…and the brightest? Sounds like more credentialism to me.
Color me unimpressed. “The best and the brightest” are never really either the best or the brightest. Incidentally, I’ve never been as impressed by David Brooks as I’m supposed to be, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, and that goes triple for Bill Moyers.
Having seen the kind of people who qualify for and pay dues to mensa, I have a deep and abiding contempt for the use of paper and numbers to qualify someone for power.
I watched Obama’s supporters during the campaign keep rattling off all the titles he’d had and offices he’d held. Not one ever managed to tell me something he’d done. Now we’re seeing what he can do, and I know now why nobody talked about that during the campaign.
Not that I ever doubted it. Critical thinking: it’s not just for breakfast anymore.
Some incoming college freshmen are told they’re among the best and brightest and apparently believe it. Once you’re convinced that you’re one of the best and brightest, you have no need to listen to anyone else. After all, there’s no way anyone else can be better or brighter than you, is there?
George Orwell was right when he said “There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.”
I will give Bill Moyers credit for precisely one thing: back around 1980, he did an episode of one of his documentary series on “Olympics of the Mind”, a creative problem-solving competition which folks here are probably familiar with. Had it not been for that show I wouldn’t have gotten involved with OM, and I almost certainly wouldn’t be an engineer now.
I was surprised and disappointed to discover ten years or so later what an complete tool Moyers is, though, and what a nasty partisan hack he is. I guess that goes without saying for anyone lauded as a prominent intellectual or respected commentator.