Henry Fowler, the lexicographer best known for A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. David Foster Wallace, in his evidently quite-flawed essay “Tense Present,” described Fowler thusly:
If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field…
What interests me about Fowler’s claim is that I am often amused by the veneration of intelligence in the same communities that deplore the veneration of beauty or wealth, since intelligence is no less arbitrary in allotment, constructed in classification, and happenstance in appearance than those attributes. Indeed, it involves as many attendant flaws as they do, too: often, wit entails derision; brilliance, arrogance; knowledge, pedantic elitism.
Simen commented recently on the inequality of beauty, a fact which problematizes even the most pleasant utopias; those who hope to maintain in the face of the irresolvable unfairness of beauty’s inequitable distribution the plausibility of a fair society will have to claim that beauty is a fluid concept we can redefine, that it only matters because of the patriarchy or advertising, or some such idea reducing its import. I’ve long wondered what egalitarian revolutionaries propose to do about nature’s individuated and unequal distribution of attractiveness.
And what of intelligence? I believe intelligence is no more laudable than athleticism, morally; it makes one good at some things and not at others. It is not a moral virtue; it is not a mark of goodness; someone cannot be faulted for not possessing it; and Fowler is right: we should regard the display of knowledge as comparably vulgar to material ostentation.
Or is this not the case? Is there some quality to intelligence which distinguishes it from beauty, speed, height? Is there a connection, in theory or in fact, between intelligence and goodness (should there be such a thing)? Does it relate to this characteristic of mind?
