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Culture & Ideas 3/11/02
All Thought Out?
The intellectuals are dead! Long live the intellectuals!
BY JAY TOLSON
Perhaps it is a sign that the age of the intellectual is truly over when a respected
writer (and federal appeals court judge) can produce a list of the top 100 "public
intellectuals" based on a Google search of media mentions. Appearing in Public
Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, the much ballyhooed list accompanies author
Richard Posner's supply-and-demand explanation for why the general quality of the
caste is now so poor (excessive demand for overly specialized academics, and no
standards of quality control). Posner takes up the argument of Russell Jacoby's 1987
book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe: namely, that
the independent Edmund Wilson types who once wrote for the general public have
been succeeded by tenured knock-offs who are barely able to communicate with one
another. But it is his list that sounds the true death knell: If the word intellectual
can
be applied to both William Butler Yeats and former Clinton adviser Sidney
Blumenthal, its definition has become promiscuous beyond all hope of sense or
meaning.
This need not be cause for mourning. There were thinking people before there were
intellectuals, and there will be thinking people after their demise. "Erasmus and
Thomas More told uncomfortable truths to power," says Princeton historian Anthony
Grafton, tracing the tradition back to the Renaissance and even beyond, to Socrates.
What is ending, though, is an ideal. After roughly 100 years of embattled existence,
intellectuals are morphing into something different. But even as the new breed
assumes its own identity and name�the "commentariat," perhaps, in recognition of its
role as a pool of on-call experts feeding the 24/7 news cycle�a number of recent
books invite reconsideration of the strange career of its predecessor.
Intellectuals first got their name in the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that
racked
France in the 1890s. The causec�l�bre was a Jewish captain named Alfred Dreyfus,
wrongly convicted of giving military secrets to Germany. Supporters of Dreyfus,
including novelist Emile Zola, expressed outrage that the French state could betray
its republican (and Enlightenment) principles of justice by refusing to retry the case
when new evidence was found. The anti-Dreyfusards�zealous nationalists,
reactionary Catholics, and antisemites�claimed that a retrial would be hurtful to the
nation. "They thought they were defending an organic, harmonious, and ordered
society against nihilism," writes Christopher Hitchens in his new book, Letter to a
Young Contrarian, "and they deployed this contemptuous word [intellectuals] against
those they regarded as the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the
unsound."
The ideal of the intellectual was associated with a commitment to universal truths
rising above economic, ethnic, or political interests. But from the beginning,
intellectuals found it hard to live up to the ideal. Surveying the European scene in
his
1927 book, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, the writer Julien Benda already saw
treason everywhere. If at first the betrayals were sporadic, they soon became more
the rule than the exception. "As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical
systems in the 20th century, communism and fascism," writes Mark Lilla in The
Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, "it also gave birth to a new social type, for
which we need a new name: the "philotyrannical intellectual." To explain the
intellectuals' attraction to tyranny, scholars have blamed both the excessive
rationalism of the Enlightenment and the romantic, folk-nationalism of the counter-
Enlightenment. Lilla points to the philosopher's passion for truth as the deeper cause.
In its political expression, this passion, if not controlled, can create both actual
tyrants
and others who, Lilla writes, "enter life not as rulers, but as teachers, orators,
poets�what today we would call intellectuals." Far from being independent minds,
they are, he adds, "a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of
a fickle public."
Such drives might well explain why so many intellectuals�including great ones such
as Martin Heidegger in Germany, Georg Luk�cs in Hungary, and Gabriele
D'Annunzio in Italy�became supporters of Nazism, fascism, and communism, even
after seeing the toll these systems inflicted. But there were still the defiant
exceptions. George Orwell in England and Albert Camus in France were both
intellectuals of the left who broke ranks with the ideologically correct herds of true
believers�and suffered the scorn of their peers for doing so. Equally exceptional
were those "New York intellectuals"� Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Irving
Kristol�who forged an influential anti-Stalinist left. Some of these thinkers went on
to
reject leftist thinking altogether, launching the movements that came to be known as
neoconservatism and neoliberalism.
