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To Minerva's Owl

• Anyone can be an intellectual, at least on a part-time basis. Some spare time is required but not much, providing the intellectual is willing to make sacrifices. During the industrial revolution, workers who labored for sixteen hours a day under terrible factory conditions still found time to read by candle light before going to sleep in their hovels to dream of liberty. Today's laborer might sacrifice a football game or a crime show.
• What is an intellectual? An intellectual is an independent thinker who intentionally develops his reasoning power along liberal lines. Not that he is an ideological liberal, a "bleeding heart lliberal" or "left-wing Jewish intellectual" and so on. "Liberal" is relative to what one would be liberated from. The intellectual is not a conforming member of the "intelligentsia" employed in the Intelligence Bureau of the Power Elite. Rather, the intellectual has a reputation for challenging conventional thinking. Of course every persuasion has its intellectuals or prophets before the intelligentsia or priests take over; but the true intellectual is loyal not to the persuasion but to the continuing search for the truth that sets everyone free, not merely a few people at the apex of society. Therefore he has an abiding interest in a liberal education in its radical sense, the universal cultivation of individual liberty.
• University administrators in the United States once believed universities have a fundamental, liberating duty to constantly question the conventional thinking of society and its power elite, therefore many intellectuals occupied the universities. Even then the best intellectuals were roving lecturers, some of them self-taught scholars without university degrees. But the people of the United States have always had an ambivalent relationship with their intellectuals. They were seen as an arrogant, critical, and useless lot whose interests were contrary to the pragmatic interests of a growing nation that needed to belly up to its destiny. If mind is to actually dominate matter, the practical or material aspect must be the foremost consideration, not the cultivation of rebellious spirits, whose spiritual value had greatly depreciated after the Revolution even though their properties had greatly appreciated. Yes, some of the intellectuals among the rabble-rousing rebels were rather rich, already freed by their wealth, and had a patriotic interest in their plantations. Indeed, only the wealthy could afford a liberal education. In any event, the intellectual power was greatly feared by ordinary people, and rightfully so, because mind does tend to assume power over matter, and intellectuals would preside over the masses, whether for good or ill.
• The masses rebelled against the uncooperative university intellectuals, and the diffusion of independent thinking suffered accordingly. Yet despite the anti-intellectual movement, a liberal education still produced the nation's leaders from whatever class they were born into, and the exercise of that liberating power is still rooted in the first three arts of the seven liberal arts. Namely, the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic in their broadest sense. Grammar is the study of the world's greatest literature, not merely the rules of good speech. Rhetoric is the persuasive use of speech. And dialectics develops and employs the logic necessary to win arguments.
• Now the popular resentment for and repudiation of intellectualism in favor of a more "productive" or "practical" education has served to diminish the very means by which ordinary people can liberate themselves from the clutches of the power they rightly feared. It has left that power unchallenged in its highest offices. The emphasis is on profit. The profit motive is cultivated as the sole business reason for providing benefits to others. The less one does for more money the better. Ideally, one should not have to do anything. Ideally, there would be no expense, only revenue. Executives are enthusiastic about this scheme, so much so that incredibly wealthy men and women resort to fraud and theft to satisfy their craving as their tolerance level mounts. And that is perfectly logical given the scheme of things. They are intelligent men and women, liberally educated, but liberty requires liberal challenges all around, and we have denounced our independent intellectuals. Thus the intellectual power is concentrated at the top, is corrupted and catered to by the prostituted intelligentsia, polluting the entire pool, and only a few liberal bandits are free - as if to prove Solomon's saying about the Sun.  
  

