September 23, 2008
Experience and education, but whence wisdom?
Victor Davis Hanson explains why he's confident that Sarah Palin has what it takes to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, comparing and contrasting the struggles of the two least experienced candidates on the ballot.
The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cachet, the fawning New York editors and DC insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail--and won't in office either.
Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one's down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser.
I like the cut of Hanson's jib, can't really find fault with the point he makes: Obama's bellyaching is somehow ... unseemly, given the way he's floated upward and onward, much like the feather in Forrest Gump.
But Hanson goes on to make another point, one that was at the center of a conversation I had today with a dear friend, wherein we differed as to the comparable worth and merit of today's society versus that of the early 20th century.
I believe that, apart from the wonderful gadgets and hi-tech gee-gaws that we enjoy, the actual culture in which we swim is a foetid, stinking cesspool, filled with loutish, uncouth cretins, over educated and under socialized, rude to strangers in a way that would have shocked my grandparents, tolerant of aberrant behavior that would have earned a trip to the local jail, or a bag of feathers, a quick application of tar, and an assist out of town.
For all the opportunities afforded today's children and young adults, we have produced generations of people who have diplomas in hand, but can't do much of a value and don't know anything useful about ... well, anything.
I pointed out that it was American children educated in one-room schoolhouses, using rote memorization and decidedly old-fashioned and un-enlightened texts, who turned this nation into an economic powerhouse, harnessed the power of the atom, and put men on the moon.
And yet, today, an education is highly overrated, the real-world experience of people like, well, like Gov. Palin derided as too ridiculous, too small-town goober to have any utility in today's complex and dangerous world.
Hanson has this to say:
While civilization advances on the shoulders of the educated, it is carried along by the legs of the muscular classes. And the latter are not there by some magical IQ test or a natural filtering process that separates the wheat from the chaff, but rather by either birth, or, as often, by their preference for action and the physical world.
I have seen no difference in intelligence levels between those who inhabit the world of the physical and those who cultivate the life of the mind. That is, the most brilliant Greek philologists seemed no more impressive in their aptitude than the fellow who could take apart the transmission of an old Italian Oliver tractor, fix it, and put it back together--without a manual. And I knew three or four who could. The inept mechanic seemed no more dull than the showy graduate student who could not distinguish an articular infinitive from an accusative of respect.
My seventy-year old Austrian professor who, off the cuff, could recite the lettering peculiarities of some 100 or so Athenian inscriptions on stone was brilliant-but no more intuitive or impressive than my grandfather who at 86 could scan 100 rows of vines under irrigation, instantly access how many acre feet of water were in the field, how many more needed, and then screw up or down an iron gate on a 20-foot standpipe and ensure the ditch water reached the end of each row--and only the end of each row.
You know all this in your hearts
For most of you readers, all this is trite and self-evident. But apparently not for hundreds in politics, the media, the universities, Hollywood, and the foundations who seem to think that a fumbling nervous Obama in interviews, who grasps for a word and utters vacuous platitudes is "really" contemplative, like his Harvard Law professors; but when a Sarah Palin seems nervous under scrutiny from a pseudo-professorial, glasses-on-the-lower-nose Charlie Gibson, she is clearly an empty head with an Idaho BA.
A Ronald Reagan knew more about human nature, and thus what drives the Soviet Union than did all the Ivy-League Soviet specialists that surrounded Jimmy Carter-much less the Sally Quins and Maureen Dowds of that age. We in America, unlike the Europeans, know this intuitively, grasp that a Harry Truman figured out the Russian communists far better than did the Harvard-educated aristocrat FDR.
I am not calling for yokelism, or a proponent of false-populism. Rather, I wish to remind everyone that there are two fonts of wisdom: formal education, and the tragic world of physical challenge and ordeal. Both are necessary to be broadly educated. Familiarity with Proust or Kant is impressive, but not more impressive than the ability to wire your house or unclog the labyrinth of pipes beneath it.
In this regard, I think Palin can speak, and reason, and navigate with bureaucrats and lawyers as well as can Obama; but he surely cannot understand hunters, and mechanics and carpenters like she can. And a Putin or a Chavez or a Wall-Street speculator that runs a leverage brokerage house is more a hunter than a professor or community organizer. Harvard Law School is not as valuable a touchstone to human nature as raising five children in Alaska while going toe-to-toe with pretty tough, hard-nose Alaskan males.
What is wisdom?
Not necessarily degrees, glibness, poise, or factual recall, but the ability to understand human nature. And that requires two simple things: an inductive method of reasoning to look at the world empirically, and a body of knowledge and experience to draw on for guidance.
Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra--unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.
Well said, don't you think?
Posted by Mike Lief at September 23, 2008 11:54 PM
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Comments
Well said, indeed.
Posted by: Susan at September 24, 2008 09:05 AM