Intellect as a Discipline

There are many kinds of serious intellectuals, whether they are independent or engaged in a profitable intellectual profession, such as accredited academic. They may be distinguished by various different temperaments, characters, and formative experiences, by areas of interest, and influential histories of thought behind them. Disagreements and debates are an expected consequence of differences, and certainly, the quality of arguments over ideas is one indication of robust intellectual culture. Still, all serious intellectuals are united in kind by their relationship to intellectual conscience, and acquired intellectual discipline.

The select natural talents of the human mind commonly known as “the intellect” require discipline to respond with high performance. That performance may be cultivated as any talent may be practiced: as exacting work under strict expectations for years, until it becomes internalized, much like the reactions of martial-artist monks or trained soldiers. (It would be possible to compare several psychological effects, such as “spoiling for a fight,” which are common among both rigorous intellectuals and trained combatants.)

Habituated through training, the intellect reacts not at will, but instinctively. Its exercise is compulsive. It cannot fail to be incisive and precise, or else occasions of lax mentality cannot fail to make the intellectual feel he was remiss in his duty. The intellectual cares sincerely about intellectual work in principle because he perceives that lapses discord with his training, and hence his physiology—the acclimation of his nervous system itself. Sloppy analogy, contradiction, selective logic, careless inaccuracy, poor grammar, forgetfulness—such things grate on trained nerves.

To allow the edge of the intellect to dull feels as indecent to a disciplined intellectual as gaining fat and losing muscle does to a physical adept. Failing to maintain intellectual standards feels as negligent as a soldier failing to orient himself according to the lay of the land, checking corners and watching for snipers. The disciplined intellectual feels defenseless without his wits, but also derelict in duty, and bereft of purpose. Consequentially, for him there is a price to pay, which must be weighed: losing the freedom to feel lazy or carefree, and losing connections to those who conduct themselves casually, who are far more numerous than his kind.

To the disciplined intellectual with a genuine sense of responsibility (an “intellectual conscience”) who knows he has earned his powers, the pseudo-intellectual charlatan is, of course, professionally intolerable. An incompetent with pretensions to intellectualism for its potential rewards of attention, reputation, money, or attraction would also come across as ethically offensive and psychologically irreconcilable.

The true intellectual, who excels in curiosity and insight as well as responsibility to the habit of precise thought, is well aware that the quality and clarity of mental processes is more important than their arbitrary circumstances or trappings, and that even specific pieces of information are subordinate to the ability to assemble a meaningful puzzle with them. Thus, the true intellectual is disposed to show impatience with obfuscatory jargon, needless complication, hairsplitting over details, insubstantial discourse, kowtowing to others’ sensibilities, excessive self-congratulation, academic fads, name-dropping, meaningless personal qualifications or status, and other frivolous or pretentious distractions from the cultivation and maintenance of high intellectual standards through thought-work itself.

The kindest attitude he might have toward such things might be to interpret them as entertainment which is harmless unless it is taken for significant or serious proof of intellect. He is likely to be less forgiving with intellectual dishonesty, with any relativism which dismisses intellectual standards rather than reforming them, and with any case of ignorance professing knowledge—having necessarily been made aware, in his own development, that acknowledging areas of ignorance is essential to further learning.

Education Ensuring Elites, and Rebellions

There are still soldiers and warrior-monks of the mind who were reared and inculcated to use intellectual rigor as their birthright and their duty; there were more in the past, in times of more serious and undiluted education.

The public school system in the United States overall never was a serious attempt at education, despite exceptional teachers or exceptional attempts to reform schools, such as competitive magnet schools. At best, the system once did a better job providing training, or instruction—to follow Albert Jay Nock’s distinction from education. It is true that some programs of instruction can supplement an intellectual’s process of acquiring discipline. However, instruction in public schools was primarily envisioned as training for obedient, uniform citizens and factory workers, as was openly admitted by many who designed that system. The centralized public school system was modeled around rote instruction, not inspiration or exploration of subjects intended to encourage a passion for learning. The ultimate goal of true education is empowerment, individual realization at high levels of capability, approximated as “thinking for oneself.” Unlike true education, public schools were designed around conditioning for social obedience, and indoctrination with preferred versions of curricula. Different curricula were selected, over the years, by conflicting social and political special interests, only one aim of which was to provide skills particularly valued by employers, such as reading, writing, math, and technical proficiency, which provision has degraded enormously over the years to the dysfunctional point of not only allowing students to graduate illiterate, but also of employing illiterate union teachers in some places.

