Hi Ray, I'm grateful to you for posting the NYT article "Thinkers in Need of Publishers" by Rick Perlstein (appended below). I tried to download this myself but my G-box crashed both times, and then I forgot to return to the task later. Anyhow, it goes well with my first pot of tea of the day.
I think Rick Perlstein is dead right where he writes: "Where are all the public intellectuals? A well- stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen." I'm not so sure that he's right about his particular examples because I'm not sufficiently au fait with the American writing scene to identify the anonymous authors he alludes to. Perlstein also quotes Russell Jacoby where he writes (in his book "The Last Intellectuals", 1987) that: "A literate, indeed hungry public exists. What is lacking is the will and ability to address it." And I agree with Jacoby, too. The problem here is that (book and magazine) publishers have become too large and institutionalised to rely on. Indeed, the more blurbs and recommendations I read on the covers and inside pages of "intellectual" books, the more wary I am of their contents, and the more frequently I'm disappointed when I actually read them. There are few that actually deliver what they claim. There are two facts of life about intelligence (this is, assuming that we can agree that there is some sort of ability that we can call intelligence -- which, of course, many people will disagree with). The first is that any of us can easily discern those who are less intelligent than ourselves but cannot possibly gauge those who are roughly equal in intelligence to ourselves or who are more intelligent. The best one can do in these circumstances is to say, "M'mm . . . you might be right . . . I'm willing to be persuaded . . . but let me hear more first." The second fact is that, while in times past intellectuals were self-publishing and self-selecting (usually by private correspondence), many intellectuals today (and I'm sure there are many) can't get published publicly because they haven't been willing or able (for personality reasons) to go through the hoops of establishing themselves within institutional set-ups. Indeed (on this second point), those who have studied children and students of high ability have often remarked that, because they are invariably have to be taught by those of distinctly less intelligence for many years, then they often disguise their abilities for fear of being put down or scorned in various ways. It must be the case today that there are many intellectuals who lie low for many years but then, when they have acquired knowledge and experiences and feel they have something to say, find it difficult, if not impossible, to get published. Indeed, this is the reason why I had so much hope for the Internet in its early years, for here was a publishing medium that was not supervised by institutionalised intellectuals of only moderately high intelligence. So far, I've been disappointed most of the time I've searched. Whenever I discover a site with the possibility of real intellectual clout, such as <www.edge,org> I also find that the original group has been joined by a more diffuse circle of those who have high institutional cachet but are not themselves creative thinkers. Mind you, now that the razzamattaz has gone, maybe the Internet will settle down into the sort of real discussion medium that I had hoped for. But this thought leads into another area of difficulty. This is that modern times are so complex that the sort of well-rounded intellectuals of the past don't have sufficient time in the day to become deeply acquainted with all the important problems around them. They must perforce remain specialist themselves with only tangential contact with other intellectual areas -- thus limiting themselves to a smaller audience than those of the past. This is why I think that the democratic principles of the past must now give way to a new sort of policy selection and governance. This is an uncomfortable thought and can easily be labelled as fascist. But then it's also uncomfortable to remain with the present "democratic" system where, for example, the most powerful nation on earth, with immense capacities to do both good and evil, finds itself with a President of hardly more than average intellectual ability -- if that. Keith Hudson >>>> January 22, 2002 Thinkers in Need of Publishers By RICK PERLSTEIN Every semester brings a new symposium, every season a new book, every Sunday a new furrowed-brow disquisition. The topic is "public intellectuals" - writers and thinkers who address a general audience on matters of broad public concern - and the theme is decline. Russell Jacoby, who coined the phrase, delivered the consensus judgment in the title of his 1987 book, "The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe": There are none to speak of. And as Mr. Jacoby noted in the splashy 2000 edition, "Happenings since its publication do not cause me to revise its main points." The old lament is now back under the elegiac title "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline," a book by the federal judge Richard A. Posner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago's law school. Why, the question runs, are there no more public intellectuals? Ever the gentlemen, both of these authors claim to indict impersonal forces: for Russell Jacoby, the disappearance of