PUNDITS
Chas. Mccabe and
Student
"On the occasion of his taking over the seat of English Literature at Cambridge University in 1913, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said: ‘Definitions, formulae (some would add creeds) have their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary unintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his private opinions.’ . . . The blasted thing is that the statement is almost precisely true. In most human beings there exists a terrible need to be told what to think. . . . There is this hunger for definitions. The guys who provide these consolatory formulae are called pundits. . . . The pundit, it may be argued, serves a useful function in society. . . . If enough predigested opinion is foisted upon the world, the grumblings of the malcontents are muted. You may have noticed that the people who have the most violent opinions are those who read either superficially or not at all. . . . If the world were filled with people of this stripe, it would be virtually ungovernable. . . . It is the steadying influence of the pundit, the priest and the professor that puts all this mental ferment down. . . . In return for your confusion, [they] offer the comfort of certainty. In return for your instinctive knowledge that there are two sides to every story, [they] offer the resounding authority that there is only one."