In fact, what gave the intellectuals an extended lease on life were the very factors
that contributed ultimately to their demise: the academy, specialization, and
diversification. As Jacoby argues, the movement of huge numbers of intellectuals
into the universities during the two decades after World War II had at least two
consequences: It took them out of their urban bohemian habitats, and it slowly turned
them away from their original mission of addressing the general public. Despite
deliberate efforts to protect and train "public intellectuals," including Ph.D.
programs
and special university-based centers, specialized intellectuals crowded out the all-
purpose generalists to satisfy the media's need for credentialed experts.
Meanwhile, responding to the excesses of the New Left and the counterculture, more
and more intellectuals from the early 1970s on broke out of the secular, left-leaning,
cosmopolitan mold. "Being an intellectual had once implied pushing against a stolid
social order," says historian Wilfred McClay. "But that society was disappearing.
Everybody was starting to live and think like Greenwich Village intellectuals." Seeing
themselves as "liberals mugged by reality," in writer Irving Kristol's famous phrase,
neoconservatives cautioned against the perverse effects of government social
programs. They called for more religion in the public square. They championed
capitalism and the idea of a strong America in the struggle against communism.
Most disturbing to intellectuals on the left, these assorted neoconservative and
neoliberal intellectuals had real influence in the public sphere.
But with the winding down of the Cold War in the 1980s and the gradual abating of
the culture wars in the 1990s, the assorted "neo" intellectuals found less and less
cause for contrariness. If the latter half of the 20th century had shown that there
could be many kinds of intellectuals, it also demonstrated that, without the edge of
opposition, intel- lectuals gave way to something else�the specialist and partisan
commentators. And if the latter perform as well as, say, Weekly Standard editor and
author David Brooks, who is to say that they provide a lesser service? At the very
least, this new breed of thinker exhibits a wariness, even an irony, about ideas that
was dangerously lacking in its predecessor. The greatest cost of the demise of the
intellectuals might be a lack of confidence in those universal principles that once
animated the original Dreyfusards. "Now," says McClay, "even the public senses that
there is no bearer of disinterested truth."
Modern Orwells? There are occasions when position-mongering may be inadequate.
In the aftermath of September 11, the example of two members of the dying
breed�Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan�stood out. Writing in the New York Observer,
columnist Ron Rosenbaum hailed these "two expatriate Brits" as the Orwells of our
time for speaking bluntly to their respective constituencies about the meaning of the
terrorist attacks: Hitchens "by challenging the left to recognize the terrorists not as
somewhat misguided spokesmen for the wretched of the Earth, but as . . . theocratic
oppressors of the wretched of the Earth." And Sullivan "by challenging the right to
question the danger that may lurk in the heart of all fundamentalist versions of
religion, not just Islam�perhaps in the heart of religion itself."
Though Hitchens is somewhat abashed by the comparison to Orwell�the subject of
his next book�he is unhesitant about society's need for contrarian thinkers. Yet his
own career illustrates the precariousness of his kind. Eschewing the academy and
other affiliations, he has even been known to bite the ideological hands of the
publications that feed him. Such independence can appear fearless or perverse,
whether he is offending conservatives with his indictment of Henry Kissinger, or
liberals with his attacks on Bill Clinton, or almost everyone with his campaign against
Mother Teresa. Yet his willingness to gore all sacred cows has made it hard for even
the offend- ed parties to ignore him. "I think an intellectual ought to be separate
from
a commentator," Hitchens says, acknowledging that his kind makes life hard for talk-
show producers seeking experts with predictable positions. No stranger to those
shows, Hitchens sees the occasional convergence of intellectuals and television as a
qualified good�as long as they don't "do their thinking on demand." Of course, if they
stick to that principle, we will see even fewer of their kind on the air.
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