Our fundamentalists these days know a lot less than they think they do. But so do our “new atheists,” evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists, and so forth.

The Conservatives vs. the Intellectuals?

by Peter Lawler

So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore.

The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is.

The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He explained that in a modern, sophisticated society they’ll be a “new class” of people attempting to distinguish themselves by their devotion to ideas. They would be driven much more by vanity than love of truth or concern for others, and their main impulse would be displaying their superiority in the public square. They would be the source of the fashionable dogmas—kinds of popularized science and other forms of self-helpy expertise—that would tend to displace religion and patriotism. The new dogmas wouldn’t really be more true than the older ones, and they would have the huge practical disadvantage of “deconstructing” moral virtue as most people experience it.

So against the witty and fashionable intellectuals Rousseau praised ignorance. His authority in that respect was Socrates—the philosopher who said time and again that all I know for certain is that I know nothing. Socrates didn’t know enough to be an atheist, just as he didn’t know enough to affirm the gods of Athens. Socrates distinguished his endless quest for what he didn’t yet know with the activity of the sophists—the experts who thought they possessed the true and scientific theory of education and should be paid the big bucks for sharing those most useful and enlightened techniques with others.

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Read more: www.imaginativeconservative.org