So much for public schools, which were never designed to promote discipline in thought so much as control thought by routine and incarceration. Private schooling has provided education more reliably, and produced a disciplined intellect on many more occasions. Yet the motive behind private schools has not necessarily been the enlightenment of autonomous thinkers, either, but in the case of the elite private schools and universities, the production of politicians, executives, officers, directors, and managers suitable for their responsibilities, as well as professors, doctors, lawyers and other respectable establishment positions who may occasionally attain influence.

The boot camps of traditional preparatory schools have declined or disappeared. Rules and regimentation have become less fashionable, but so have academic rigor, depth and breadth. Universities, more famously, have greatly declined in academic integrity, marked by grade inflation, stripping away core requirements, low admission standards, and in general pursuing financial and social aims at the expense of the intellectual quality of individual students. Universities have generally fallen into mass-production as they have greatly increased in number, enrollment, and tuition over the past century; the pattern was already lamented by Nock in 1931.

This explains the general decline in quality of the elites that prep schools and universities have historically been charged to raise, e.g. the “leaders of tomorrow,” the future “captains of industry,” and useful recruits for the various networks of controlling elites across academia, media, finance, big business, law, politics, bureaucracy and the military.

The usefulness to the elites of this system of production and recruitment lay as much in indoctrinating a conventional, conservative outlook eager to continue the rule of predominant ideas and institutions as in the acknowledged roles of the system: instilling professional ideals for intellectuals, such as truth, knowledge, justice, and wisdom, and inspiring a sense of personal destiny through presumed service to society. The crucible of traditional elite education produced cadres of intellectuals with credentials necessary for joining and replacing the elites. It challenged them to rigorous exploration of intellectual subjects considered important, and demanded exacting and diligent habits of thought-work considered necessary. In this system, perceptions of importance and necessity of intellectual practices were reinforced by harsh criticism. Yet the discipline itself was never the real goal, only a means (as is also the case with the soldier, or the monk) equaled by urgency to induce conformism; neither was empowerment quite the intent. The ideal intellectual of a traditional elite academic system is a disciplined and talented thinker who will follow the work of others, and support established ideas and the establishment; despite some trumpeting of independent thought, those who somehow launch into new directions of their own cause disturbance and unease in those institutions.

Raising the expectation of the graduate from such a program that he is prepared for a future commanding role, or at least a role of advisory importance, rather than the role of following the establishment and reinforcing it, seems a quite effective form of stability through power-sharing, albeit limited or illusory power (See Type 5 Social Control). It is probably necessary to provide for ego-management within any system for socializing the intellect, as well as indicate a reward suitable for the tremendous personal investment and hardship of a long, strict education.

Yet the intellectual-elite formulation also ensures instability, for it inspires occasional rebellions based on great expectations of those who believe they are excluded from rewards or influence they deserve. The fact that these may have been justly excluded from desired echelons, as Karl Marx was, does not necessarily indicate insufficient ability to find an alternate way to assume power or achieve posthumous status.

Most significantly, some of the most adept minds are confronted with contradictions between ideals and the reality they find, and refuse to reconcile what does not match. One such overthrow was the historic upheaval which created secular Western intellectualism. Traditions of rigor were enabled by the precise habits developed in part for monastic training, and then theological study in universities (which filled Church offices) that taught scientific thinking to those who would eventually consider Christian dogma unbelievable.

Rogue intellectuals appear as scattered individual cases until they seem, in retrospect, to fall into just such a “movement” as the gradual secularization of science. But it is no coincidence that so many individuals who become intellectual critics or revolutionaries have previously received strict and traditional training to prepare them for occupying a conventional place in society, among its intellectual elites—usually, not a high place, typically a minor-functionary position. The greatest intellectual powers are resistant to suppression or distraction by typical promises and rewards, or unsubstantiated rationales. Yet disciplined education helps to empower them. Thus it is usually not from a total outsider, but from the fringes of the educated establishment that ideological changes with tremendous consequences come—and sometimes great progress begins—with the willful exercises of mental prodigies who feel driven to take exception to doctrines they are supposed to accept or occupations they were trained to follow, prodigies like Siddhartha Gautama, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, or Murray Rothbard, to give a varied series of examples.

