainly a necessary appendage of leverage, useful for its bestowal of the Tax Exempt Status that endows the financial arm of the University Administration with further levies. I'm not sure what the equivalent is on the State-University side or if there is one, but among the Private institutions it's is a prize worth more than gold. It's a shield from the wicked IRS and other prying bodies who are curious about the goings on behind the ivory towers.
  Sports? Aside from actual sweaty, smelly (and highly lucrative) "real sports," the Academics rush to collect signature-series Nobel Prizewinners - like little chessmen, they foundational game-pieces with which to bankroll further departmental growth and bludgeon adversary institutions.
  Teaching a trade? Behind the tower-walls, doctrines that have a proven and global track record of utter failure and horrific consequences are championed by ideologues within who are committed to their perpetuation at any cost, while some kinds of "Science" of dubious actual value but great Governmental Benefits and the vast opportunity for further financial growth are put forward as unquestionably, inviolably valid.
  And these guys say that they should run the Country? It sounds like they already do.

• Vocational schools and elites
• Posted by perlhaqr on September 10, 2008 at 7:55am EDT

• I can second Clayton Cramer's commentary. I'm currently enrolled at a local community college which recently changed its name from "Technical-Vocational Institute of New Mexico" to the utterly bland "Central New Mexico Community College".

  Subsequent to that, a dean was transferred from the Liberal Arts department to head up the Trades division, and she's been doing everything in her power to shut it all down. My instructors are in communication with people in similar positions at other institutions of vocational learning, and the story is the same everywhere; Welders and Machinists and A/C Repair Technicians and Auto Mechanics will shortly have nowhere to learn their trade.

  ----

  As for the main premise of the post, I think it's less that most people don't so much wish not to be led by intelligent people, as much as the wish not to be led by a******s.

• AH Factor
• Posted by UD on September 10, 2008 at 9:05am EDT

• perlhaqr: I agree with you that it's really about assholes. I'm working on a post for my other campus today - margaretsoltan.com - in which I try to be as clear as I can about the assholistic actualities that lie behind abstractions like 'elites.'

• Go tell it to the Army
• Posted by PaminaK620 on September 10, 2008 at 2:55pm EDT

• UD, it is good to see your coverage of Charles Murray's about the value of the BA. From everything you've written and the op-ed I read in the WSJ Charles Murray would not approve of what's been going on in the U.S. Army for the past couple of decades. The Army thinks that everyone needs a 4-year degree and they aren't particular about whether it’s in the liberal arts or sciences. I am speaking here primarily of the enlisted ranks, hardly a bastion of the nation's academic elite, especially now that they are recruiting felons and high school drop outs. The army doesn't care if you're a tanker, a mechanic or a Chinese linguist; soldiers are expected to work toward a degree. Many soldiers do nothing but the ones who want to get ahead take enough classes to keep the education center at their post in business. Education is part of the monthly evaluations and it is increasingly difficult to make it into the senior enlisted ranks without a degree. Every so often you meet a sergeant major with a BA in English Lit.

  Army policy never really explicitly justifies it's hang up on college for grunts, or my husband's art, philosophy and literature (BS) degree from West Point for that matter, and why you the taxpayer should fund it, so I can only try to fill in the blanks from my own nine years of service. After the Vietnam War some smarty pants generals (a few Rhodes scholars among them) decided that a voluntary professional force was best way forward for our national defense and that educating soldiers, no matter how junior, was one way to get there. I worked with multi-national forces in Germany, Kosovo and Bosnia and I would say that the U.S. has a pretty darn good army. So does Finland, where it is possible to meet a corporal with an M.A. in economics. But the Russians, oh dear, their 18 year-old draftees can't even grasp the idea of 360° security and their first line leaders were either not interested in or were not capable of teaching the concept. When I worked as a translator with a Russian infantry squad I saw that what I had learned about the Russian army in that worthless history class in college was true. Nobody below the rank of general is expected to think in the Russian army so they shoot at anything that shoots in their general direction without ever trying to determine if it is friend or foe, armed or unarmed. Concepts, judgement and leadership (management) are important for junior sergeants (even the dumb ones of whom there are many) and not just general officers in the U.S. Army so I suppose that’s why the Army keeps pushing its soldiers to take basic composition and psychology 101. I think the point is not just in getting "the piece of paper" but that continued learning in an effort to understand the intellectual traditions that have attempted to explain the world we live in has some value. Love it or hate this is the army we the taxpayers send to fight in complex situations in foreign countries that our political leaders don’t even think it’s important to try to understand.