cheap bohemian neighborhoods; for Richard Posner, a technical failure in the intellectual- services marketplace. But in the final analysis both end up tacitly playing the same blame game. Once giants roamed the earth: George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills and Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, smart people writing for ordinary people, openly and unashamedly, on issues people care about. And now? Nothing save the gusts of postmodern academics and the ill- informed bleats of publicity-hound law professors. The previous generations of non-university intellectuals, the Jacoby-Posner story line goes, were made of sterner moral stuff. "A literate, indeed hungry public still exists," Mr. Jacoby writes in the 2000 edition of "The Last Intellectuals." "What is lacking is the will and ability to address it." I would like to interrupt this bit of rote programming. Where are all the public intellectuals? A well- stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen. In one direction: an author of two literary, daring and original travelogues about life on the cusp between wilderness and civilization, who is also a gifted miniaturist of the city � la Joseph Mitchell. In another direction: an erudite and fearless muckraker whose freelance expos�s of international rogues and investigation of the corporate takeover of American universities are but two achievements of a young career spent writing on just about everything under the sun. In still another direction: the editor of a searing (self-published) magazine of media criticism, at work on a critical study on the history of advertising. And a freelancer who has just come out with a rattling new study on the depredations of the American prison system. And there are more than a few impressive young literary critics and cultural reporters in my neighborhood, too, one of whom also happens to be a smashingly effective film critic. These are just a few people I know. My Brooklyn neighborhood happens to be unusually well stocked with but-for-the-name public intellectuals. But they are plentiful in other cities: young men and women without university affiliations, who rendezvous in barroom salons, are under 40, practice exacting self-discipline and don't sell out. All can hold their own with professors in one or more areas of expertise. If you read widely you have read them, even the ones who have yet to find much public success: in the dwindling numbers of newspaper book reviews, in the corners of the Sunday paper labeled "Insight" or "Outlook"; in one of the few quarterly magazines that still pay something or one of the few magazines that publish writing on serious issues. But are they equal to any from those golden generations - the Orwells, Mumfords, Paul Goodmans? Are they great, or potentially great? To attempt an answer would be foolish. For what is on display in most debates about public intellectuals is nostalgia, and nostalgia is systematically cruel to the present. We only remember those who pass the test of time: the stars. Then, in our minds we remake the past in these lions' images. Here in the unruly present, however, we are thrown back on nothing more than our critical discernment to make judgments. It's also hard to judge because it isn't fashionable to look for young intellectual talent any more. People once believed there were notable independent intellectuals because they were instructed to seek out and prize them. "The most brilliant young critic of our day," trumpeted the cover of Norman Podhoretz's first book, an anthology of essays that was published when he was 33. There is no such trumpeting today, partly because there are no such anthologies being published today. I can think of several brilliant young critics who deserve them. The story I'm telling is really one of extraordinary resilience and willpower. Just try, as many young writers do, to support yourself writing book reviews. You can still string together enough income for a rice- and-beans year from what you can turn out in cultural essays for newspapers and semi-prominent magazines: maybe 30 pieces, probably averaging about $400 each. You can even end up, after a few or more faithful years, with a middle-class sinecure at some publication, perhaps with the perquisite of a year's leave to write a book someday, maybe even to become some future generation's intellectual giant from the good old days. But the farm teams are folding. In the 90's, future household names were writing regularly for magazines like Lingua Franca and Feedmag.com. Both ceased publication last year, as did several book-review sections. Other regular outlets have cut back precipitously - paying less, shutting out new voices. Academia, once a potential solace, is out: at the professional conferences these days new Ph.D.'s walk around with a kicked-in-the-teeth look. The non-Ph.D.'s, of course, are not even in the game. And still they write. That's the thing. The fact is that there are no "last intellectuals." The will and ability to write smartly and well for a general audience seems to be indomitable. The intellectuals are there; the public need not feel starved; we need no more jeremiads. What today's public intellectuals need are publishers, and maybe a few publicists, too. Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information >>>> __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
