Who Gets to Be Called Intelligent?

I followed a seductive motion graphic right into a storm drain as if Pennywise himself were enticing me into the sewer.

The graphic depicted the change in the educational makeup of America’s two major political parties over a period of decades. I wanted to understand what I was looking at, so I dove headfirst into the social media thread that followed.

I did not find much enlightenment there. Instead, the conversation turned into an argument over who gets to be called intelligent.

“How many of those degrees were liberal arts degrees?” someone asked. Whether the implication was intended or not, others took up the familiar argument over which degrees count, which kinds of education matter, and what any of that says about the people who have them.

Someone else commented that their father repaired cars for a living and was the smartest man they had ever known.

It was all I could do to stay out of the discussion. Instead, I thought about that father.

I pictured him under the hood of a car, listening to the engine, asking what had changed, checking one possibility and then another. I imagined the knowledge he had gathered over years of work, including things no classroom could have taught him in quite the same way.

His child’s admiration was easy to appreciate.

What I could not understand, however, was why his intelligence had to be offered as a rebuttal to someone else’s education.

A college degree can tell us something about what a person studied. It cannot tell us the full extent of what they know, how well they use that knowledge, or what they might still learn.

Not having a degree tells us very little about those things, either.

Yet credentials are sometimes treated as a ranking of people. Then, in anger at an academic hierarchy and an alphabet soup of post-nominal initials, we can fall into the opposite mistake and dismiss entire fields of study.

If someone has implied that your work requires less thought because you did not go to college, you have every reason to object. College can also cost more than many families or individuals can reasonably bear. Its institutions and graduates are capable of arrogance.

These are real grievances.

They do not make the study of literature, history, philosophy, or art worthless, however.

Nor should people who defend those fields of study need to prove their worth by finding fault with a mechanic. Or a farmer. Or a rancher. Or a journeyman in any trade.

Think of a carpenter, an electrician, a theatrical set designer, and a poet. Their work is different. They use knowledge particular to their craft, and the skill required for each role would make it difficult for these workers to swap duties. Nor would each have something equally useful to contribute to every problem.

But each must observe closely. Each makes decisions with consequences. Each confronts something that requires another look.

The carpenter discovers that the wall is not quite where the drawing says it should be. The electrician must understand how the existing system works before changing it. The set designer adjusts their plan when performers begin to move through the space. The poet reads a line aloud and hears that it says almost, but not quite, what was intended.

None of this makes their knowledge equivalent. It makes their attention consequential.

Their ability to learn did not end when their formal training did. Their work keeps asking them questions, requiring their attention.

When additional learning comes with a course or a certificate, we call this continuing education. But learning does not require a credential. We also learn when a colleague shows us a better method, when some material we’re working with behaves unexpectedly, when someone challenges our account of an event, or when a familiar solution stops working.

Learning asks us to pay attention and admit that what we know today may be incomplete.

Any knowledge gap can feel dangerous in an argument about “intelligence.” So, we sometimes plant our feet and stand our ground.

If I change my mind, perhaps I will be told I never knew what I was talking about. If I acknowledge what you know, perhaps I will lose my claim to what I believe to be authority.

As a result, we defend our side and try to make the other side feel inconsequential.

We certainly see enough of that in politics every damn day.

But put the mechanic and the poet in the same room for a moment.

The mechanic will know things the poet does not. The poet will know things the mechanic does not. On some questions, one of them will know considerably more than the other. On other questions, neither may know much at all.

What interests me is what happens next.

Can either recognize the limits of what they know? Can one notice something that helps the other see differently? Can they find language for a problem they could not initially explain? Can either encounter unfamiliar knowledge without experiencing it as a threat to their own?

That to me is a much more interesting question than which of them is “more intelligent” or “more liberal.”

I went into that social media thread looking for the truth behind an animated graph. I can’t say the thread gave it to me. I came away instead thinking about a man who repaired cars, and about how quickly a conversation can turn his work into a weapon against someone else’s learning.

I wish I knew more about what he taught his child.

I don’t.

But his child thought he was the smartest man they had ever known, and that seems worth paying attention to.

Not everyone needs the same education or will know the same things. Expertise is not evenly distributed, nor should we pretend it is. What we can make room for is the possibility that what another person knows matters, that what we know is incomplete, and that neither fact diminishes us.

We could all benefit from that.

By the way, paying attention is the “art” part.

A version of this post was also published on Substack, Sep 27, 2026

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