The Scholar and the Dilettante
Yesterday I wrote a piece about Trump’s killing of General Suleimani at the Baghdad Airport. My approach was based on a burning in my gut that said that all Trump succeeded in doing, besides distracting our feeble-most electorate from his impeachment clamor, was to get us into another war in the Middle East. Now that might well have been his plan with the idiotic and self-centered thinking that a war or threat of imminent war tends to make the electorate less willing to change horses in midstream (LBJ being an obvious exception). But my assessment was that singling out and assassinating someone like Suleimani on a preemptive basis is morally wrong, illegal, and very Nazi-like (using my latest movie viewing of The Great Escape to validate my point.) Then, this morning I read a New York Times Op/Ed by Thomas Friedman and found myself feeling great pangs of shrinkage.
Friedman did not say anything to contradict my point of view and he didn’t even suggest whether it was right or wrong for us to be pleased to be rid of Suleimani. But what he did was give an incredibly well-informed assessment of what is happening in the Middle East and the role Suleimani was or was not playing in it. This made me stop in my blogging tracks and think.
Thomas Friedman is almost exactly my age. He was born six months before me but graduated from college (Brandeis…one of the schools perhaps even more liberal than my Alma Mater, Cornell) the same year. He was raised in Minnesota and I spent formative years in grade school in Wisconsin. That’s about all we have in common historically. While I got an MBA and went to work in NYC banking, Friedman earned a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford as a Marshal Scholar. He quickly became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist mostly covering the Middle East and even living in Beirut for several years. His career has taken him into the journalistic firmament with three Pulitzer Prizes to date, a weekly column in The New York Times, and books of huge success and readership including The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America, and Thank You for Being Late: Finding a Job, Running a Country, and Keeping Your Head in an Age of Accelerations. Everything about his writing agrees with what I know and feel about the world. If my blog had a role model to aspire towards, it is Thomas Friedman.
Now, here’s the thing I need to sort out. Friedman is a true scholar and I am not. He and I both did more or less the same amount of post-Graduate education, but mine was on the time value of money and his was on heady stuff of geo-political change. He was a Marshal Scholar, which my buddy Frank always says makes him more elite and cerebral than any old Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker Rhode Scholars. I snuck into Cornell’s business school by hook and crook after an undistinguished career at Cornell (Friedman graduated Summa Cum Laude, which I only understand due to four years of high school Latin). I was a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell for ten years, but my students (enrollment and evaluations were always strong) referred to my teaching as “Storytime with Rich” since I used real-life storytelling to teach financial concepts. They loved it because it was real, but scholarly was not something it would be mistaken for. I even wrote a book on the global pension crisis and it was published by Wiley & Sons, the Big Kahuna in academic publishing. It was based on what I would call secondary research and was written in an avuncular style that people called readable. What that all translates into is that the book is not going down in the annals of scholastic merit, even if it did make a few good points. Thomas Friedman has more scholarly capability in his little finger than I have in my whole body.
I have known my IQ since I was in high school (a benefit of being raised by an educationalist mother). It’s above average, but probably not Mensa-grade. I’m going to guess that Thomas Friedman can clear the Mensa bar with room to spare. If I ever get feeling too big for my britches, I look up the latest clickbait on presidential IQ’s. I have no way of knowing whether Chester A, Arthur was a smart guy or not, but I have my opinions about everyone from LBJ on. I can accept good IQ’s from Nixon, Carter, Clinton and Obama. I want to think Bush Sr. was smart, but not so much. The rest of them, Ford, Reagan, W., were all lesser lights in the smarts category. Ford was a stop-gap and both Reagan and W. were surrounded by strong, competent people who may or may not have followed a path that all of us liked, but at least they did so with a degree of responsibility and class. They all had IQ’s equal to or greater than mine (I am assuming that there is at least a two standard deviation leeway in this highly inaccurate measurement system). Trump is another story altogether. I have read that one psychologist estimates he has an IQ of 156, which would rank him as the second smartest president of them all. That would mean he was smarter than Clinton, a Rhode Scholar, or Kennedy a man who could read at 1200 words per minute. Another psychologist would estimate his IQ at 77, below average intelligence, well below Ulysses S. Grant and the lowest of all presidents by a lot, and defined as borderline mental disability.
I have always questioned the value of raw intelligence. Intelligence need to be balanced with several other more pragmatic qualities. Just adding EI or emotional intelligence does a lot to make IQ useful in the world. I’m sure no one needs to have me tell them what I think of Trump’s EI, so let’s just say that the functional intelligence of the man seems virtually non-existent.
I have always assumed that my EI boosted the productivity of my much more modest raw IQ. Having never met Thomas Friedman, I cannot say what his EI is like, but I can say without any hesitation that his writing is brilliant and on point with the most pressing issues of the day. His focus on globalization and the environment as major themes makes it clear that he must have a high EI because he is so very much in tune with modern society and so enlightened about both. I know there is much ideological bias in my views on Friedman, but his treatise on General Suleimani was so well-informed and insightful that I think it transcends ideology with factual recitation, and very important facts about the Middle East Region that show the value of Friedman’s scholarship.
When I write about politics, I have strong views. I try to be well informed and factual. But when I read Friedman I am cowed. As Mike Myers and Dana Carver said in Wayne’s World, “I am not worthy.” I have always disliked the word dilettante, but when I stand next to a scholar like Friedman, I am back telling stories to my class, cutting factual corners for impact. Read Friedman.