Thursday morning always brings a Peggy Noonan column - always a treat. Today she is revising last week's remarks on The Complexity Crises. She makes her case for a conservative approach to governing and then says:
I note here what is to me a mystery. It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals, who often seem, in areas outside their immediate field, startlingly dim. I don't know why intellectuals--or cerebralists or eggheads or IQ hegemonists--seem to miss the most obvious things, floating on untethered by common sense. If you talk to a brilliant scholar at a fine university about social policy, chances are he will say with honest perplexity that he cannot understand--really cannot understand--why people would not want men to marry men, or women women. I wish there were a name for this, for the cluelessness of the more intellectually accomplished, the simpler but truer wisdom of those who are often less lettered and less accomplished.
But I have strayed from my point, which is that in the midst of the increasing complexity we should limit as much as possible what is decided by government, limit its power, and have some actual sympathy for politicians who have to master the arcane subject matter. Better they make decisions than our black-robed masters.
Thanks, Peggy. We live in Charlottesville, near a fine Univesity filled with brilliant scholars. We know exactly what you mean.
Readers, Peggy deals with three topics today. Please scroll down to the third section for these remarks.
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