"Shuffling bent, almost toothless, squinting and blinking, he could be as old as sixty or as young as forty. Before scientific medicine, unless you were upper class you needed a lot of luck to reach middle age still in good health, if you reached it at all. Twentieth-century intellectuals call technofixes dehumanizing, Everard recollected."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 104.
Do we (those of us who have survived into the twenty first century)? Why this hostility to "intellectuals"? In a University town, I am surrounded by people who are only too aware that they would have been crippled in their sixties if not for free National Health Service knee or hip replacement operations. One of my fellow pensioners, commenting on his parents' generation when they reached retirement age, said, "If you'd worked, you were done!"
The modern period is a mixture of good and bad but scientific medicine is one of the goods - for those who can access it.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've tried to tell you before, as when we were discussing that chapter of THERE WILL BE TIME, which you disliked, there ARE "intellectuals" in the US who think and talk like that. Esp. in the state of CA, in the San Francisco region. There ARE "intellectuals" who are hostile to "dehumanizing" high technology. For a science fictional treatment of what that kind of people might do if they came to control the US, see FALLEN ANGELS, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and a third author whose name escapes me.
Sean
Sean,
Michael Flynn.
Paul.
Sean,
OK> I must make allowances for context.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That's it, Michael Flynn! I really should have taken the bother to find out the third author's name.
In the US, at least, "intellectual" has become so closely associated with the left, including the extreme left, that conservatives and libertarians, including the most learned and well read, prefer not to ue that word of themselves.
Sean
Sean,
But learned, well read conservatives and liberals apply their intellects just as much as their opponents. But words change their meanings. The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC) that I meditate with has changed "Zen meditation" to "serene reflection meditation" in its documents because "Zen" got a bad name in the US, apparently!
Paul.
I should have written "libertarians." (Again, these words all change their meanings, of course.)
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree that scholarly and well read conservatives and libertarians use their intellects as much as the most intelligent of their opponents do. The problem is, "intellectual" has been emptied of its original meaning. So much so that conservatives and libertarians in the US tend to dislike that term.
And "liberal" is another word which has unfortunately completely changed its meaning in the US. It USED to mean, up to about WW I, people with ideas and beliefs we would call libertarian today. Nowadays, unfortunately, it means "leftist."
I think what has been causing you some confusion is the fact some political and philosophical terminology has different meanings in the US from what the same words means in the UK.
Sean
Deffo! Certainly "intellectual."
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