This is a fascinating and deeply troubling graphic, if true:

(Source with extensive discussion. Via Jonah on the Corner.)

The Œc. Vol. has frequently thought—anecdotally—that something like this is the case. A whole range of explanations suggest themselves, but Confucius* says: Most worrisome scenario is that it’s simply a function of higher education which, rather than cultivating the educated, thoughtful scholar of traditional liberal education, has turned into a factory for shallow, fashionable, conformist, moralizing, leftist “intellectuals.” And remember, kiddos, back when people could read, intellectual was not a synonym for scholar or educated person. It was pejorative, like the Russian term intelligentsia, which seems to have been whole-heartedly adopted by those it contemned.

Whatever the cause, the trend suggests an explanation for the fact that a significant fraction of the American élite appears to profoundly dislike America—or at least to consider it inferior to the abstract, idealized, intellectualized version that they believe it should become. (To be redeemed, but that’s a whole other post.)

As Cicero said in De Divinatione: Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum† (2, 119), and as Orwell may or may not have paraphrased, “Some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could conceive of them.”

One worries that chart shows the growth of our very own, homegrown intelligentsia, presenting a very thorny socio-political problem.

* For those who came in late: Confucius is the Gormogons’ Œcumenical Volgi.

† But I know there’s nothing you can say so absurd that it hasn’t been said by some philosopher or other.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.