All that matters is how well you think

There's a tradition in journalism, going back at least to Mark Twain, of crusty men of blue-collar extraction like Pete Hamill or the late Mike Royko who, for a fee, will let you know what The Common Man (i.e., them) thinks about the issues of the day.\nThese days the prime exemplar is probably Michael Moore, the writer, filmmaker and TV troublemaker, scion of an auto working family from Flint, Mich. There's a scene in Moore's useful documentary The Big One where he jeers at his apparently yuppie audience for buying Third World folk art, handmade handbags from Guatemala and whatnot. They laugh, but uneasily, as if they're just realizing that he's making fun of them, not Jesse Helms or Bill Gates. Moore has suggested in print that middle-class folks who want to make contact with the American working class should go line dancing.\nI thought yuppies had already discovered line dancing! The gentry have gone slumming among the peons for centuries; it might improve interclass relations, but it has no effect on class systems. Marie Antoinette and her court ladies dressed up as milkmaids now and then, but it didn't improve their social consciences.\nI'm beginning to suspect that I might have given a wrong impression when I addressed the topics of Class and Buttcrack two weeks ago. I received more positive responses on that column than on anything else I've written, often from people who were at pains to inform me that they didn't much like anything else I'd written. Ah well, it wouldn't be the first time I've expressed myself badly.\nOne old friend, a retired university professor, pointed out in e-mail that he could "out-hick" me easily. I wasn't trying to out-hick anyone; on the contrary, I was trying to stress that I am under-hicked. But touting the superior virtues of Joe Sixpack the Noble Savage is such a widespread pastime that I can understand why people might have thought I was doing it too. Not only liberals do it: William F. Buckley famously quipped that he'd rather be ruled by the first 500 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Yale University.\nHe didn't mean it, of course -- just kidding, guys! -- but Buckley's witticism is noteworthy: he's hardly an egalitarian, but once in a while he'll play one on TV. I've noticed that many academic partisans in the culture wars of the 1990s, who most of the time waved the banner of elitism, would sometimes present themselves as ordinary Joes whose common sense was baffled by the elitist jargon of French theorists and their American minions. Aw shucks, folks.\nNope, that wasn't what I was trying to do. I don't find wisdom in any class of people as a class, including intellectuals. (Certainly not in myself.) I find wisdom in individuals, and it seems to me that the smartest people I've encountered tend to be painfully aware of their own stupidities -- the errors that stared them in their faces for years, without their noticing. If they're merciless about the mistakes of their peers, it's because they're just as merciless with themselves.\nIf I must at times defend working-class people against the jeers of those who want to see us as subhuman, at other times I have to defend intellectuals against those who think they're better than we are because they don't think. Such people are found not only in the trailer parks of America, but in its ivory towers; not only on Rush Limbaugh's telephone lines, but in Harvard and on PBS. What counts is not who you are, who your parents or first cousins are, where you live or how many degrees you have, but how well you think. And just as the greatest athletes have their off-days, so do the greatest thinkers, let alone those who aren't so great.\nLast time I quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein on the importance of thinking clearly even when it's unpleasant; this time I'll quote his near contemporary, the classical scholar A. E. Housman: "Three minutes' thought would have avoided this error; but thought is difficult, and three minutes is a long time"