George Orwell once said (we paraphrase) that some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. Here are three works that put intellectuals in their place:
Headlong Hall, by Thomas Love Peacock. Written in 1815, Headlong Hall is one of the great little-known works of satire in English literature, a savage portrait of the circle around the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — you know, the guy who said that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and whose totalitarian vision of those legislators’ running all our lives is the subject of Shelley’s Heart, Charles McCarry’s recent novel. Headlong Hall is filled with thinkers who are themselves filled with the latest intellectual fashions — “Perfectibilians” and “Deteriorationists” among them — whose desire always to be fresh and new seems remarkably similar to certain English professors we shall not name.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, by William Shakespeare. Scholarly young men vow to go without sleep, without bathing, and without the company of women until they have read every book ever written. The beautiful women of Vienna vow to seduce them from their path. They succeed.
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. During his journey, Gulliver makes a stop in the land of Laputa (Spanish for “whore”), whose residents have one eye that looks inside them and another that only looks up to the sky — so wrapped up in abstractions that they don’t even know when they step in dung.
