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.
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