I like this Aldous Huxley quote: “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Does that mean that a Huxley-qualified intellectual who thinks sex is infinitely interesting is in some sense superior to one who never saw why sex was such a big deal?

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Intelligence is one important element of intellectuality, but urgency is also important. Intelligence and urgency increase one another’s effect exponentially, and sometimes catastrophically. The poor souls who are both urgent and intelligent to an extreme drive way the hell too far out into the frontiers of knowledge and create great caches of insight where nobody has ever been, then they die in solitude. They literally sacrifice themselves to knowledge.

The sacrifice is redeemed by the merely intelligent and the merely urgent. The merely intelligent build infrastructure around the new knowledge – sanitation (solid scholarship), communications (standard language, histories, textbook knowledge), logistics (publishing, championing). The merely urgent digest all these insights, simplify them, smooth them and carry them back to civilization. The merely urgent are the agents of popular change.

I can tell you: there is a lot out of astonishing insight out there, freely available, that civilization has not even begun to digest. The question is whether we’ll eat, or whether we’ll keep pointing at our empty distended bellies as proof that we’re already too full. We’re starving to death on a mountain of nourishment.