The problem with intellectual capital is that it’s finite. Each of us has a certain amount of knowledge, time, and ability, and once it’s gone, then we’re done. Knowing that makes it imperative to spend our intellectual capital on the important things – those things we can, and should, work to change.

Among historians, there’s an interesting theory yet to make its way to the masses. This theory is that the image of the South as devoid of intellectualism is an erroneous one. In fact, the people of the South – its brightest (white) minds – expended tremendous energy to come up with arguments to justify slavery. During Reconstruction, this energy went to upholding a new racial status quo – segregation. The defense of Jim Crow became the predominant activity of many a well-educated Southerner.

Black Southerners were trapped in a different problem. Their educations were limited through the system of racism. Black Southerners created music and art and writing, but those contributions were ignored – or credited to white folk.

With the fall of Jim Crow, the South’s intellectual and creative potential broke free of these constraints, and the four decades since have seen a rise of Southern culture, adopted by people in other regions. Southerners themselves have come to represent a large portion of the people who win Oscars and Heisman Trophies and other indicators of success.

Mainstream liberals today are stuck in the same kind of intellectual quagmire as those Southerners were for more than a century. We often waste our potential on issues that don’t matter. Some issues are interesting to note in passing but really aren’t worth more than cursory acknowledgment.

I’ve give you an example. Feministing, a leading cultural-liberal feminist blog, had a post a few weeks ago about a campaign in Germany to combat bulimia. The campaign involved placing pink magnets that looked like vomit splatter on the lids of toilet seats. Now, what do you think was the most important part of that campaign? At Feministing, it was the color. How dare this organization whose mission it is to encourage girls’ self-esteem use pink! Pink! Don’t they know that’s a girly color?

No, folks I’m not kidding, though concern over the shape of the magnet and its exact placement closely followed the color as an issue of primary importance.

Intellectual capital that day? Wasted.

What other options were there? Well, let’s see. We could have talked about (from a US perspective here; I’m not familiar enough with the German system) the classification of bulimia as a mental illness. That leads us to advocating for mental illness to be on par with physical illness as far as insurance coverage. Or we could talk about the dearth of courses dealing with severe body image dysfunction in therapy programs. Or we could discuss the piss-poor state of treatment for mental illness in this country in general. We could plan an educational campaign about body image or eating disorders. Any of those, even if they were only coffee shop talk, would serve us better than debating the color of the damned magnet.

I’d like to encourage liberals really to think about what they’re doing. We often share the same goals. With the magnet, everyone’s goal is to stop eating disorders by helping the girls (and boys, men, and women) who have them. A productive discussion would address how to do that and would focus on real solutions. That’s where liberalism could be more pragmatic.