Last year there was a great deal of controversy about a film called The Help, which used some familiar themes about a wise (black) servant and an idealistic young woman dealing with racist older relatives. The film attracted a great deal of negative attention from some because of the seeming stereotype of wise help and foolish masters, but in reality it was really the racial aspect (the seeming fact that foolish white people were exploiting wise black people) that drew the most ire.

After all, the (white and English) butler Jeeves has been an enduring figure for decades, enduring enough that there was once an internet search site called http://www.askjeeves.com playing off of this wise butler character. No one that I know is offended by a wise English butler serving an incompetent English aristocrat, even if it is every bit as much a stereotype as wise black help. What is more stereotypical than a nearly omniscient English butler, after all? Yet, rather than just comment on the popularity of this, I would like to probe a little bit deeper to see what the real appeal of portrayals like Jeeves and other wise servants is for writers.

Why are the servants of The Help, or Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse’s classic stories and novels, or the house slaves of Gone With The Wind or the British butlers of any number of television series so wise while their masters are so incompetent? It is a puzzling mystery. Part of it, I suppose, is that all too often we tend to portray or imagine our rulers and ruling classes as either bungling incompetents or all-knowing and all-powerful wizards, or some combination of the two. All too often, in addition, we give credit for the power of those in command to the help they receive from their underlings.

Additionally, there seems, for whatever reason, a real unwillingness amount people to accept heroic characters who are particularly brainy know-it-alls. Evil masterminds who are intelligent but are inevitably foiled are acceptable in mass culture. Wise and intellectual sidekicks to intuitive but dissolute heroes (think Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes) are also acceptable, similar to the whole Jeeves and Wooster pairing. But bookishly intellectual heroes are generally not acceptable, at least not in a heroic sense, unless they are somewhat absent-minded or figures of slight ridicule. It is as if being intellectual and knowledgeable is unheroic, or somehow threatening to most people unless they are evil (and thwarted) or unless they are clearly “the help” and not “the masters.”

I wonder why that is the case. I consider myself a mostly harmless person, for all of my knowledge, even if I make a very ferocious enemy. And there is nothing necessarily unheroic about nerdiness, even if it is hard for most people to understand. But that does not keep it from seeming somehow unapproachable to others. It seems as if our culture and our literature (as well as other aspects of our society, like television and movies, which are heavily based on literary motifs) has some major misunderstandings about intellectuals or the sources of wisdom, and so it seeks to displace that wisdom from those in power to those who are somehow exploited by that power.

On the one hand, this presentation serves to keep our leaders from being seen as too wise. For example, former President Bush had a master’s degree, but his characteristic dyslexia led him to be seen as a stooge or an idiot fronting for evil masterminds in the eyes of conspiratorially-minded leftists. However, it also leads us to dangerous levels of disrespect and ridicule for those in charge, so much as to threaten the legitimacy of society’s structure and rule. Additionally, there are often serious questions of judgment as to why the foolish and incompetent rule while the wise are limited to the position of servants and hired help, with vastly less pleasant lives and undeserved exploitation at the hands of the unworthy.

Maybe we don’t see it that way, because at the same time most of us realize that those who are in charge need help. To be competent in positions of great authority requires superhuman charisma and memory, and most of us realize that those in power often outsource some of the more menial tasks to assistants so that they can focus on the more important aspects of focusing on having a winning personality and charisma, and relying on the book smarts of others. After all, we are influenced from early on to associate higher levels of success and pleasure out of charm or intuition and lower levels of enjoyment out of book knowledge. In Harry Potter, Hermoine is the bookish sidekick for a reason. Even Harry Potter needs his Jeeves, after all.

This stereotypical presentation, for whatever reason, appears to draw very little commentary. We take it for granted that intellectuals serve others and do not rule, at least in the United States. Other nations may have former spymasters or playwrights or historians serve as leaders, but we English speaking people prefer to have such obviously competent people in the background while having more charismatic leaders in the foreground, for whatever reason. And so, instead of becoming an aristocratic leader himself, Jeeves remains the butler, and we all remain the poorer for our own slighting of such gifts, by limiting them to the help and not encouraging the acquisition of such gifts for ourselves.