Eggheads

Don’t let the next paragraph fool you, this is not a depressing entry.

This year is getting off to a slow start. First, I stayed in bed until after 11 o’clock. I hate when I keep falling back asleep. It has become difficult for me to resist the comfort of not opening my eyes or moving. I’m afraid it’s because there’s nothing I’m looking forward to doing. It’s a form of depression. I’ll have to discuss this with my therapist on Friday. It’s the first time talking to her in a month. I was hoping to do it in person, but I suspect it might be by phone or video thanks to Omicron. Once I was out of bed, I decided to give myself a nice breakfast. I went for a ham and cheese omelet. I forgot to use the cooking spray, so it stuck to the pan.

I recognized that I’ve become accepting of boring comfort over anxiety but should not be enough. I might not have had therapy in a month, but I’ve had enough to know that there are things I can do to fight mental states I don’t like whether it be anxiety, depression, or ennui. I decided to go back to my practice from the early days of the lockdown and calling friends. That’s something that always makes me feel better once I get over the anxiety of making the call. When I took my walk the other day I called three friends, none were available to talk. Yesterday two of them called back so I had two quality conversations. Carey and I for the most part discussed Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that first aired, we were obsessed. Taking a cue from Vin Scelsa we called it Church. We would always talk the next day about the previous night’s episode. Then we’d continue to talk about the show every day. We finally instituted the “Day of Trial and Denial.” The day before it was on, we were not allowed to mention the show. This was difficult. Carey remembers that once we were sitting in a restaurant and out of nowhere, he made a random quote from the show. We were living the Seinfeld life. After the third season when the characters graduated high school and more importantly Joss Whedon left the day to day operations of the show, there was a steep drop-off in quality; it was no longer Church. We didn’t stop watching and there were good episodes every season, but it wasn’t even our favorite show.

Then Katherine called and we talked of many things, of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — Of cabbages — and kings —And why the sea is boiling hot — And whether pigs have wings. Well, we talked about Betty White saying the secret of her long life is never eating anything green and that includes cabbages. She said that days before she died. Betty was one of those people that everyone liked, including people that never watched Golden Girls or The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I knew her first from 1960s gameshows, especially Password, hosted by her husband Allen Ludden.

None of that is what inspired me to write today. It was when the topic turned to anti-intellectualism and she asked the proper question, “What is an Intellectual.” Oddly, I have been thinking about that most of my life and fell back to the idea I first formulated in first or second grade; An intellectual is someone that enjoys learning. I should broaden that, it’s not just learning, bit it’s enjoying mental activities, not just learning but thinking and problem solving. It involves curiosity.

What inspired seven-year-old me to come up with that? It was an explanation of why I was so good in school. I was conscious of my tendency to be egotistical and didn’t think, “because I’m smart” was an acceptable answer. I think I hit on something. Yes, innate qualities are important but so are inclinations. Given a math problem, I wanted to figure it out. Given facts I wanted to learn them. I didn’t learn all the state capitals because that’s useful but because I enjoyed the process of learning them. I enjoy solving puzzles. I enjoy reading.

You learn as a kid that many people don’t enjoy these things. Some not only don’t enjoy them but mock those that do. What’s sad is that I learned as adult that some people never get over this. The middle school bullies have grown up to be a significant force in politics. I see it all the time in my baseball groups where some members have a visceral hatred for analysis. I was not surprised that when I checked their political affiliation, they are in the anti-intellectualism crowd. One exchange put it so well. Someone said, “Only nerds take WAR (a modern analytics stat) seriously.” To him this was a crushing remark. My response was, “Yes, only smart people.”

One of the best things about being an adult is that we can surround ourselves with people that share our inclinations. All my friends are intellectuals. The correlation between education and political leanings has become sharper and more well-known of late. The more educated you are the more likely you are to be progressive. My guess is that this is not so much an effect of education but self-selection of who gets educated. People that hate learning are less likely to continue their education more than they absolutely have to. I have friends that did not have the opportunity to get a higher education but are intellectuals. Their politics follows their inclination, not their education level.

This divide is old. Even when I was a kid, “scientist” was the most liberal profession. In 1952 Einstein told Johnny Von Neumann that Kurt Gödel had lost his mind. Von Neumann asked, “What did he do?” Einstein replied, “He’s voting for Eisenhower.” Von Neumann and Gödel are not as well-known as Einstein, but they were two of the greatest mathematicians. The difference between now and then was the correlation was not nearly as strong. Getting an education was still the American dream for everyone. There was a long time that the more educated you were the more likely you were to vote Republican, but that was because of the stronger correlation of income with politics. For people at the same income level the more educated you were the more likely you were to be liberal. Now the divide is so strong that the majority of Republicans say that colleges and universities are a negative influence on society.

Keep in mind that we are talking correlations not absolutes. There are a myriad of intellectual Republicans. They love learning and thinking as much as anyone, they are just rarer.

But that’s not my main point. It’s that I love people that love intellectual pursuits. Every week I post the New York Times News Quiz and my friends take it and we compare scores. I have friends that are masters of word puzzles and word games. I have friends that are voracious readers and love discussing what they read. I have a friend that every day posts a random fact on Facebook, because he enjoys random facts and people follow his page because they do. I have friends that I can go to a museum or a zoo or a botanical garden, which can explain what we are seeing like experts. I have a musician friend whose pride and joy is his high quality telescope and almost daily writes about astronomy. He’s in heaven with the launch of the Webb Space Telescope. Along with the middle school bullies there are people on my baseball groups that do their own original analyses. Others quiz each other about deep baseball knowledge. I have friends who were on Jeopardy. Hell blogging every day is an intellectual pursuit. Like James Branch Cabell’s literary creation Jurgen, there is nothing I enjoy more than observing the workings of my own mind.

I can almost guarantee that if you are reading this you are an intellectual. You might not think of yourself as such. You might not think of yourself as intelligent. That’s OK, even intelligent intellectuals can be wrong about things, especially things they are close to.