I'm currently reading "Common Genius" by Bill Greene, and will be doing a review of it here on this blog when I'm done. To a great extent it is a sustained, well-reasoned attack on intellectuals and intellectualism. I wonder what Greene would think of professionals in light of Radley Balko's piece. Certainly I (and I am sure, he would) think that we need professionals -- but if you have to use the power of government to enforce your professional status, what are you really providing anyone that's of value?
This raises the following personal questions: as a scholar/intellectual, am I a professional or an amateur? Does my Ph.D. make a difference there? Am I even an intellectual (I will get into Greene's definition of an intellectual when I do the review of his book)? How does the blogosphere challenge such classifications?
As to the last question, I think that there's both a lot of good and a lot of garbage online. It would be nice if there were some well-respected gatekeepers that might browse the net and rate blogs and provide links through their site. This would both let anyone write whatever they wanted, but also lend credibility to the work many of us do here online. One of the good things about professional gatekeepers is that they help you separate the wheat from the chaff. It's hard to find everything online that's wheat, you know.
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