When being smart means being dumb and dangerous

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INTELLECTUAL MORONS: HOW IDEOLOGY MAKES SMART PEOPLE FALL FOR STUPID IDEAS

By Daniel J. Flynn

Crown Forum, $25.95, 292 pages

REVIEWED BY LARRY THORNBERRY

The confusing thing about the word "intelligentsia" is that it sounds like it has something to do with intelligence (the being smart kind, not the military information kind). It doesn't. Readers who don't already understand this will after they finish "Intellectual Morons."

Mr. Flynn's latest?he covered some of the same ground in 2002's "Why the Left hates America"?could have been subtitled, "A History of Recent Idiocy." Sadly, there's plenty of it to go around. In "Morons" Mr. Flynn goes after the puzzling question of how so many otherwise intelligent people fall for ideas so dumb that an acute 12 year-old wouldn't consider them for 10 seconds. We're talking about professors, politicians, clergypersons, reporters, television producers, and writers?what Mr. Flynn calls the "cognitive elite."

These folks are bright enough to dress themselves in the mornings, balance their checkbooks, get their cars serviced on time. Some small number may even understand the infield fly rule. But they fall for -- and emotionally defend -- ideas as bizarre as: the United States threatens the world with imperial designs and orchestrated the 9-1-1 attacks. The automobile is the biggest threat to world security. Ten percent of the population is homosexual.

They also fall for and ardently defend such notions as: words and works of literature mean whatever you think they mean; all the world's resources will be gone by (insert your favorite date here); save for size, strength, and plumbing, men and women are essentially the same and we should force the world to operate on this understanding; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is about rape; and, always a favorite with this crowd, "Bush is like Hitler."

To be fair to book-buyers, Mr. Flynn doesn't really answer the question in his subtitle, "How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas." Instead, he enumerates the manifold ways in which they do. By way of explanation, Mr. Flynn only notes that for the "cognitive elite" ideology has replaced analytical thinking, which shows that the author has a firm grasp of the obvious. What it doesn't explain is why so many on the elite left (and some on the right) have chosen to seal their cerebral cortexes in an orthodoxy so rigid Torquemada seems a non-directive counselor by comparison.