John Frederick Lewis, Two horses pulling a plough, viewed from the back, c. 1820
We can’t define an intellectual by the volume of his database. Not even by his or her ability to reason. Alain de Botton writes that “a wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints”. They are not less intelligent than a college graduate in humanities after reading a thousand books. So intelligence is not a familiarity with the contemporary European philosophy, comparative fluency or ability to memorize. Intelligence is curiosity. This curiosity in turn fuels the exploration of a subject or an object.
I meet many people who have an enormous mental database covering a vast filed of knowledge. Yet they became jaded and lost their curiosity. It’s hard to describe these people as “intelligent”.
There are the current laments about the lack of intellectuals among the modern orthodox here and here (and not even an expectation about the other streams). This is unfair to people brought up or converted to the dogmatic culture. You can’t hold people responsible for the lack of curiosity if they are indoctrinated into a system that presumes and postulates more answers than questions. Centuries of breeding out the curious and curiosity as an undesirable trait are finally paying off.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Further Reading:
On the Path to Post-Evangelicalism
Alain de Botton and Nassim Taleb in Quotation Marks
The Isaiah Berlin Lecture by Adin Steinsaltz
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Strangely, modern orthodoxy has embraced careerism to the exclusion of madda in spite of the YU slogan. These days law is the prototypical MO career. It rewards ability to attend to facts and arguments, but in an amoral fashion with indifference to the big questions of what is right or true or how a just society should be organized. Legal theory offers incredible opportunities for a a public intellectual, but most legal practitioners accept the framework and maneuver within it. As my lawyer friends remind me, criminal trials are not about truth but about evidence; lawyers don’t exist to assure truth but to assure the presentation of evidence which maximizes the interest of their client.
As for MO Judaism, it is procedural as well with a bent to maximizing modern pleasures within the boundaries of halachah. Throughout the orthodox world courage among rabbis is a vanishing trait.
Finally I would observe that increasingly, the most valued trait of orthodoxy is community. Alas, the tradeoff is independent thinking. As you argued, Ben, increasingly the best minds in that world are in internal exile as the price they pay for belonging.
Yerachmiel, you are correct in your description. I deliberately skirt the issues because the redeeming arguments are sparse. My bewilderment is why there are just few people who transcend the reactive mode of thinking. And there is more conformism in the reactive arguments than in the outright mob mentality. In other words, where is the genuine curiosity to the great or perhaps even not so great beyond?
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Nothing more (talk about curiosity, reason[ing ability], dogma/anti-dogma etc etc), nothing less.
Now, one must be able to be both halves – the watcher and the watched.
The next step: Can they be brought together?