• Posted by PaminaK620 on September 11, 2008 at 5:05am EDT

• The more I think about it Charles Murray really does seem out of touch about how the “cognitive elite running the government” think and how the grunts on the ground make decisions about who lives or dies when they knock down doors and drop bombs in the real world. A friend of mine recently told me about a class he took at the Army’s intelligence school in Arizona with a junior Army captain of Arab descent who served as a translator for General Petreus when he was in Baghdad. This captain, my friend said, went on and on in class about how we, the U.S., should try to understand the points of view informed by the competing interests of various factions in Iraq. Good grief that sounds like the relativism that those out-of-touch muddle-some elite professor’s preach from their liberal enclaves in their worthless classes. Apparently it is part of that new strategy in Iraq that John McCain is taking credit for. From listening to our esteemed (by the AIE at least) but less than academically gifted commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, for the past eight years there are no points of view there is only good and evil. From the little we know about Sarah Palin she would seem to be of a similar mind. As for the next president, John McCain is less close to God but as far as I can tell, especially in his response to the Russia – Georgia conflict, his concept of international relations is that you are either with us or against. Plus I think I also heard from our illustrious Naval Academy graduate is his recent address to the American legion that diplomacy is useless and America will not back down from its enemies. Now as for that other guy in the race, the community organizer with the Harvard degree, he would seem to go along with the junior Army captain’s suggestion that we ought to think a bit about how we operate in another part of the world, but that is precisely why we ordinary folks don’t trust him on national security.

• Intellect vs. Wisdom
• Posted by justaguy , parent & taxpayer on September 11, 2008 at 11:50am EDT

• Just an observation ...
  in this discussion I find the word intellect in one form or another 49 times. I find the word wisdom once. The problem from my perspective is that the undeniable intellect of elites translates into wisdom all too infrequently. As long as we're applying presidential leadership, the is no better example of intellect failing to manifest itself as wisdom than Bill Clinton. He could have been a great president, but displayed an appalling lack of wisdom in his personal life that (literally) spilled over into the oval office.

  To many voters, virtue trumps intellect. It takes far less intellect to make a judgment about virtue than it does intellect. As Forrest Gump said, "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." I would point out that the moral failings of conservative politicians have been punished at the polls by the same people that support candidates from third-tier colleges. Calling Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Mark Foley, Bob Ney.

  Charles Murray is quoted in the article, "College should be the place where [elites] are forced to think deeply, drawing on the best that has been written in the past about questions of virtue and the nature of the good and what is required in order to live a good life." The elites should be wise enough to apply the knowledge gained about virtue and the good life to themselves first. Today, educated men and women are not nearly as rare as virtuous men and women. The great challenge for the intellectual elites is to cultivate virtue in their own lives.

• nice discussion
• Posted by vinnie dummerino on September 11, 2008 at 12:10pm EDT

• you run a nice discussion UD even for someone like me:) Murray and others obviously haven't talked to that Howard Gardner mutiple intelligence guy at Harvard or some of those Romans and their concept of the "all rounder" which I think the American public and most publics around the world and historically have preferred and supported; over specialized academics, intellectuals and elite fans tend not to get this or what real life is about and the kind of people you want making decisions that could gore your ox if you're not one of those elite folks. You tend to want an all rounder who has had a real life somewhat like yours or one that gives them real empathy for lives like yours. Unwashed folks just aren't that dumb as Rousseau once said. Yet, I'm really glad that we have compounds and playpens for those elites like various universities and New York and a few other cities as it makes it much easier for everday life to go on with half a chance to have a little fun once in awhile too.

• Elites, education, and value
• Posted by MamaMedic on November 4, 2008 at 11:20am EST

• A thin crust of elites leading the country. Begs the question, are those elites still to be elected? and by whom? This generates an unsettling vision of an interposed class of advisers packaging the elites to garner the votes of those teeming below. Perhaps the secret mission is do away with voting in any meaningful fashion (thoughtful selection of leadership) or are we well on the way there already?

  Who said "wisdom is intelligence revealed in right action?" Can't remember, but like the spanning of heart, mind, and action.

  Let us always remember that reading the right books does not make the heart right. This triggers the image of great classical music being played as the Nazi doctor selects those will go to the right, and those who will go to the left.

  I'd like to see a moratorium on snide remarks about McCain and Palin's education backgrounds. McCain went to an elite institution. Palin attended units of the bedrock of democracy. I'd like to see more snide remarks about the quality of their current intellectual products.

  People do need to feed themselves and their families. They would like to live lives beyond mere survival. They would prefer to be able to do so by doing something not too "soul-killing". Many would like something interesting and engaging, but only if they have ever had the sensation of being interested and engaged. It is valuable to have a marketable skill. It is even more valuable to be able to do useful and interesting work across 40+ years of life in this rapidly changing world of ours and feed oneself and one's family while doing so. Sounds like vocation plus higher ed is a valuable product, and it is such a difficult package to deliver.

  I have to comment on the statement that police don't need college. Most police have some college. Next time you are sitting behind the wheel of your car on a darkened street, as the flashing lights of the patrol car behind you scatter across the dashboard and the deserted scene around, ask whether or not you would like for the flashlight-wielding silhouette approaching you to have had some engaging and interesting exposure to other cultures, modes of thought and the underpinnings of moral codes? Particularly if you are a little "other" yourself.