The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer.

Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority

Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world. A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is an adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it. This explains the self-assurance and self-regard of the liberal governing classes, their smug certainty of their own superiority and their unconcealed disdain for the uneducated and unlettered masses beneath them, the people Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, calls the “deplorables” – the Republicans, Trump voters and other reactionary ignoramuses, many of whose parents, and their parents before them, voted the Democratic ticket and were rewarded for doing so by the beneficiaries of their votes.

The result, before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump’s first term in office, can be fairly described as the tyranny of the educated and the intelligent; or, put less politely, the mass-intellectual, a product of the industrialization of liberal education throughout the western world. Sir Francis Bacon understood knowledge as power; power over nature in service to a more comfortable future for humanity. Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is not merely in itself virtue but the one and only true virtue.

Thus progressive education along narrow and restrictive lines of thought fixed by the adepts is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority: the Church of God Without God, recognized as the institution entrusted by them with the privilege of baptizing in its name the present and future members of the new ruling class, endowed with power and the material rewards that come with power – the new Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It is no coincidence that the logo chosen for Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation should be a bitten fruit, symbolizing knowledge acquired through metaphysical rebellion and power as virtue, whether or not acquired by virtuous means and wielded to moral ends. I read only the other day of a team of American scientists who, working with a human egg and a piece of human skin, have succeeded in creating a human embryo, thus realizing, potentially, the ability of two men to sire a “child” that is, indeed, their own and without genetic contribution from what we used to call “Mother” Nature. (The question of what the life of such a freak would be like never – apparently – occurred to them.)

Scientific “achievements” like this one are the result of the modern worship of narrow intelligence and the complete neglect of what used to be called “intellect,” a word one scarcely hears anymore. Every child for the past three-quarters of a century at least has been subjected to a so-called “intelligence test”; none to what one might call an “intellect test.” Intelligence and intellect are clearly two critically different things. To the extent that intelligence really is susceptible to accurate assessment (a claim of which I am extremely skeptical), it needs to be far better, and more comprehensibly, understood than it is in modern western technocratic society.

Intelligence tests are designed to measure the mental capacity of a middle, or upper-middle class, person to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of business, the law, medicine, the sciences and technology generally. Success in these fields certainly requires intelligence but by no means necessarily intellect, which implies a comprehensive sense of the entirety of human understanding and culture and of the relationship and balance between their separate categories, including theology and philosophy, history, languages and the arts and fine arts. Many of the finest minds in one field or the other have been hopelessly incompetent in, and even ignorant of or blind to, the others. Music is an art with a fundamental relationship to mathematics. Nevertheless, who can say how Bach would have scored on an SAT test that included geometry and the sciences? Or Shakespeare? Or Rembrandt? Or, for that matter, Saints Paul and Augustine and Aquinas?

However that may be, it is a virtual certainty that none of these men would have seen in modern education anything less than a civilizational, moral and human disaster. Descartes has been famous for nearly five centuries now for his maxim, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Christianity has given the world another, and infinitely deeper, one, though so far as I know it has never been formulated succinctly. That is, “J’aime, donc je suis.” It would take a person of intellect – not necessarily one of high abstract intelligence – fully to recognize the profound human truth of that one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.