"Too Smart To Be So Dumb"

A sharp and enjoyable article by Joel Engel in The Weekly Standard, May 27:

.... If it were true that a high I.Q. in and of itself guaranteed peace and prosperity, then we should appoint Stephen Hawking president right now and be done with it. But I don't want Professor Hawking as president, nor any of the other truly brilliant people I know. Yes, it's thrilling to sit at a dinner table and behold gifted minds interacting with other gifted minds, and to read and watch and listen to their works of genius. But that's not the same as admiring their character, which is often less developed than their ability to slash a Z on someone's chest with their wit. Anyway, for all their verbal eloquence and artistic finger-pointing, which big issues, exactly, have the reigning intelligentsia been correct about in the last 40 years? One would be hard-pressed to compose a short list.

The truth, which Orwell pointed out, is that truly brilliant people and truly talented people often believe truly stupid things: G.B. Shaw believed in Hitler and Stalin. Norman Mailer believed that convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbot deserved to be paroled because he could write well (and that we went to war in Iraq to bolster the white-male ego). Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich believed that the few hundred of us still alive after the ecological holocaust of the '80s and '90s would be living in caves. The academic establishment believed in the efficacy of bilingual education and largely continues to believe that communism spreads prosperity and social justice. Princeton professor of bioethics Peter Singer believes that parents ought to be able to murder their disabled children. And Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta believes that a 70-year-old lady from Vero Beach and a young Arab man chanting Koranic verses are equally likely to hijack a plane.

The best and the brightest, as we learned from JFK's advisers, offer little protection against absolute foolishness -- and may, perhaps, be more susceptible to it, given the anecdotal evidence suggesting that brilliance and common sense are inversely correlated. It's no wonder Castro hoped Bush wouldn't be "as stupid as he seems." For 40 years the dictator has been surrounded and visited by brilliant people who swear that he's brilliant and benevolent -- and if Bush were indeed a dimwit, he might see right through Castro and conclude that all those people willing to brave sharks, drowning, dehydration, and firing squads to escape from Cuba actually recognize something that the dictator's brilliant admirers do not.

Common sense is both rarer and more important to successful leadership than is genius, a fact true since before Voltaire first noticed it. Harry Truman, a man without a college education, had it; as did FDR, whose second-rate intellect, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, took orders from a first-class temperament. Ronald Reagan had it, and so does George W. Bush....

It may be read as a companion piece, so to speak, of Tony Blankley's "George 'Machiavelli' Bush? Nah", blogged earlier today. (Indeed, I wonder if Engel's piece may not have been a springboard for some thoughts in Blankley's.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 06/07/03 01:14:04 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"Terrorism and Other 'Scholarly Pursuits'"

A hard-hitting editorial in The Weekly Standard, dated June 16, revealing that the American Association of University Professors may be poised to betray some of its own founding principles:

Meeting this week here in Washington, our nation's scholarly community, through the American Association of University Professors duly assembled, stands poised to commit an act of self-betrayal the depth of which is without obvious precedent in the history of American higher education....

To wit: The American Association of University Professors appears inclined to blacklist the University of South Florida (USF) -- by a formal, annual-convention vote of indefinite "censure" this coming Saturday -- as punishment for the steps that school has taken to terminate the employment of Prof. Sami Al-Arian. Whom we have met before, many times, in these pages. And whose decades-long "active extramural interest in Palestinian and Islamic developments," as AAUP investigators have blandly glossed the matter, has lately earned him solitary confinement at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Sumter County, Florida, pending trial on a detailed, massive, multi-count terrorism-conspiracy indictment....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 06/07/03 10:53:36 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"George 'Machiavelli' Bush? Nah"

An excellent op-ed from Tony Blankley in WaTi, June 4:

Until about two weeks ago, our friends in the liberal media, the Democratic Party, the State Department and France had consistently accused our president of being a simpleton. He was not like them, with their beautiful, subtle minds that could see 12 sides to every issue and thus be paralyzed into inaction. George Bush — in their lofty view — saw everything as good and evil, black and white, right and wrong, friend and foe. He was, of all appalling things — a moralist, and heaven forfend, a practicing, believing Christian. He simply didn't have the intellectual firepower of his critics that permitted them to be devious, clever and amoral....

But after two years of being accused of being too stupid and moralizing to be president, George W. has passed two tax cuts, won two wars and maintained the highest sustained public job approval ratings in the history of presidential polling.

So, just in time for the 2004 model year unveiling, the liberal media, et.al have come up with an even more implausible description of George W. Bush. We are now to believe that the president is the devious mastermind of a mind-bogglingly complex plot to deceive the world into thinking Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Not only did he have to deceive the credulous and naive French Intelligence Service, but also Russian and German intelligence, the U.N. Security Council and their inspectors, the State Department bureaucracy, including Colin Powell personally, and Tony Blair and the vaunted British Intelligence establishment. Because before the war, all those entities honestly believed — and consistently reported to the world press — that they believed Saddam had such weapons....

(See also "Too Smart To Be So Dumb".)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 06/07/03 10:52:13 AM
Categorized as Political.