Random Reflections On Smallness
Scientific method.– Not judging a book by its cover should not entail denying the existence of covers. Covers are the given. They are experience. To ignore them, let alone to deny them outright, is to confuse sophisticated illusions with depth.
Diminishing returns.– If you want to depress yourself, reflect first on the number of people who start out in youth full of energy and enthusiasm for knowledge and the thinking life, and then on the percentage of those same young enthusiasts who end up, ten years later, settled into lives of physical comfort, material gain, recreational drinking, and thinking pursued, if at all, strictly as a means of carving out a professional niche or an area of expertise with which to pay the bills or impress their families.
Dunning-Kruger effect.– The problem with the concept of the middlebrow is that it essentially comprises a realm of vain posturing by those who lack the intellectual or moral substance to break free of the safety net of accepted norms, such that its denizens will always and inevitably tend, as a matter of face-saving need and lack of self-awareness, to (re-)evaluate themselves as highbrow. Hence every milquetoast philosophy professor thinks he has the wisdom to evaluate and even rank the great thinkers, every political scientist assumes he has earned the right to deduce and reduce the “real” motives and intentions of Thomas Jefferson or Elizabeth I, and every literature professor believes he has attained the authority to critique the reputation or artistic merits of Milton or Swift. Lacking the stuff of greatness, or even the depth of thought to understand the difference between great thoughts or deeds and merely fashionable ones, the middlebrow subtly usurps the rightful place of the highbrow in public perception and practical education. The democratization of wisdom, or elitism by consensus. In civilizational effect, the blind leading the blind.
