The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever."
Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced--full mind, starved heart--stout heart, weak head.
Kingsley's line is a convenient text, but to establish the point that English literature voices a traditional distrust of the mind we must go to the masters. In Shakspere's plays there are some highly intelligent men, but they are either villains or tragic victims. To be as intelligent as Richard or Iago or Edmund seems to involve some break with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero seems to imply some Faust-like traffic with the forbidden world; to be as thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too thoughtful to live. In Shakspere the prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, or Duke Orsino, or Florizel--men of good conduct and sound character, but of no particular intelligence. There might, indeed, appear to be one general exception to this sweeping statement: Shakspere does concede intelligence as a fortunate possession to some of his heroines. But upon even a slight examination those ladies, like Portia, turn out to have been among Shakspere's Italian importations--their wit was part and parcel of the story he borrowed; or, like Viola, they are English types of humility, patience, and loyalty, such as we find in the old ballads, with a bit of Euphuism added, a foreign cleverness of speech. After all, these are only a few of Shakspere's heroines; over against them are Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Hero, Cordelia, Miranda, Perdita--lovable for other qualities than intellect,--and in a sinister group, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Goneril, intelligent and wicked.
In Paradise Lost Milton attributes intelligence of the highest order to the devil. That this is an Anglo-Saxon reading of the infernal character may be shown by a reference to the book of Job, where Satan is simply a troublesome body, and the great wisdom of the story is from the voice of God in the whirlwind. But Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so persistent and liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart. It is disconcerting to intelligence that it should be God's angel who cautions Adam not to wander in the earth, nor inquire concerning heaven's causes and ends, and that it should be Satan meanwhile who questions and explores. By Milton's reckoning of intelligence the theologian and the scientist to-day alike take after Satan.
If there were time, we might trace this valuation of intelligence through the English novel. We should see how often the writers have distinguished between intelligence and goodness, and have enlisted our affections for a kind of inexpert virtue. In Fielding or Scott, Thackeray or Dickens, the hero of the English novel is a well-meaning blunderer who in the last chapter is temporarily rescued by the grace of God from the mess he has made of his life. Unless he also dies in the last chapter, he will probably need rescue again. The dear woman whom the hero marries is, with a few notable exceptions, rather less intelligent than himself. When David Copperfield marries Agnes, his prospects of happiness, to the eyes of intelligence, look not very exhilarating. Agnes has more sense than Dora, but it is not even for that slight distinction that we must admire her; her great qualities are of the heart--patience, humility, faithfulness. These are the qualities also of Thackeray's good heroines, like Laura or Lady Castlewood. Beatrice Esmond and Becky Sharp, both highly intelligent, are of course a bad lot.
No less significant is the kind of emotion the English novelist invites towards his secondary or lower-class heroes--toward Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for example, or Harry Foker in Pendennis. These characters amuse us, and we feel pleasantly superior to them, but we agree with the novelist that they are wholly admirable in their station. Yet if a Frenchman--let us say Balzac--were presenting such types, he would make us feel, as in Pere Goriot or Eugenie Grandet, not only admiration for the stable, loyal nature, but also deep pity that such goodness should be so tragically bound in unintelligence or vulgarity. This comparison of racial temperaments helps us to understand ourselves. We may continue the method at our leisure. What would Socrates have thought of Mr. Pickwick, or the Vicar of Wakefield, or David Copperfield, or Arthur Pendennis? For that matter, would he have felt admiration or pity for Colonel Newcome?
Let’s consider this less a review than a citation. Though he is writing negatively of the phenomenon, he nicely elucidates what we have called one of the great strengths of the Anglosphere: Anti-Intellectualism. Mind, the only shift that is required here is to replace intelligence with intellect. After all, we admire scientists, inventors and the like, Though we do tend to think of them as absent-minded, impractical men. What we object to is intellectuals, who believe that they can thwart reality by the exercise of Reason. Looking down our noses at them has saved us from the innumerable isms that tore the Continent apart. Though, admittedly, we are currently plagued by the Identitarianism, of the Left/Right. Of course, we also find it easy to laugh at them and we embrace instead the typical characters out of Anglo-American literature, the steadfast if dull men who are not subject to the hysteria of the ideologues.
His tenure at Columbia came at the time when the university was a focal point of an American cultural development in which music, literature and teaching, itself, were important and exciting. Mr. Erskine helped to generate much of this excitement, not only because of the emphasis he placed on the importance of reading great books but also because he transmitted to his students a zest for the art of life. In his autobiography, "My Life As a Teacher,” published in 1948, he said his aim had not been to produce great scholars but to show the students that so-called dead literature was very much alive.
Among the junior instructors he chose to assist him in section work at Columbia in 1920 were Mark Van Doren, Raymond Weaver, Irwin Edman, Mortimer Adler, Rexford Tugwell and Clifton Fadiman, then virtually unknown.
To be intelligent means many things of course. For the present purpose, I will underscore that intelligence is knowing how to weigh the evidence that flies in the face of steadfast assumptions. It means to know when causality can be inferred and not, to know when the weight of correlational evidence must be taken seriously, to know that a replication is worth much more than a single demonstration, to know that when new methods divulge strange truths about us and our brethren, it may be the theory that has to go. The moral obligation to be intelligent requires that we keep abreast of discoveries that require old views to be bagged and put out on the curb for recycling - every week.
