Perspective 80
Jack Sparrow and the Intellectuals
Greetings,
In today's essay I start with a remarkably candid quote I found from a prof at Case Western Reserve about his being too isolated to understand what actual people think. We all run that risk and it's worth a bit of self-reflection.
This is Perspective #80, a kind of a milestone. I started writing Perspectives almost exactly five years ago. I did not want to remain silent during troubled times on the one hand and yet I did not want to add to the vast amount of noise (or spout nonsense) on the other.
Before 2020, I had been writing exclusively on economic topics, originally for students, starting during the Great Recession in 2008. I wrote about 200 essays in what I called Economic Prospect on related topics over the years. I've also written dozens of book summaries over the years.
Thanks to (very kind and patient) friends I will (soon-ish) be able to have some of my writings gradually available on Substack. You may begin to receive the same one page Perspective essays through a different link as a result. One concern I have is that you may not feel as free to respond. I really value the contacts and feedback/pushback I get.
Thanks for reading.
Blessings,
John
Who Would Use Jack Sparrow’s Compass? Perspectives #80 John Teevan July 31, 2025
Here’s a standout quote. I could write for a month and quote verses but how could I write something as clear as Prof Michael Clune of Case Western Reserve wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education? (May 23, 2025)
(Let me) “describe my own path out of denial. While my career in higher education has taken me far from my immigrant, working-class origins, I have maintained a close connection — rare for people of my profession — with working-class people.
“The Narcotics Anon meetings I attend as a recovering heroin addict are far more diverse, racially, and economically, than my university. Over the years, as my discipline of English came to conceive of itself in political terms, as speaking truth to power on behalf of the oppressed, I became aware of a curious disconnect between the academic views proclaimed on behalf of these oppressed people, and their own views.
“I would look around a meeting and see poor and working-class Black, brown, and white people, many of them ex-cons, suffering from the diseases and indignities attendant on the lower classes, and think: These are the people we’re speaking for in our conferences and classrooms.
“But on nearly every issue — including policing, drug decriminalization, immigration, America, gender, and race — my NA friends had views that were not only different from the views of my academic colleagues but could not even be expressed in (the) academy without immediate negative career consequences. (Ital. mine)
“The political views dominant in (the) academy do not match the views of most Americans. Not only that, but the intellectual isolation of the ivory tower means that if not for my NA meetings, I would never even have known that my views on policing or immigration were controversial.”
Did you see the final point? Intellectuals tend to be isolated on their campuses. They (Clune generalizes here) are out of touch with the very people they earnestly speak for. It is not just the politicization of education, but the intellectualization of parts of education that causes harm due to ignorance of on-the-ground reality.
We tend to see intellectuals as rational and wise and of course they are. The intellectual excels at applying smart power to real needs but there are exceptions. Sad examples? 1) Religion: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 2) Lit: Satan is the true hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 3) History: Hitler was true to his cultural ideas so who are we to say he was wrong? Intellectuals, even occasionally in the sciences (Isaac Newton’s well-intentioned notes deciphering the ‘coded history’ in the book of Revelation), can drift away from both rationality and wisdom. They can be wrong, even spectacularly wrong, without becoming less smart.
Intellectuals are also prone to utopian ideas; enter Mike Clune. His NA connections brought him back to reality and gave him a dose of wisdom that he had lost in the group think of his peer group of intellectuals. Almost unbelievably, the street level understanding of reality by actual people can appear to be wrong, wrong-headed, off-base, and even despicable to such world-fixing intellectuals. How backwards is that?
Consider this: Our national narrative on poverty does not match surveys. Gonzalo Schwarz surveyed Americans on the street and found that “Freedom of choice in how to live” (83%) and “having a good family life” (80%) continue to be strongly associated with the American Dream. People mostly (66%) want equality before the law and a fair chance regardless of where they started. He asked people what they wanted. They want a job, not a handout. This explains how 69% of Americans sense that they are (or are on their way to) achieving their American Dream. (Archbridge 2025 Annual Report). If so, two generations have pursued a false approach to poverty.
Economists and government planners have good data and interesting ideas. But they can lack an understanding of actual people. This is nothing new. We have mis-understood humanity ever since we decided that we know better than God about what makes people tick, what we lack, or what our true, deeper needs are.
Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict) stated that reason cannot function properly as reason without revelation. Reason without revelation (God’s word) can leave any of us unwise or unreasonable. A segment of intellectuals occasionally puts the larger society at risk when their ideas, detached from reality as Mike Clune warns us, escape from the academy and become the norm among the elites.
Sadly, these people are guided (as one man pictured it) by Jack Sparrow’s Compass: no true north.