I should have linked to this yesterday, but life conspired against it. Bill Voegeli on the Roots of Liberal Condescension.

I liked this bit:

Buckley’s position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God’s laws and tradition’s wisdom, Buckley’s argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the “democracy of the dead,” incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.
The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their “intellectual arrogance” is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature’s God, either don’t exist, can’t be known, or don’t matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history’s next phase can be discerned by some better than others.

Meawhile, Barton Swaim had an interesting piece on the site the other day about conservative intellectuals. I found it particularly interesting because I always thought we needed a new word, since “intellectual” is freighted with more baggage than it can carry.

“Scholar” and “academic” both have very professional connotations these days (which is particularly sad for the former term). “Historian” is too narrow. “Expert” is even narrower. “Author” is too unimpressive and vague. “Man of letters” is probably too sexist and certainly too literary sounding (at the very least “woman of letters” sounds stupid).

And so we are left with “intellectual” which must be a statement about ones learning and IQ, but also an adjective with several sociological connotations. In one usage, as Voegeli suggests, “intellectuals” are a specific bunch of progressive or otherwise left-leaning eggheads who have a bottomless confidence in their own intelligence and the ability of people like themselves to redesign society from scratch or at the very least guide it to the sunny uplands of history. In the 1930s, such would-be meddlers were frequently called “planners,” a term I’m still fond of. Philosophes is an even older term for this crowd.

Again, as Bart notes, the fact that Burke hated “intellectuals” demonstrates the tension. Burke himself was certainly an intellectual in the sense that he was really, really, smart and learned. But he wasn’t an intellectual in the sense that he thought he was smarter than tradition, convention and markets combined. Bill Buckley played a similar role. He had the appearance, mannerisms and qualities of mind most of us associate with intellectuals, but he rejected the ambitions most closely associated with intellectuals.

This confusion creates a huge opportunity for mischief, in that it allows many critics of conservatism to claim that conservatism is anti-intellectual when it’s often merely opposed to a certain kind of intellectual.

Anyway, I’m just rambling now. And I have much to do.