In 1914, John Erskine, the eminent Columbia University professor of English, the father of the great books movement, published an influential essay titled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.

That's an arresting phrase, and you might think it problematic. For one thing, it might appear to demand the impossible.

Surely a person has no control over how

intelligent he is, but aught implies can. So, how could anyone be morally obliged to be intelligent?

For another thing, Erskine's notion might seem objectionably elitist. Intelligence is rare, so it

has often said. Did Erskine think that virtue is to be found only in a small cognitive elite?

But such misgivings would rest on a misunderstanding.

Erskine's true meaning can be gleaned from what he is opposed to.

There is, in his view, a tendency in modern times to think that virtue has nothing to do

with intelligence or is even opposed to intelligence.

Erskine thinks that Americans have inherited this attitude from the English, who, in his

estimation, are especially prone to it. He has in mind lines like Charles Kingsley's, quote,

be good, sweetmaid, and let who will be clever, unquote, intelligent but wicked characters

like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth or Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost,

and what he calls the well-meaning blunderer, who is the hero of a novel by Fielding Scott,

Fackery, or Dickens. He cites also the inclination to praise the courage of the light brigade's

charge rather than to lament the grave error that led to it.

Erskine suggests that the English borrowed the attitude in turn from the German conscience,

which he says, quote, gave its allegiance not to the intellect but to the will.

In America, Erskine says the attitude manifests itself in a tendency

to turn every economic or social issue into a moralistic crusade,

when in fact what solving the problem often requires is calm rationality.

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