How "Intellectual" Became a Dirty Word

According to Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesaurus:

Intellect – [ Latin, inter-, between + legere, choose] (1) the ability to reason or understand (2) high intelligence (3) a very intelligent person

I am of the persuasion that the meat of intellectuality sits with the terms in bold. “Choose between.” Discernment. A healthy respect for the concept “because.” The ability to notice the distinction between one object and another, to notice inconsistencies between, say, declared beliefs and actions, and to connect “dots” – which means to discern how (or whether) one idea follows from another. These are what the phrase “critical thinking” denotes. It has gone by other names, such as common sense, mother wit, and organic intellectuality.

In light of choose-between, what is to be made of the Western Academy's tendency to emphasize, praise, and reward memorization-regurgitation? Certainly these are more useful to employers, many of whom operate according to the capitalist, Adam-Smith, division-of-labor paradigm. These bosses don’t want you critiquing managerial policy, or considering the moral implications of a mission. They want you to stamp the widget, slide the peg in the hole, run the conveyor belt, answer the phone, read the teleprompter, type the memo, flip the burger, and pull the trigger. To do. Hence the persistent, institutional emphasis on standardized testing as the primary measure of "intelligence." Professor Lani Guinier observes:

When you admit for the quality of doing well on tests, that quality doesn't have a particularly useful relationship to the real world. What the tests actually test is quick, strategic guesses with less than perfect information ... Many of my colleagues have great faith in the LSAT, number one because they did very well on it, and number two because we have almost a religious attitude toward testing. It's what I call the testocracy.

Memorization-regurgitation, I will add, is faster than choose-between; from Wall Street to the water cooler, as the saying goes, "Time is money."

This comparative institutional neglect of training the choose-between faculty, in the interest of fostering memorization-regurgitation, is part of the reason why you get strange looks for pointing out:

• to a male preacher, that his divinely downloaded message for the day happens to agree with his bias, that women shouldn't wear pants; and that, while this idea has no theological basis, it is strikingly convenient for the advancement of sexism, and thereby useful in an institution such as the Christian church, where historically, men have dictated to women

• to scholarly worshipers of ancient Greece, that what they call “intelligence” and attempt to monopolize through historical revision, has existed wherever on earth there have been minds

• to the United States' wholesale supporters of war, that a meaningful distinction between two heaps of dead bodies, is not that one heap is Middle Eastern.

The word “intellectual” is not dirty. It is misused.