Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

December 11, 2007

Which Came First: The Intellectual or the Leader?

My piece over at American Thinker today:

Now obviously George Bush is not running for office again, but I use him as an example because so much emphasis has been put on the "smart" vs. the "dumb" candidate -- "dumb" being equivalent to President Bush. When you realize that an entire industry has sprung up around Bush's "inferior" intellect, with numerous books, calendars, and other items for sale that impugn his IQ (and focusing largely on his propensity for mispronouncing words like "nuclear"), he's an obvious choice for discussion. (What will these entrepreneurs do when President Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009?)

If being smart was the only qualification for being a leader, one would assume from his treatment in the media that George Bush should never have gotten near the Oval Office...
The whole thing is here.

UPDATE: I received a lot of feedback from readers, most of it positive. However, I did get an indignant e-mail from a professor at the University of Wisconsin (in the engineering department). I will not reprint his name or e-mail here, since while he was condescending, he was not outright rude, nor was his message of a threatening nature (like some others I have read of). Here is the text of his message:

I see that you have joined the ranks of easy answers and offer more spoon fed ideology to the masses. Really schools produce anti-capitalist feelings among intellectuals? I teach at the University of Wisconsin, considered liberal, and we have more CEOs amongst our graduates than Harvard; and I believe and know some of them who qualify as intellectuals--how to explain that? Those verbal skills that you say shape entitlement are rarely graded; instead merit is usually determined through extensive writing, or testing and now more often in our college through product design and competitions.
But to some extent you are right, it is the intellectuals in IT who pointed out how the last elections were manipulated by touch screen voting, and it was the intellectuals in the pentagon who pointed out we needed more troops in Iraq, and it is the intellectuals in my class who I teach to be skeptical of all claims that are going on to lead us into a new and technically rich society.

My response:

Then by your implication, George W. Bush is an intellectual because he received his MBA at Harvard. Why didn't I see that before?

You seem to have missed the entire point of my article. I can't remember the last times CEOs, IT professionals and the like, as a group, were classified as intellectuals by the "great thinkers" of our time. That's not to say they are incapable of intelligent thought -- quite the contrary! Yet these thinkers, as you describe them, put a higher value on the end result than the "intellectual process." This is what distinguishes them from those who consider themselves to be intellectuals, i.e. philosphers, lecturers, and so on.

I do not mean to imply that there is no place for intellectuals in society. They provide a much-needed perspective on many things. I merely point out that "book smarts" alone do not necessarily make a great leader.

Thanks for writing.