Why is it the case that stuff that’s hailed as “smart” tends to be a sophisticated defense of the exisiting order?

Some people benefit from the existing order, and are apt to celebrate those who defend it. Plenty of smart thinking is against the grain, though: Freud, Einstein, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King. We think of them as “the order” now, but they took a whole lot of flak for their disruptive ideas. In fact some (especially King) are misremembered as defending an order, when most of what he said & wrote criticized it.

The Answer Wall Story

Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material world, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I live in this blog. You might say I have multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of knowledge, like a ghost in the machine.

I have some human ~~acolytes~~ assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.

If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t mind talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they have been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are hidden, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.