A few weeks ago, the Financial Times had a great article on the importance of Intellectuals (even though it is decreasing) in France. Sugary excerpt:
But even today the reverence shown to intellectuals is astonishing. Scarcely an evening passes without some worthy, highbrow panel discussion on television between the country’s wise men and women. Le Nouvel Observateur, the weekly leftwing magazine, devoted its cover and many of its inside pages to dissecting how les intellos would vote in last year’s presidential election. Where else do philosophers debate whether jogging is an acceptable form of exercise for a head of state?
Should the rest of the world take les intellos seriously? Dutchman Frits Bolkestein, a former European commissioner and keen student of France who is writing a book about the role of intellectuals in public life, argues that French intellectuals generally don’t know what they’re talking about. Many, he says, resemble minor celebrities rather than serious thinkers.
But in spite of Bolkestein’s scepticism, conversations with Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, Nicolas Baverez and Edgar Morin – four of France’s most provocative thinkers – yield insights on the state of France, the environment, the defence of human rights and military interventionism.
The article led me to wonder not only why in America intellectuals don’t play the same role, but also why there is a vibrant anti-intellectualism in American society, which leads it to despise people who think and to view them as part of an elite, which is trying to unAmericanize America, by making it a French. I think that some of the reasons are historical in the same that America likes to believe that it was created by simple folks who rebelled against the English who were elitists and who were hard workers instead of spending their afternoons sipping teas and their nights drinking French Wine. The point is that even though American founders were part of an elite group and were intellectuals, the story of America is one in which ordinary folks in spite or rather because of their lack of sophistication do something extraordinary precisely because they believe in what Tom Paine called “Common sense.” French has a different history. The French likes sophistication and want their leaders to be better than they are and to know more than they do. Indeed, if the American Revolution was about Americans saying no to a king because he wasn’t one of them and was condescending, the French Revolution was about the uprising of the people against a monarch who had stopped to act like a king and its queen whom they believe was an imposter. The French who stormed the Bastille did so because they stop to believe that their king was the descendant of God because he was acting like members of lower classes peasants by being standoffish and by showing its love of power and of money instead of being noble and acting divinely and with dignity. This explains why France returned to different forms of monarchy even after its revolution, why it had a Napoleon after a Louis XV and why today its president is called a republican monarch. In other words, the French recognize and accept that common folks may be honorable and extraordinary people, by that there needs in society to be people whose role is to reach for something higher, to think about issues and to value culture and the art de vivre and de penser above everything else. This explains for example why Sarkozy started to become unpopular when he acted like a nouveau riche, a common folk who won the lottery and wanted to show that he had made it and to show his riches. Americans to the contrary like it when theirs leaders behave like them, enjoy beer, play sport, make grammatical mistakes, eat junk food but values hard work and applies street smart to their problems. It is for that reason that the American presidential will not be about issue, but about identity and that the winner will be the one whom Americans like and believe resemble them the most.
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