“[Solicitor General Elena] Kagan’s nomination [to the US Supreme Court] has also highlighted America’s ambivalence about what we have always said we wanted, a meritocracy. Work hard, be smart, rise.“The result is an aristocracy of wired brainiacs, of highly focused, well-credentialed careerists.
“There’s something limited, even creepy, in all this ferocious drive, this well-applied brilliance. There’s a sense that everything is abstract to those who succeed in this world, that what they know of life is not grounded in hard experience but absorbed through screens—computer screens, movie screens, TV screens.
“Our focus on mere brains is creepy, too. Brains aren’t everything, heart and soul are something too.
“We do away with all the deadwood, but even dead trees have a place in the forest.”
Peggy Noonan “The Lamest Show on Earth” (WSJ 5/15/10)
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