I have a submission I sent to SEB

Thought you might like it also.

http://semiotician.wordpress.com/page/2/

Or as Ashleigh Brilliant quipped, “I don’t have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.”  I may fit right in with the Elitist Bastards, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize my own limitations.

On the other hand, a lot of this stuff is hosted in—or perhaps I should say, is a parasite upon—the ivory towers of academia.  If the public universities subjected the efforts of the “literature” (and especially the hyphenated-studies) camps to the rigorous analysis of science and pulled teaching duties from faculty whose product cannot withstand scrutiny without falling apart, at least the taxpayer’s money would stop accelerating the rot.  Perhaps entire colleges within those universities should be closed, and their faculty allowed to seek other employment.  I would nominate several at my own alma mater (elitist bastard that I am).

On the other hand, I give this about the same odds as the tissue-paper dog chasing the asbestos cat through Hell.

I’m saddened to say that your points are quite legitimate. That is, I wish it was not the case that intellectuals so often succumb to fads, but I must recognize that a number of them do.

I don’t think one of the solutions is to scorn intellectuals as a group, however. On the other hand, I am not sure how to solve the problem. Do you have any suggestions?

It’s suicidal of any society to scorn its intellectual and scientific elite.

There are reality checks on the scientific elite (creating a fairly strong meritocracy), but intellectuals can succumb to fads which would lead entire societies to suicide.  Need I point out post-modernism as one recent example?  (Post-modernism is also opposed to science, as so deftly demonstrated by Alan Sokal.  When the “intellectuals” and scientists are at war, which side do you join?)

The public is right to be suspicious of things which are against their interests.  The problem is that the dispassionate seekers after truth are at a disadvantage to the cunning manipulators of opinion.

Or you could go for Hannah Arendt, or Simone de Beauvoir, or for a real cranky controversial elitist curmudgeon, Our Germs (Germain Greer). I think she’d make a good complement to Hitchens

Apparently it’s “elitist” to tell someone the reality they prefer doesn’t hold water.