What they do not overthrow, and could not dispense with even if they wished, is the ingrained physiological discipline of their brains. Without the deliberate mental discipline once mastered by them—whether by practicing musical composition, mathematics, logic, linguistics, religious hermeneutics, memorization, ascetic exercises, or reading and writing languages with fine care—their later revolutionary expressions would have been impossible feats.

Reconciling Intellectuals

There has always been a great deal of mistrust towards intellectuals, much of it deserved. Intellectuals, as a type, prefer systems of theory to irregular reality, and thus they can relate to systematizing the world, and regulating it to conform to ideas—especially, without benefit of introduction to contrary points of view, and self-awareness. An inner regime is all too easy to project onto the world. (An artistic temperament is subject to similar pitfalls, due to intimacy with needing to impose aesthetic urges onto reality, and control the form in which their artistic vision is expressed.) Ever since castes of scribes first administered the land for kings, and formulated laws and doctrines, literacy has entwined with political rulership. Over the interim, education capable of intellectual discipline took the form of institutions supporting established elites and succored by them, until the present day of laxity.

Yet it should be apparent that any civilized society requires mental discipline—especially once we trouble to trace any of the widespread consequences and ramifications of mental culture. Those who make it, and in particular, those who create and express ideas which will influence others, effectively rule over the questions of which kinds of institutions and ethics will be favored in society—what will matter to people, and why, and therefore: how people will live.

A central part of education, particularly for those deputed to a life of the mind, is the acquisition of discipline. It is likely not the specific subjects of study or forms of practice that matter so much as the principle that discipline in the abstracting abilities of the central nervous system should be cultivated, with as much deliberate attention as movement receives in martial arts or breathing receives in yoga, or physicality in any kind of body practice. It is certainly the case that mind-body discipline should ideally be cultivated as a whole project, and this is desirable to balance development of intellectuals. But there are particular consequences for failing to develop mental discipline, and especially for the decline of the true intellectual, that must be felt by all of society.

If the importance of true intellectuals, and of cultivating intellectual discipline in order to foster true intellectuals is not recognized and put in practice, the consequences are dire. Anyone else may then make a sloppy claim upon logic or argumentation, the weight of history, or of science; others may feel compelled to defer to unsound, pretend expertise. It becomes extremely difficult to know which experts to trust, despite needing them, when incompetence in a specialty or a prejudiced view appears respectable to a layman. And, if true intellectuals are not working to address fundamental questions or critical decisions, there can be no appeal to their arbitration or judgment—or rather, anyone may think he can judge a question, no matter how ill-prepared.

Even a society of people who wish to dispense with controlling elites—especially, such a society—must rely upon the cultivation of mental discipline for defense against the creeping power-accretion of undeserving inferiors, and especially depend on the conscience of the true intellectual as a bulwark.

For the intellectual is an embodiment of service to practices and ideals which are fundamental to society and culture. The solution to the dangers posed by their influence has never been to weaken or diminish them—that is most dangerous—but to empower true intellectuals through special education, and to clearly understand their necessary role: guardians of past standards and harbingers of future innovations, able to lead through ideas. We should prefer that they have mastery over the realm of ideas because that is their native element, provided that they are no longer regimented and systematized for the preservation of a controlling elite or the exercise of elite power. When they are provided with the necessary mental discipline and yet not (or, not successfully) programmed with a bias toward imitation of the past, including its respected mistakes, true intellectuals can fully adhere to their discipline, and are far more likely to benefit society through this work than collude to control it.

The Anti-Intellectuals

Since I have said a great deal about the true intellectual who declines, let me furnish a specific example of social consequences by directing a few additional remarks to qualities typical of the anti-intellectual, who proliferates. The anti-intellectual is a specific type of pseudo-intellectual, far more dangerous than other types, or a mere slovenly intellectual. He is not rigorous, but he is serious. Although he claims to think and possess intelligence, and probably calls himself an intellectual or takes it upon himself to play pundit, he is not attracted to ideas so much as he is drawn to the field of ideological contention.

