If you drop by, I’m buying…

Judith beat me to it but I wanted to emphasise that while Bush may have an honorary doctorate from Yale, he also posses a Master’s in Business Administration from Havard, the first president to have earn an MBA.

What about science, arguably our greatest achievement? I, for one, do not consider educated anyone who has not yet read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, something that I seriously think everyone should read. Much more important, satisfying, and transcendant than 90% of the self-absorbed rubbish Bloom recommends.

Beginning to sound like a real salon in here.

I enjoy blooms lit crit, but his intelligence doesn’t prevent him from making an ass of himself.

Your comments about Bloom’s column, particularly those I’ve quoted below seem quite apt:

I think it’s the way their deep knowledge in a certain specialized area (in his case, literature) combines with a failure to research much outside the range of that knowledge, and the resultant arrogance and ignorance they display without their even realizing it. Because they are smart and highly erudite in one discipline, and are used to pontificating within that discipline (and receiving praise and respect when they do), people such as Bloom often appear to lack the intellectual curiosity–and humility–to wonder what it is they don’t know about other things, and to try to learn.

Not only is that the case with Bloom–and with many academics who are content to sniff about the stupidity they see represented not just by Bush but by American voters generally–but in some respects, things have always been this way in Western civilization.

One of the most delightful of Plato’s dialogues is the one entitled “Ion,” where Socrates questions the rhapsode Ion about his art, and where it becomes very clear that Ion doesn’t really have much knowledge or understanding of what it is he does so well, nor does he have much knowledge of the world beyond his art. Although Bloom would most likely say that the Ion represents a crucial dialogue in the famous dispute between Poetry and Philosophy, I always think of Ion when I hear some smug academic revealing his ignorance of subjects beyond his field of expertise.

Maybe this time the link will work: “Ion.”