Iraqi academics see the current attacks as a way to destroy Iraq's intellectual elite. Precise figures are difficult to obtain, but studies suggest that doctors and academics are particularly at risk. A study by the Iraqi Ministry of Health concluded that armed groups have abducted between 160 and 300 Iraqi doctors since April 2003, and killed more than twenty-five. Nearly 1,000 doctors have fled the country, the study said, with an average of thirty more following each month. To stem the outflow, the ministry broadcast a public service announcement on television in spring 2005, with a message that said: ‘Dear Citizens, please do not kill doctors—you may need them one day.’
Professors at Iraq's once prestigious universities are also under attack. According to an April 2005 United Nations University report, assassins have killed forty-eight academics since 2003, and many more teachers and professors brave daily threats. Hundreds of academics and professionals have been threatened with death and told to leave Iraq. According to the Association of University Teachers, 2,000 professors have left Iraq since 2003, joining the 10,000 professors the association says left the country in the twelve years after the Gulf War.
Attacks on people who can think occur in every culture and in every epoch. Rebellious feminists in Russia are labeled with mental disorders made up on the spot for the purposes of incarcerating them. Scientists who point out the environmental dangers caused by business are ridiculed as fear mongers. Every age and every culture has its versions of cultural revolutions, inquisitions, and Scopes trials.
It is impossible for a child who is born smart to have any inkling that her abilities are likely to be disparaged, that thinking itself will be envied and hated by some in her society, or that she may be targeted by her government because she has chosen a thinking profession. What smart child building with blocks or surfing the Net could possibly suspect how unfriendly her species is to thinking and to the fruits of thinking like science, culture, and freedom? Such a notion would make no sense to her. Yet those are the abiding truths about our species that perennially contribute to the distress that smart people experience.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
1 Was your smartness disparaged as you were growing up?
2 What messages did you receive about your capabilities and talents?
3 What messages did you receive about whether it was admirable or unseemly to be smart?
4 If you received mixed messages about your smartness, what was the bottom line or ultimate message?
5 Given that those messages and that upbringing necessarily influenced your formed personality, what do you need to do now to recover your rightful smartness?
2
SMART WORK AS OXYMORON
We can imagine a situation far back in time in which nothing in a person's life could be singled out as one's profession or line of work. If you had to grow or catch your own food, make your own clothes, dream up your own metaphors for the night sky, heal your own injuries, make your own love matches, concoct your own stimulants and sedatives, and in every way imaginable take care of yourself and amuse yourself, you had no profession or line of work. You were simply living; you were simply a human being.
You weren't a baker or a homebuilder or a utensil maker or a natural philosopher; you were all those things. Now such a life is virtually impossible. While you can be several things—a lawyer during the day and a painter on Sunday; a grocer during the day, a cabinet maker in the evening, and a fisherman on the weekend; and so on—there is an undeniable sense in which our species has sorted itself into jobs, professions, and lines of work.
Smart people, if they get the chance or make the chance, will find themselves needing to choose from among a standard menu of work opportunities with names like doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist, novelist, entrepreneur, and so on. Each job on this list may hold some cachet in society, but each may also hold no meaning for a given smart individual. The sorting out of society's needs creates jobs and professions—some of which putatively allow for thinking, many of which do not—but that very sorting reduces the chances that a given smart individual can find a line of work that feels genuinely meaningful.
There is no necessary connection between the value that society puts on a line of work and its meaningfulness to a given individual. Society may hold the profession of doctor in high esteem, but if you do not find medicine a meaningful line of work, it is not meaningful to you. Society may not hold the profession of elementary school teacher in high esteem (whatever lip service it may pay to the value and importance of that work), but if you find that a meaningful line of work, then it is meaningful to you. To repeat a central fact about meaning and a core teaching in natural psychology, meaning is a subjective psychological experience. If certain work isn't meaningful to you, it simply isn't.
This problem is compounded by the following additional reality. People do not become lawyers, doctors, or scientists. They become corporate lawyers or litigators, pediatricians or brain surgeons, geologists or physicists. That is, people are forced to specialize—and that specializing typically further reduces the meaningfulness of that line of work. Maybe practicing law might have proven meaningful if you had not also wanted to make money and had chosen poverty law instead of corporate law. Maybe science might have proven meaningful if you could have stepped back to look at the biggest issues rather than having to drill down into a niche where you work with one organism, one atomic particle, or one geological formation. But the way that professional work is constituted nowadays, you are bound to have to specialize.
There is no contemporary category of general thinker that matches the ancient job title of natural philosopher, in which people could do science, philosophy, art, and anything else that caught their fancy. Smart people today must become clear somethings—college professors specializing in the early works of Melville, engineers specializing in bridges, lawyers who know tax law, and so on—and, having become that something, must stay right there, trapped with the duty of preparing another journal article, pondering another bend in the river, or familiarizing themselves with another tax code change.
Marilyn, a biological researcher, explained:
The journey to get where I am today as a biological researcher at a prestigious university was long and hard, and because it was so hard, with so many hurdles to jump over and hoops to jump through, I never noticed exactly what was happening. I never noticed that in some of my undergraduate classes, I was actually excited by the material and actually enjoyed thinking about the big questions but that as each year progressed and as I had to narrow my focus, find my niche, and choose my life form, as it were (I've ended up an expert on a certain worm), I stopped thinking and spent my days in pretty dreary fashion trying to find some enthusiasm for my own research. Biology is amazing—I am a biologist—and yet it has all come together in a very disappointing way.
Martin, a professor of philosophy, described his situation:
I've spent the last two months defending a journal article I wrote about praise and blame in Kantian ethics from the three peer reviewers who nitpicked my article to death. In order to have a chance to get it published, I need to address every one of their concerns—and the problem for me isn't so much that I'm spending all of my time on what feels like a silly and mind-numbing task but rather that this is the box I've put myself in, this exact box, where I make some fine logical or linguistic distinctions and then have to act like that matters, like I am increasing human knowledge or something.
The academy is a comfortable place to be, and I suppose I could turn myself into someone who does think bigger than I currently think. Maybe I can't really blame
