[ExI] Continued use of the term "intellectuals" is not productive

[Lee Corbin]

John Clark wrote:

 > On Dec 30, 2009,  Tomasz Rola wrote in Re: [ExI] I accuse intellectuals... or else:
 >
 > > I wanted to make a list of intellectual Genghis Khans.
 > >
 > > Rafal suggested on Sun, 27 Dec 2009,
 > >
 > > > ### Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Karl Marx, Friedrich
 > > > Engels, Noam Chomsky, almost any random sociologist since Emile
 > > > Durkheim, Upton Sinclair, Paul Krugman, Joseph Lincoln Steffens,
 > > > Albert Einstein, Jeremy Rifkin - collectively contributing to the
 > > > enactment of a staggering number of stupid policies, starting with
 > > > meat packing regulations and genetic engineering limits all the way to
 > > > affirmative action, social security, and the Fed.
 > >
 > [Damien added]
 > > > In US: the neocons are intellectuals, of a sort. They happily provided the
 > > > Iraq war. Dr. Leon Kass is clearly an intellectual, and he helped to ban
 > > > embryonic stem cell research... On a more highbrow level, if Heidegger
 > > > wasn't an intellectual, nobody is.
 >
 > I don't say all of these were as evil as Genghis Khan, that's asking for rather a lot, but off the top of my head here are some 
intellectuals that the world would probably have been better off if they'd never been born:
 >
 > Paul of Tarsus
 > Augustine of Hippo
 > Martin Luther
 > Jean-Paul Marat
 > Vladimir Lenin
 > Philipp Lenard

For long I supposed that there just was confusion between
"intellectuals" and "evil intellectuals", and this was getting
added to the conviction by many that by definition an
"intellectual" is a pointy-headed type leftist. To these people,
and there are a lot of them, it would never occur that James
Watson or Gauss was an intellectual. Paul Johnson didn't help
with his book "Intellectuals", though it does contain revealing
and utterly devastating biographical sketches about

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau : 'An Interesting Madman'
    Shelley, or the Heartlessness of Ideas
    Karl Marx : 'Howling Gigantic Curses'
    Henrik Ibsen: 'On the Contrary'
    Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother
    The Deep Waters of Ernest Hemingway
    Jean-Paul Sartre: 'A Little Ball of Fur and Ink"
    Edmund Wilson: A Brand from the Burning
    The Troubled Conscience of Victor Gollancz
    Lies, Damned Lies and Lillian Hellman

But I would have preferred is to retain "intellectual" for someone
who, well, engages in intellectual activity, and I always tried
to think of myself and my friends as such. But the cause is
hopeless:

Sadly, the term now creates so much confusion is that the only prudent
recourse is to drop it, and to just say what you mean instead.

This is one of those cases where it is utterly pointless to argue
about the meaning of a term, as disappointed as will be those who
want to bandy it about as opprobrium.

Lee