After the bizarre rants of America’s supposed intellectual elites in the wake of Bush’s reelection, I’ve been wondering: Why are intellectuals so stupid?
A new book from England may answer that question. According to a review in the American Enterprise magazine, Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism shows that *real* intellectuals are a vanishing breed.
The review, written by Kelly Jane Torrance, describes the book as “is a short, sharp look at why thoughtful, serious men of letters have been replaced by well-groomed pundits who can only speak in sound bites.”
The culprit is postmodernism, all the rage in the academy, which disregards the concept of truth, an elitist notion. England may have given rise to two of the greatest universities in the world, but today Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education, is quoted saying that his country has no use for ‘the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth.’
The book is apparently relevant for Americans who are getting fed up with being disparaged by condescending elites: “The view that the public is too stupid to grasp the high-minded and sophisticated ideals of American liberals expresses a profound sense of contempt for human beings.”