So they were the _clercs_ of _trahison_des_clercs_, and what they did that others do not do is betray their country, society, civilization, the Church, the Good, etc. etc. etc. -- people who, in short, failed to be anti-Semites because they spent too much time thinking. Following this general line of thought, Flannery O'Connor once defined the word as meaning "a man who sleeps with another man's wife" or something witty along those lines. And this sort of thing is not recent; for does not Rousseau say "L'homme qui médite est un animal depravé"?
But if this were the only line of thought, Hofstadter would not have titled his famous book _Anti-Intellectualism_ _In_American_Life_, nor would he have written,
"It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things
he values about himself and his work are quite unlike those
society values in him. Society values him because he can in
fact be used for a variety of purposes, from popular entertainment
to the design of weapons. But it can hardly understand so well
those aspects of his temperament which I have designated as
essential to his intellectualism. His playfulness, in its
various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse
luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps
the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most
tender indulgence. His piety [towards ideas] is likely to seem
nettlesome, if not dangerous. And neither quality is considered
to contribute very much to the practical business of life."
(p. 33)
Chapter 2, "On the Unpopularity of Intellect"
Here they are Christ-figures of a sort, who suffer to redeem the world, or at least give it good bombs, while their playfulness of mind is held in contempt and their essential aspects of temperament are misunderstood by -- well, just about everybody, the booboisie, the bourgeoisie, and even Southern lady authors. One can imagine that Hofstadter must have passed many an hour gazing out of his office window contemplating the tragic irony of it all. By contrast, Hitchens's take on the question seems to be completely incoherent; there millions of people who don't agree with the _New_York_Times_ and say so whom no one would call intellectuals -- our friend Bo Gritz for example -- whereas it is my guess that the editorial writers thereof might well put themselves in that category, even to the point of gazing with Hofstadter out of that window, the people with minds suffering and laboring for the mindless multitudes and nothing to show for it but a middle-class income and a sense of ineffable superiority.
It seems to me there is only one way to conjoin these views into one: by defining _intellectual_ as "one who thinks more than I do, therefore, too much," and _non-_ or even _anti-_ intellectual_ as "one who thinks less than I do, therefore, too little." In that case, Ms. Oates's observation is right on the mark, except, as I said, for its weaselly "suggests". There's no suggests about it: "I'm an intellectual" means "but you're a boob" whereas "you're an intellectual" means "but I'm a good, decent person."