Any ideology can attract anti-intellectuals, and any popular ideology has its own. It is the mark of an anti-intellectual to proclaim his point of view and insist upon it while dismissing the process of asking questions, gathering information, evaluating facts and interpretations, and consequently, learning.

The anti-intellectual has already decided what he thinks, and therefore considers learning a distraction and a waste of time, at best. Instead, he seeks out information selectively in order to support his pre-existing position, ignoring contrary information which does not. He is only frustrated, and not interested, by the appearance of contrary facts; he will not yield to their case unless he is compelled to do so. Those who raise objections or alternatives appear to him only as wafflers, or as enemies, who are as much partisans on behalf of ideas that are antagonistic and false as he is a soldier of his bedrock truth. Hence he tends to assume they deserve scorn and denunciation. The devil’s advocate really is the devil, to the anti-intellectual.

For the anti-intellectual to maintain some distance from an issue long enough to investigate the subject and decide is impossible; in this respect he really is the extreme opposite of the remote, unfeeling scholar. The anti-intellectual does not analyze, draw conclusions, or decide; he justifies and rationalizes. In his mind, he already knows and cannot be bothered with such vague curiosities. In fact he suspects and mistrusts any ambiguity, and mistrusts the intellectual who values subtleties and preserves delicate ambiguities when concreteness would introduce inaccuracy.

The anti-intellectual cannot admit “I do not know,” unless he considers the matter trivial. As Socrates noted, this admission is the beginning of a serious process of gaining knowledge. Therefore the anti-intellectual is bereft of well-grounded knowledge. What he has assumed is almost certainly erroneous, or so incomplete as to confound his pursuit of the future.

To the extent that the intellectual allows himself to slip temporarily into such behavior over contentious issues, in order to defend turf, he fails to maintain his own standards. To the extent that programs of education allow or encourage the production of pseudo-intellectuals masquerading as true intellectuals, and anti-intellectuals in particular, they do more than make a mockery of intellectualism; they endanger their own future along with society around them. A certain kind of pseudo-intellectual fool might only indulge in nonsense enthusiastically in order to entertain himself, but the anti-intellectual is not only false, but driven. He will gradually, but eventually produce counterfeit culture to replace any sound product of reliable thought. He will aggressively weave nonsense into reality because he believes it. He will exhaust both skeptics and defenders of principle, unless they can rely on true intellectuals to separate truth from insidious lies and substance from hot air.

Rediscovering Intellectual Discipline

Because of these consequences, it is enormously troubling for true intellectuals to dwindle with the decline of systems of rigorous education which tend to produce them.

Alternative means to facilitate education—such as home-schooling, non-conformist schools, and political or religious groups prepared to offer tendentious but alternative intellectual training—may offer a necessary supplement to traditional academies and universities. Tendentious educations are not ideal, but as a rule educations include bias without warning of bias, and tendentious-yet-disciplined educations do have a chance to be valuable in challenging true intellectuals because, as we have seen, great minds tend to exceed direction, and question tenets.

Yet the emergency is far greater than the response; any institutions which have emerged are more remedial than adequate to the task. It is true that it is more possible today for more independently-minded thinkers to teach themselves using the internet than ever before, due to the intellectual provisions offered there. However, this availability of resources is unlikely to replace the guided development of discipline which is essential to forge true intellectuals, including first-rate intellects. Mentorship at the very least would seem to be necessary, in order to facilitate the early stages of learning suitable for a lifelong pursuit of disciplined intellectualism.

A new kind of learning organization is desperately needed to foster true intellectuals—not to teach them precisely what to think, but to help them learn how to think and to take ideas and their implications seriously, through conscientious practice. If the ideas that compel intellectuals turn out to be different from those before them, that is sometimes the result of a sincere education. At present, considering the influence of so many shoddy ideas, it seems that we dearly need just such a revolution.

page created on May 19, 2010
page updated May 19, 2010 4:11 EST

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