• Parents naturally want their children to have a good job. The best jobs are scientifically and technologically oriented, and of course children are excited about technology. Yes, we find a liberal core in the curriculum, but who needs liberty when we are already free? who needs the humanities when we have science? And who has heard of the trivium or of the goddess Trivia? The liberal core is a shrunken skull on top of the flag pole in the center of the fast track, something to salute before one embarks on a crazed career. Few take the pledge of allegiance to liberty seriously. Liberty is a hard course of independent thinking; although it is rebellious, it leads the mere individual to his own socialization, to his own fundamental property - his person. Thus individuation perfected is the ultimate socialization. But today the "educated" thinking is as fragmented as the divisions of labor, each with its tin badge of ability. Other than absurd ideologies that pass for distinguishable lines, thoughts lack a line. Thoughts lack continuity, are disintegrated. The person is in a jumble, a hodgepodge with a credential, hates intellectuals who beg askance of her feel-good faith, and wonders why she is anxious and disturbed and in need of serotonin reuptake inhibitors - we no longer believe in logotherapy interspersed by scream therapy to break the monotony. Nevertheless, liberty lives even amongst the poor and oppressed. Parents may not have heard of the word "trivium", but they know where the power is and what subjects of study it prefers above all others.
  

• Today the United States is incredibly wealthy and continues to prosper despite the pockets of poverty which are due to spiritual dearth rather than a lack of material resources; please pardon my impolitic expressions, but fat people look on complacently while skinny people starve. In the midst of plenty, untold millions of overweight people know something is wrong, not so much with the material prosperity but with the spirit. It is as if the spirit has crawled underneath its wealth and is about to be crushed. Hordes of workers are expected to work at least forty hours per week, often producing junk, trash and garbage they really do not want, in exchange for a place to squat on the fringes of the luxurious gated compounds of their white-collar chiefs. Man must be an economic animal to survive, but our old habits have brought us into a new age of tribal darkness. We are like a moose who, when taken to a moderate clime, would eat himself to death preparing for the next winter which will never come. The compulsive production of cheap things and the corresponding professional brain-scattering has unhinged us all from our essence,  our very being. If we need more of anything, we need more spiritual beings instead of hamburgers.
• What is wanted is a spiritual regeneration. What is wanted is liberation from the meaninglessness of life in an antoid colony. Religious and moral evolution are not the only aspects of spiritual regeneration. Broadly speaking, our spiritual progress is our mental progress, as is our moral progress - "spiritual", "mental", "moral", are essentially synonymous. Instead of derogating "intellectuals" as dreamy idealists and ivory tower philosophers, as did the Chinese communists, or even worse, now is the time to cultivate and encourage them.
• Furthermore, we should not allow false religion to divorce our faith from reason, to denounce reason and make faithful beasts of us. May we in the West not regress to the barbarous times before Muslim philosophers introduced us to the humanist movement, the historical sciences, the inductive scientific method, the founding principles of the Italian Renaissance and, most importantly, the harmony of faith and reason. We are eternally grateful to Islam for the preservation of Greek philosophy and its development of rational science; but we have taken that science to an extreme, neglecting the mitigating metaphysics of the medieval Muslim philosophers who were doctors of the soul as well as of the body. Their search in "both" realms was a reasonable, living quest for knowledge of supreme being. They had their doubts about whether the Unknown could be known, but nevertheless the search went on even among the most "atheistic" of thinkers. Searching for the supreme being, the ultimate Liberty,  is risky, but as al-Ghazali posited, and Pascal followed suit, If you win you shall win all; if you lose you will lose nothing.
• In the United States, a few independent thinkers and writers bucked the great anti-intellectual wave and became quite influential in the liberal era including the Sixties, but today the independent intellect has been almost entirely sacrificed to the antoid colony, whose members, despite their narcissistic submission to the corporation and obedience to its profiteering fathers, are becoming increasingly anxious and hostile. Humans are not ants. A spiritual rebellion is called for to liberate the human spirit for beneficient mutual intercourse instead of malevolent revolutions and global terrorism. Therefore I call for an intellectual rebellion motivated in benevolence and taking form in good deeds: we cannot live on thoughts and prayers alone, and we weary of those who use them as substitutes for genuine charity.
• It is for the reasons noted above as well as for many other causes left unsaid that I believe everyone can and should be an intellectual to the best of their ability. If some of us do not have the leisure to take it up the liberating intellectual profession full time, being an intellectual can still be the best hobby an amateur can have.