Beware Intellectual Guruism

The smartest person you know ain't *that* smart

One pitfall in the intellectual life I’ve noticed in both myself and others is what might be called “intellectual guruism.” To have fallen prey to intellectual guruism is, in short, to have let your critical reflection, the direction your thinking takes, or the views you treat as prima facie probable, to be handed over to some intellectual figure viewed as a “paradigm” of rational sophistication.

Typically, this is some scholar—theologian, philosopher, scientist, public intellectual, etc.—whom you have rightly found to argue compellingly for some view of great concern to you. Because this figure has argued compellingly for this dearly held position, they then, consciously or subconsciously, are given inordinate deference when it comes to their views on a variety of other, logically independent positions.

Although this has always been a danger of the intellectual life, I feel it has increased of late due to the sheer proliferation of public intellectuals in a variety of disciplines, and the ability to form communities of interest around their work online. Because of this trend, I thought I’d offer the following in order to help us all (myself included) beware of this vice.

Some signs one has fallen prey to intellectual guruism:

1. Whenever the guru begins expressing some new view, you automatically treat this view as having intellectual weight or sophistication, simply because they have expressed it.

2. You find yourself reflecting less and less critically about these other views of the guru, and they are treated as having a presupposition of rational justification.

3. You increasingly adopt the political or moral views of the guru, even if you were only originally drawn to their thought for entirely different reasons (metaphysics, theology, psychology, etc.).

4. Any intellectual opponents of the guru are by default viewed with suspicion, and you quickly rush to the defense of the guru whenever their views on any matter are publicly challenged.

5. If, upon asking yourself “What are the greatest weaknesses of the guru’s arguments on x, y, or z?”, you struggle to come up with an any.

The mark of having not fallen prey to intellectual guruism, by contrast, is that you treat this figure as as fallible and prone to bad arguments in certain areas as any other human being. Moreover, you should find yourself strongly agreeing with certain of their positions, strongly disagreeing with others, and having a healthy agnosticism about others.

Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t have our intellectual heroes. And often, we simply have a similar cast of mind as some of these heroes, and so of course we’re likely going to see the world in similar terms as they do. It’s also the case that, for some thinkers, there’s a significant degree of systematic interconnectivity to their thought, and so logic compels you to agree with many views they have in virtue of these logical connections (though, in my experience, typically the logical connections between even the best thinker’s views are far less tight, far less close to entailment, than we’d like to think).

What it is to say, however, is simply that one should remain as intellectually engaged, as prone to careful, critical analysis of the arguments, when reading or listening to those you admire or agree with on many issues, as you are when reading or listening to those you don’t admire or agree with on many issues.

So, keep your wits about you. Don’t fall prey to intellectual guruism.