Shades of Gray
The blog with the above name has a “random quote of the day” entry. This one comes from British writer Paul Johnson from his ridiculously overrated book Intellectuals. Have a read (there ain’t enough room to post it here - which is a shame). Does anyone else gasp at its vacuity? Can anyone detect any awareness from its author of the shades of grey pulsing beneath its apparent common sense? Let’s take just two sentences:
Above all, he says, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.
We must remember, oh yes, and we must put people first. So what does this mean in practice, before ideas? Actually, first we must understand each word. But how is this done before we’ve had an idea about it? I don’t know. It’s confusing. I tell you what we need: we need an intellectual to bring out how complex the interaction of world and idea actually is: particularly the meaningless of prioritising one or the other. What we don’t need is a red-faced old hack shouting down any whisper of reason with his despotic philistinism.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
