One of the strangest parts of being educated – and I mean here not “learning a lot of stuff” but “learning how to play the social role of ‘smart person’” – is that it can make you very stupid. You need to seem to know everything, and the labor-saving habits that enable you to maintain that appearance actually constrain your imagination and distort your picture of reality. This stupefying process, in my experience, takes two main forms: on the one hand, excess credulity – too much belief in one’s own credentials and in the credentials of one’s friends and mentors and in the academic fads that happened to be dominant during one’s training; and on the other hand, reflexive cynicism. The former is probably the easiest to see, and certainly the most irritating, but the latter is probably more corrosive, precisely because cynicism is so often the correct response to a situation. In a system that rewards the person with, not the truest, but the most cutting analysis, cynicism will therefore become one’s response to every situation, precisely because it seems safe. One can seem like the sharpest wit in every room. This is very dangerous. A cynical person misunderstands reality as surely as does anyone else who has the same answer to every question, and, since she believes everything is always already coopted, a cynical person often stops trying to improve the world.

It is this cynicism that accounts for the relative neglect of the activists who worked to end slavery.