A thought about intellectuals.

Daniel Kahneman suggests there are two types of thinking:

• Type 1, which is largely unconscious, intuitive and associative -- perhaps the result of an evolutionary process which rewarded quick "pretty good" response to threats and opportunities with survival, and
• Type 2, which is largely conscious, learned and analytic, perhaps the result of accumulated culture and especially schooling.

I have been reading The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I have been specifically reading the early chapters which talk about the scholastic movement in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Humanists, both of which groups did a lot of Type 2 analysis on what the bible meant, what early interpreters of the bible meant, and the quality of early translations, especially into Latin. I must admit that I found a lot of that effort to be rather futile -- if the earliest authors were wrong, improving the translation of their works, or improving the commentaries interpreting those translations would not seem to accomplish much "truth telling".

I recently commented on George Washington's intellectual accomplishments. I did so after watching a lecture on George Washington as an intellectual. Washington read widely, mastered surveying and  military arts, innovated as a plantation owner (both in agriculture and industry) and emphasized learning useful knowledge, which he applied as leader of armies, leader of his country's government, and leader of the Constitutional Convention. He seemed to have considerable curiosity, but directed that curiosity in his available time to things that were relatively likely to provide useful knowledge.

Thomas Jefferson and other of his contemporaries seemed to see him as less of an "intellectual" in that he had less formal education that they did, and perhaps because he had not mastered foreign languages. I came away from the lecture with the idea that intellectual carried the connotation identified in Wikipedia:

The distinctive quality of the intellectual person is that the mental skills, which he or she demonstrates, are not simply intelligent, but even more, they focus on thinking about the abstract, philosophical and esoteric aspects of human inquiry and the value of their thinking.

I rather hate the idea that intellectuals are those who focus on "philosophical and esoteric aspects of human inquiry" rather than on "useful knowledge". Let us consider two people of equal intelligence who are equally diligent in their studies, one who studies philosophy and religion to satisfy intellectual curiosity and the other who studies social and natural sciences to derive useful knowledge and understanding. If only the first is "an intellectual", what then should we call the second?

I would go further. Scientists tend to focus on topics that can be studied experimentally, and if they have a part of their life devoted to things that must be taken on faith, do not call that science. I am very comfortable with applying the term "intellectual" to someone who has worked hard and successfully to master scientific knowledge with potentially useful applications. I think I am less happy to apply the term "intellectual" to someone who has worked equally hard to learn esoteric knowledge of no particular utility.