In the July/August issue of the Atlantic, David H. Freedman writes about "the war on stupid people." The culture at large increasingly despises them, while the much-vaunted "economy of the twenty-first century" has no room for them. Smart people know, in theory at least, that one is no more responsible for one's IQ than for one's looks or height. So why don't our attitudes, language, and social arrangements reflect this fact? And why do they seem to reflect it less and less all the time? Freedman writes:
As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
In the Times Literary Supplement, the classicist Mary Beard writes about Athenian democracy and the Brexit referendum. The city Council of Athens, Beard reminds us, was chosen by lot, which was important for more than one reason. Beard writes, "Many Athenian democrats would have argued that people must learn to do politics, they must learn to be citizens; it is not something that comes naturally. Much of the Athenian political system was about that process of learning." She concludes:
We now tend to treat the Athenian use of lot as if it was simply a way of ensuring that every citizen had an equal chance of serving as one of the 500 annual members of the city Council (the boule) or as one of many other administrative officials. And it was in part that; indeed some modern idealists have even thought it might be one way for us to solve the democratic deficit in the British House of Lords. But lot had another equally important, structural part to play in the Athenian system. For it also ensured that practical political experience was spread widely across the citizen body. Leaving aside all other offices, at a rough estimate something like 70 per cent of the citizens would have served on the Council once during their lifetime, with all the responsibilities that involved of preparing business for the full assembly, dealing with day-to-day crises as they arose, receiving and interrogating representatives from other cities and countries, and so on. There was no equivalent of a civil service in classical Athens. Serving on the Council was a practical course in political administration and argument.
I am not suggesting that there is a direct lesson here that we can simply apply across the millennia. Ancient Athens is far too different from us for that: its citizen body was, for a start, no larger than the size of some modern university student unions, and was completely “woman-free”. But Athens can help us to look harder at ourselves. Handing us a referendum once every twenty years or so, largely depriving us of accurate information in a fog of slogans and rhetoric, and allowing us all, on both sides, to vent our various discontents and prejudices in a yes/no vote is not a way to reach a responsible decision. Nor is it a way to re-empower a disempowered electorate. That, as Athenian democrats would have seen, needs something much more radical, and it has to happen not twice in a lifetime but in the day-to-day practice of political life.
Finally, Matthew Rose writes in National Affairs about the liberalism of Richard John Neuhaus:
In 1990, Neuhaus was invited by the Christian Century to contribute to an ongoing series called "How My Mind Has Changed." Neuhaus was then 53 years old and a veteran clergy-activist of causes ranging from the radical left to the neoconservative right. He recalled that as a seminarian he vowed he would be "in descending order of importance, religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal, and economically pragmatic." Neuhaus insisted he had remained attracted to that "quadrilateral" but allowed that the disputed meaning of "politically liberal" had put his commitment to the test.
He catalogued his frustrations: the betrayal of the Civil Rights movement by the rise of identity politics; the abandonment of the poor to a failed War on Poverty and the devastations of the Sexual Revolution; the disparagement of patriotism and the natural family; and most worrisome, acceptance of the lethal logic of Roe v. Wade. "I experienced the illiberality of certain liberalisms," he reflected. But if readers expected a political conversion story, they would be disappointed. Neuhaus instead pointedly reaffirmed his commitment to the liberal tradition. Mourning the "lost dignity of liberalism," he expressed hope that religious believers would remain committed to "modernity's greatest political achievement."
This is advice we do well to remember and heed, especially those of us tempted to opt out of the "civilizational circle" by declining participation in democratic debate. The advances of secular liberalism might seem unstoppable, but they are not. They depend entirely on the credibility of the claim that religion and religiously informed moral judgment are incompatible with open deliberation. Neuhaus dedicated his life, in word and deed, to refuting this assertion.
