by Derek Huang

Created on: May 22, 2008

The Intellectuals and the Elite

"There are many natural scientists who continue to reject the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook

These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular."

Do you have any idea what that meant? I don't. As far as I'm concerned, what I just spewed out of my mouth was gibberish. It sounded smart didn't it though? Maybe it made you feel dumber than I am, but don't be fooled. Anyone can put on airs, sound intellectual, and in doing so, separate himself from the rest of us as someone more knowledgeable.
I remember seeing someone like that when I joined our school's Computer Club last year, in my freshman year.

He had long hair, would often grasp it in his hand, run it back and forth. He would steeple his fingers together with his elbows resting in front of the keyboard, muttering to himself: "Excellent." and "Yes.". He would use esoteric phrases like "Ergo" and "You sir, are an idiot". All of this, of course, would seem perfectly ridiculous, but he had the words to match. Often he would talk to us in incoherent strings of technobabble about PHP, game design, mutable matrices, SSH clients and servers that use TCP and X11 ports and connections. Wow. How could I ever hope to carry out a conversation with this almighty, albeit a little eccentric, genius? The illusion was short-lived. In a week's time, I discovered that he was a charlatan, a fake. Someone who could toss out the words but couldn't back it up. The effect he had on me, when he did have me fooled, was a huge one. I felt that I didn't know anything about computers, I thought seriously about leaving the club, which obviously was way over my head. For a while, I was the nobody, and he was the elite.
It's an example that can be applied to our society as a whole, in which appearing smart is valued higher than being smart, an elite group is created that pushes down the non-elite. Sometimes it's called intellectual elitism, but the members of the elite aren't necessarily smarter,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>