Years ago, at a dinner party on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I found myself in a shouting match about whether it was fair to make fun of intellectuals. The person with whom I was arguing, herself the daughter of prominent scholars, said she was offended by the work of Woody Allen because of his mocking portrayal of educated, urban elites.
Such derisiveness, she claimed, would never be tolerated if it were aimed at racial minorities, or poor people, or even plain old intelligent people who didn't stammer and flail their hands around quite so much when they talked. As a proud intellectual (and this is where the shouting began, not to mention some hand flailing), she was offended on behalf of herself and the entire community.
At the time, I was 25 and strenuously devoted to the cause of making my life resemble that of a Woody Allen character. (This was before he moved them to the Upper East Side.) Still, I couldn't see my dinner companion's grievance as anything but unintentional self-parody. Intellectuals, I argued, were made for poking fun at. Even I, a clueless suburban refugee who dreamed of rent-controlled apartments filled with house plants and volumes of Goethe, could see that.
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm beginning to think she might have had a point. As dumb as things were back then, it's fair to suggest today's culture is even dumber. Granted, the police aren't raiding highbrow cultural events and arresting anyone who uses a three-syllable word, but something uncannily similar is playing out, minute by minute, on television and the Internet. With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.
What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."
