Noisemaker

I found this quote on Facebook today:

Intelligence is the ability to hear someone's opinion and not be swayed by it.

It was left unattributed, prompting me to consider the sad possibility that the page's proprietor authored it himself, feeling sufficiently proud of his brainchild to inflict it on the internet-going public. Too bad for him. His quote is blindingly, breathtakingly stupid, and completely antithetical to every intellectual endeavor ever. (Also: it makes me angry.)

At the risk of insufferable white-knighting, let me clear something up. Intelligence never exists in a vacuum. Intelligence is routinely mistaken. Intelligence neither has nor pretends to have all the answers. Intelligence is sufficiently confident that it cheerfully admits its limitations. Above all, intelligence craves further understanding, relishing in opportunities to refine and revise and be swayed by the opinion of another.

Here is a tip for you, O anonymous peddler of Facebook quotations. When you argue, you can nearly always find common ground with your opponent, a reasonable component of his argument that causes you to adjust — ever so slightly — your thinking. When this proves infeasible, there are two possibilities: either your opponent is an intransigent, incoherent noisemaker, or you are. Take care that it isn't you.

I feel guilty having subjected the internet to the above quotation, and my grandstanding is not penance enough. Here is compensatory wisdom, quotes that ought to be on our anonymous friend's profile:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman

The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. - Tom Stoppard

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. - Bertrand Russell

There. Now I feel better.

The best just keeps on getting better

Sigh. Many of you will remember Jon McNaughton, whose unfettered artistry I sampled in a recent post. Well, he's at it again:

(Incidentally, one of the cutest parts of McNaughton's site is his right-click blocker, which soberly informs you that the images on his site are copyrighted. I just want to pat him on the head and ruffle his hair!)

Perhaps he realized that playing artist-in-residence to the fringe right generates notoriety and its corresponding profits. I can hear Ayn Rand's post-mortem exultation from all the way over here.

I seriously considered not writing about this painting—there isn't much to say that doesn't also apply to McNaughton's previous offering—yet after the enthusiastic response to my previous post I feel duty-bound to share it. It's all here, just as before: the crushingly heavy-handed political message, the workmanlike copy-and-paste historical portraiture, the inarticulate rebuttal of "liberal" criticism. So as much fun as it would be to tear The Forgotten Man limb from limb, allow me instead to offer summary criticism. It's a better use of everyone's time.

Art transcends the prosaic machinations of day-to-day politics. It may reflect on its times, but when it does so it captures their essence rather than regurgitates their tiresome details. Decades from now we will have largely forgotten the political minutiae responsible for the controversies over which we so bitterly disagree, their particulars no more noteworthy than the 1791 whiskey tax or the merits of bimetallism. Yet McNaughton glorifies the petty conflicts, disgorging one-sided talking points as though they were timeless truths plucked from the tree of knowledge. He panders to the immediate present, and the result has a correspondingly short shelf life. He wants us to accept it as art, but it isn't; it's a political cartoon whose medium happens to be oil on canvas.