Snobbery by Joseph Epstein

Author:Joseph Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

15

Intellectual Snobbery, or The (Million or So) Happy Few

SNOBBERY has traditionally been founded on birth, access to power, fame, in some quarters wealth, and (on occasion) knowledge. But if knowledge doesn’t register on the snobbery scale for everyone, among people in what one might think of as the knowledge business—among people, that is, who fancy themselves, in the loosest sense of the term, intellectuals—snobbery runs more rampant than bacteria through the kitchen of a Tijuana slow-food restaurant.

Nobody is born an intellectual, or with intellectual interests, or even with much in the way of a natural propensity for those things of the mind that most excite people who think themselves intellectuals: ideas, art, and culture. A high intelligence quotient may help, but it isn’t an absolute requirement; many people with stratospheric IQs—among them people doing high-level science—have little interest in things that absorb the thoughts of intellectuals. Intellectual interests have to be learned, acquired, cultivated. They are in some sense artificial, a construct of a sort, and chiefly the work of previous intellectuals.

An intellectual is a man or woman for whom ideas have a reality that they do, not possess for most people, and these ideas are central to the existence of the intellectual. Because of this extraordinary investment in ideas, the intellectual is occasionally admired for a certain purity of motivation, but he or she is just as often thought of as unreal, out of it, often a comical, sometimes a dangerous character. Historically, the intellectual has been guilty of all these things.

Intellectuality is the quality of being able to talk about ideas—political, historical, artistic ideas—in a confident, coherent, or (best of all) dazzling way. If not everyone admires intellectuals, intellectuality tends to garner praise, especially from the social classes that think themselves educated or enlightened, among whom I include most but far from all members of the vast army of Ph.D.s now roaming the universities.

Whenever intellectuality is on display, an air of edginess, contention, one-upmanship, put-down, or general nervousness I won’t say pervades but usually hovers over the proceedings. All this provides fertile ground for snobbery. Most intellectuals I have known have had at least a tincture of snobbery; it seems almost to come with the job. Sometimes the snobbery is intramural, or among other intellectuals exclusively; sometimes it looks down on all who make no claim to intellectuality; and sometimes much more than a tincture is entailed: “The melancholy thing about the world,” wrote V. S. Naipaul, an authentic intellectual, “is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.” Sometimes, as I say, much more than a tincture.

In certain pockets of intellectual life, traditional snobbery crops up in high relief. In American publishing there has always been a strong strain of traditional snobbery. Publishing is a business that attracts people with a disdain for business and a yearning for culture. Book editors tend to be paid low but lunch high, taking agents and authors to expensive restaurants.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.