Obama and the War on Brains

[Dave Monroe]

Obama and the War on Brains
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008


Barack Obama's election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation.
The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American
voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet,
practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the
anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.
Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we've seen recently
that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at
nuance — doesn't get very far either.

We can't solve our educational challenges when, according to polls,
Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as
in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun
orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not
necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was
made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox
News, didn't realize that Africa was a continent rather than a
country.

Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about
his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More
recently, we've had some smart and well-educated presidents who
scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual,
and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas
aphorisms about hogs.

As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as
administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle
East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists).
Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I
can't think of anybody I've ever interviewed who appeared so
uninterested in ideas.

At least since Adlai Stevenson's campaigns for the presidency in the
1950s, it's been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too
learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful
deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once
bluntly declared that "intellectuals are deviants in the U.S."

(It doesn't help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as
of ideas. After one of Stevenson's high-brow speeches, an admirer
yelled out something like, You'll have the vote of every thinking
American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That's not enough. I
need a majority!)

Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008
of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers
and poets?

Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of
excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a
black man he didn't fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower
elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited
superficiality.

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with
complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is
looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and
Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and
contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders
self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the
fumes of moral clarity.

(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious
show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness
by using words like "fulgent" and "supercilious.")

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in
complexity. He doesn't condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as
politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound
bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues,
reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade
reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.

As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart
people have a great record in power. They don't. Just think of Emperor
Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who
also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then
castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set
fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his
gardens.

James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and
Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and
inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all
were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least
intellectual of our early presidents.

Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I'm hopeful that his fertile mind
will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no
longer will have to shuffle in shame when they're caught with brains
in their heads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09kristof.html

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days
wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound
so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and
think."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html