People use the faculty of reason to evaluate new ideas. When ideas have been positively evaluated people become emotionally committed to these ideas. Reason is used to assimilate new ideas, these ideas are then invested with emotion. Rational challenge to assimilated knowledge provoke emotional responses. Emotionally invested ideas are defended at an emotional level. Emotion, anger, fear, pride or shame, engages reason in its defence, thus, what began in reason terminates in rationalization; the employment of reason to support prejudice.
Very intelligent people are very good at using reason, so the prejudices of very intelligent people can very successfully pass themselves off as the products of reason, rather than the usurpers of reason. I think this explains the brilliant Christian apologist, William Lane Craig and, at the other end of the scale, the global warming science circus.
It's probably useful to define what intelligence is at this point. Intelligence can best be summed up as being the ability to productively solve problems. This skill essentially rests upon an ability to see beyond the immediate and obvious potentialities of objects and systems. The material evidence of intelligence is progressive improvement. Because progress means a departure from past ideas and beliefs there is a tendency for any new ideas that diverge from previous ideas, to be regarded as progressive ideas; all progress entails change, but all change is not progress, though much regressive change is regarded erroneously as progress.
A striking example of this is how "progressive" intellectuals regard Islam. Islam is simply a worldview that was once also dominant in the West under the mantel of Catholicism, but which was dispensed with centuries ago as archaic and limiting in light of new discoveries about the world and by new freedoms enabled by technological innovation. Marie Antoinette's dressmaker is said to have said, "There is nothing new except that which has been forgotten", and in the West, the stifling and oppressive influence of fundamentalist religious belief waned so long ago that we have developed a cultural amnesia to the extent that this world view seems novel to some people. It's novelty is actually seen by some as progressive. More intelligent people understand that its ideas are, in and off themselves, regressive, but seem to believe that incorporating these ideas into the Western worldview will result in an amalgamation of ancient and modern that will transcend our present paradigm, as if allowing children to scribble on Rembrandt's self portraits would enhance their beauty.
In one respect the leftist liberals are right, modernity has exhausted itself, but double doses of medicine for ailments long since cured are its only answers to an obvious intellectual impasse, more tolerance, more equality, more empathy...more absurdity. We need innovation to progress and nature is, by the very mechanism of evolution, progressive; what is not advancing is dying; all is flux. The foundation of innovation is revaluation. We must as a culture reavaluate our core beliefs.
The core belief of modernity is equality, everything that supports equality is good and anything that challenges equality is bad. This itself is an example of a false, good versus evil, duality that is a legacy of our despised Christian heritage. If something is good, the more you have of it the better, if something is bad any manifestation of it is evil. If equality is good in terms of opportunity to profit from talent, equality must be good when employed to evaluate talent, thus everyone is equally free to be mediocre. In fact such a dichotomy is obvious nonsense. If three glasses of wine makes you more sociable and conversationally adept, three bottles don't make you supremely sociable and conversationally brilliant. A sprinkling of salt makes a pot of soup taste better, so a mug full of salt should make it perfect? Nonsense! Aristotle exposed this fallacy centuries before the coming of the Christ in his dictum that for every virtue there were two vices; bravery is neither the absence of fear or the absence of courage, but an intelligent balance of the two opposites. equality of opportunity is not equality of outcome.
Anti-modern elements are emerging which renounce radical equality and advocate a return to aristocratic and hierarchical forms of government, but these elements of neo-reaction have forgotten that the previous ossified aristocratic and social systems were not efficient and when transcended the result was an explosion in human creativity. Social privilege was 100% heritable, but ability is not 100% heritable, if it was we would have long reigning dynasties of athletic champions. Enshrined hierarchy is simply the opposite of an extreme that terminates at the opposite pole in institutionalized egalitarianism. The virtuous median between the two destructive extremes is meritocracy.
