UD wants to pause on that well-known, much-used phrase, intellectual snob. A columnist at the Jewish Telegraph Agency uses it in this instance, but everyone uses it — here’s the Google page for intellectual snob. It goes on and on.
Intellectual snob is a subset of snob. Rather than express a sense of superiority to other people based on wealth or family, the intellectual snob condescends to others based upon her appraisal of herself as having started off genetically smarter, and having then been better educated, than you.
UD doesn’t have anything earth-shattering to contribute to the rich literature on snobbery in general, and intellectual snobbery in particular. (She’s very fond of Judith Shklar’s chapter on snobbery in her book Ordinary Vices. Peter Berkowitz praises Shklar’s “delightful exploration of the psychology of the snob,” correctly noting, as does she, that snobbery is one of the great illiberal vices, a sign that one’s civic instincts are out of order, since, as Berkowitz writes, “the disposition to recognize the equality of your fellow human beings and treat them accordingly” is central to liberal democracy.)
But UD will say three things about intellectual snobbery — things she’s learned from being around a lot of professors and a lot of intellectuals.
1.) Her experience certainly confirms what the literature says about snobbery and its intellectual form: Intellectual snobs among her acquaintance are strikingly insecure — about everything, but particularly about their intellect. They regard virtually all human encounters – in classrooms, at conferences, at the supermarket – as the debate club’s televised finals, in which all eyes rivet to them for their ability to undercut the claims or belittle the ignorance of anyone who happens to address them.
Hair-trigger tempers, narcissistic irritabilities, and theatrical umbrages are the hallmarks of intellectual snobs.
2.) Intellectual snobs are extreme pedants. They know a lot about specific narrow fields, and they use this hyperspecialized knowledge in order constantly to denounce errors in other people.
Intellectual snobs are particularly fond of history and linguistics, for these fields allow error-spotting infinite scope. You can get dates wrong, battles wrong, treaties wrong, the language of treaties wrong. You can fail to list all of the salient theories about the onset of the American Civil War. You can fail to take into sufficient account the Hitler/Stalin Pact.
Language use is even better for snob purposes, because our deployment of language is so personal, goes so deep… Which brings me to
3.) For the intellectual snob, the purpose of drawing your attention to your errors is to make you feel very, very bad. When the snob witnesses just how bad — how abashed and off-balance — she has made you feel, she tingles with a sense of her exceptionality.
This sensation reassures her (but not for long; she has to keep provoking it) that despite her various failures in life, she’s still the smartest kid in the room.