A couple of random thoughts, John:

1) An intellectual is someone who is educated beyond his intelligence.

2) An honest, thoughtful patriotism is, to the intellectuals and their fellow limp-wristers, just so simplisme. Why, everyone knows that the truly knowledgable people can achieve moral superiority by holding themselves above the fray, damning all sides as equally blame-worthy.

*sigh*

I think that this is what we get for sending so many people to college, whether they can handle it or not; and for subsidizing their (doubtfully useful) attendance at college so generously as to draw into the field of teaching (as college professors) people who have no business being within a few miles of a classroom-- they lack the temperament and mental rigor to be effective instructors, and so cover that failing with blather of one kind or another.

(Geez, I'm verbose today. Diagram that sentence. C'mon, I dare ya.....)

It's like they say-- if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. And too many professors are slinging BS to too many people who shouldn't be in those classrooms.

I never could diagram sentences. (I did it, sort of, in 7th Grade, and then instantly forgot how.) In fact, grammar as a science has always been pretty opaque to me.

I know it, I can write grammatical sentences with ease (or at least nobody's complaining) and always have been able to. But I can't discuss the subject.

I have never forgotten my 7th Grade English teacher telling us that he learned all he knew about diagramming sentences when he was in 7th Grade, and never needed to study it again. That was astonishing to me...or maybe he was lying.

Some speakers are naturally eloquent, and some writers are precise without effort. The rest of us need to keep a toolbox handy. I still occasionally diagram sentences in my head, to ensure that my sentence structure is sound.

What is wrong with the Soul of the West?

I think Marxism is the virus.

It's the most self-flattering belief system an intellectual can own. It rationalizes all resentments and justifies all moral failings. It provides a template for disdaining the accomplishments of civilization, and elevates the true believer to the status of judge and jury. It's catnip to the vanity of second-raters who consider themselves the elite.

The fact that Marxism has collapsed as economics, philosophy, and history has not lessened its emotional appeal. But now its energy is concentrated almost exclusively in its resentments and negativity. In those smug, sour comforts it finds an ally in radical Islam.

" It's catnip to the vanity of second-raters who consider themselves the elite. I like that!

But then I always ask what's "underneath" the attraction of Marxism? We seem to keep re-inventing it in new guises, so somthing deeper must be going on. Each new intellectual fad on campus seems suspiciously like the same old Karl with a lot of tinsel drapped over him...

My suspicion is that if suddenly all memory of Socialist/Marxist/"Progressive" theorizing were wiped from our brains and libraries, new golems would would soon arise, with promises of great things to come, if only society could be molded by the elite into some harmonious pattern, and verious cranky individualisms removed by re-education...

Lyle and John,

Ditto for me-- I learned to diagram sentences in the 8th grade, and haven't done it since. But it does help you see how sentences are put together, though.

I think Lyle's onto something, John, when he writes about how Marxism and suchlike appeals to the vanity of second-raters. In addition to being physical and therefore having physical appetites, we're social creatures as well, and so have "social appetites"-- we're status-seekers for one reason or another. Maybe it's to attract mates, maybe it's to attract money, or to attract attention-- who knows, but we all have this drive to be "superior" (or as Lyle put it, it's vanity), and advocacy of Marxism and related ideologies is a way to feel superior.

It's an old impulse, part of human nature, and we'll never be rid of it. All we can do is arrange things so that those who are especially prone to it are put in situations where they can't do much damage, and hope that the rest of us, working in a productive way, can generate enough "forward momentum" to overcome the backwardness and destructiveness emanating from the vain and stupid.

Just what those situations might be, I don't know. I think we've found out, though, that academia isn't a safe dumping-ground for those folks.

Too bad we can't put them in someplace like Robert Heinlein's "Coventry". That'd wise 'em up in a hurry.

All true. And one can come at these questions from various angles. You are reminding me of the theory of the "new class," the theory that the very success of capitalism has created ever greater numbers of people who no longer have to work on the farm, or in small businesses, workshops, crafts, trades, etc, where they are forced to deal with the realities of the market and the ways in which wealth is actually created...(Even in the business world of today there are many people who are petty functionaries and paper-pushers with no feel for the rigor of the market or for the discipline of trying to make actual things happen.) And without that dose of painful reality they all tend to drift leftwards...

Well, we can certainly see that happening.

But for me it all keeps raising more questions. Whence this hunger to feel superior? How deeply dyed is our fabric with it?

Also, there are people who work with heroic patience to try to untangle themselves from this "hunger to feel superior." Christians, they are. Or rather, a subset of Christians. (I'm a mere wannabe & beginner here, by the way.) And if you try this yourself (that is, try to escape from the feeling that "it's all about ME", and its corollary, that I must be superior to other people, though exactly why is never examined) you will discover interesting things. Like maybe there's a little Karl M inside all of us, so intertwined with us that trying to get a grip on him is like trying to bite your elbow or chase your tail...

A good man would rather know his infirmity, than the foundations of the earth, or the heights of the heavens.
--Lancelot Andrewes

The Mediterranean Basin -- the better part of which were conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the 8th and 9th centuries -- were predominantly Christian for at least 300 years prior to the Muslim onslaught. This was one of the reasons Europe was said to be in the "Dark Ages" at that time. Christianity was under assault from the East and South, and the far North was still largely Pagan at the time.

The impression that ignorant revisionists give is that Muslims sprang from the ground at the beginning of time in these areas, and that Christianity was an entirely European religion that was trying to take territory (the Holy Land) that was never theirs.

And yes, all these events ocurred between 900 and 700 years ago. If us Westerners can "let this go," then so should "Easterners" if they really want to rejoin the modern world.