Jonah Goldberg’s latest NRO column, “In Defense of Elitism,” concludes with these apt observations:

Right now, the word-elite of journalists and academics are the ones asking, ‘Who are we to judge?’ This elite is the one incapable of discerning the difference between a bone through the nose and the moon launch. It is this elite which says that the canon isn’t worth reading; that the Constitution is a fig leaf for white racism; that the Enlightenment wasn’t worth the trouble; that freedom and democracy are just ‘abstractions’; that beauty is just so much lookism.

Well, if an elite soldier believed arms were for hugging, if an elite athlete argued that video games were the best for exercise, if an elite scientist argued that two plus two equals a duck, we would fire these people — we wouldn’t redefine what it means to be the best soldier, the best scientist, the best athlete. And we certainly wouldn’t conclude that we don’t need elite soldiers or elite scientists. The task, for conservatives especially, is to fire the teachers and journalists who believe that a bone through the nose is equivalent to a moon launch — not to eliminate altogether the positions they should rightly hold.

I believe a bone through the nose is just that, a bone through the nose.

Unless the bone in question is the femur brandished by that one crazy ape in front of a freaky, giant space obelisk. In that case, the bone’s got at least something to do with a moon launch, though I’m not sure exactly what.

But I take Jonah’s points. As an intentionalist — an exceedingly rare creature in the modern world of literary studies and interpretation theory, where “word-elites” tend to congregate — I’ve been fighting the relativist orthodoxy (best known as “reader-response theory”) for going on 7 years now.

It’s a dirty business, fighting this fight, but I do enjoy it — and the theoretics that underlie and animate the debate extrapolate out nicely into questions with everyday usefulness (such as the interpretation of particular legal phrasings; one reason much “literary theory” has been adopted by legal scholars).

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