By Vikram Srinivasan

There is something about youth that is uniquely susceptible to hubris.

The phenomenon may help to explain why so many young people have an uncanny affinity both for utopian ideology and for the elitist snobbery, sometimes masquerading as self-anointed intellectualism,which accompanies it. Students today seem increasingly elitist in their political views, as they dismiss the reactions and arguments of those who they deem less educated than they are.

Not only is this supreme self-confidence hysterically unwarranted, it hinders a great deal of actual learning. It dovetails with an obnoxious belief in the specialness of Now, captured succinctly in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign line that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and seems to all too often preclude introspection among the college-age demographic. With a health care debate and economic crisis reinvigorating American populism, it’s worth considering why students are so in the wrong when it comes to their high opinion of themselves.

When we choose to go to college to further pursue our education, the implicit assumption, one would hope, is that we recognize that we have more to learn. For budding scientists and engineers, perhaps this consists of technical knowledge. But for students of the humanities, the path forward can be less clear. Before this ambiguity, there may be a tendency for some students of the liberal arts to view their education as a rubber stamp—a necessary process that must be undergone to enter the professional world, rather than something of intrinsic value.

Alternately, I would argue that for most students of the humanities, the real purpose of an undergraduate education is to develop our thinking skills and situate ourselves within an intellectual history. To do so, we must necessarily look back on previous thinkers who have explored and reflected on age-old questions and themes relating to the human condition, most of which continue to be the subject of dispute and contestation. This lack of settlement, one would think, should inspire both humility and curiosity.

Yet the do-gooder attitude of these self-appointed “intellectuals,” characterized by a righteous indignation at the moral or intellectual inferiority of other persons or some aspect of society, seems too frequently driven by emotional and egoistic, rather than rational, impulses. This is not to say that the ideological liberalism with which the mentality often conspicuously dovetails lacks an intellectual tradition—far from it. Indeed, students of all political stripes benefit from immersion in arguments from thinkers on the left, as well as from on the right.

But for the lay student, leftist policy positions, with theirutopian self-confidence in the ability of a select few ivory tower academics to lead society towards greater wisdom, are pure hubris. The assumption underlying this attitude, too often, is that because of our Duke education, we are automatically and uniquely qualified to hold these positions without reflection and introspection. Our status as “de facto” intellectuals is reason enough.

The more one reflects on this idea of “student intellectuals,” the more laughable it becomes. If anything, our education should lead us to ponder the extent of our own ignorance.

The idea that we are already “intellectuals” by virtue of where we stand insulates students from the type of deep self-reflection and self-criticism that true education requires. Learning demands the humility to question oneself and one’s most basic assumptions about the world—and accepting that those assumptions exist.

Part of this approach involves the recognition that we are not ahistorical beings, existing independent of a history of ideas. Indeed, we live very much within such an intellectual history and are deeply influenced by arguments originating with intellectual ancestors both dead and alive, whether we recognize it or not. Our education should help us recognize our place within this history and lead us to reflect on the influences we have inherited and selected.

Instead, the attitude of the amateur egoist privileges the young intellectual as if his beliefs are the purely the product of a spontaneous creativity, rather than the absorption of external influences. This generates a sense of certainty unbecoming of a recent teenager. When students—barely twenty years old—think themselves above imperfection and fully prepared to judge the actions and ideas of those much older than them, fully devoid of any context, we may have a problem.

To be sure, this is not yet a rampant phenomenon and a good many students at Duke are genuine and reflective in their temperament. But for all of us, little humility would go a long way.