November 18, 2004
AS MUCH AS ONE DOESN’T WISH TO BE SNOBBISH ABOUT SUCH THINGS...
Dirge for the decline and fall of the Western intelligentsia (Paul Johnson, The Spectator, November 18th, 2004)
Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goose-stepping in force. In France the followers of ‘Jumping Jack’ Derrida were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were on parade, from the Oxford stinks-don to the public-sector playwrights, with the Eumenides-novelists spitting fury. What a caterwauling and trilling! Why are intellectuals so impotent today? It was not always so. The term, of course, is French and dates back to the Dreyfus case, most likely to the year 1895. Certainly it is not to be found in the Littré dictionary of 1877. Maurice Paleologue, in his Journal de l’Affaire Dreyfus (1955), recalls an evening of frenzied argument on 15 January 1898, two days after Zola published his sensational letter, J’Accuse:As for this petition which is being circulated among the Intellectuals! The mere fact that one has recently created this word Intellectuals to designate, as though they were an aristocracy, individuals who live in laboratories and libraries, proclaims one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time — I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen.
Shortly afterwards Albert Réville, in his pamphlet Les étapes d’un intellectuel (1898), fiercely proclaimed, ‘Let us use this word since it has received high consecrations’. Le Temps took it up the same winter, publishing an open letter from Jean Psichari, demanding ‘the right of intellectuals’ to intervene actively in politics. Le Temps used the term repeatedly, and by summer it was an explosive part of the language. And the intellectuals won their first big battle, which brought them together, helped by the fact that Dreyfus was innocent. Then again, they were men of talent, in some cases genius: Zola himself, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Daniel Halevy, Clemenceau and so many others. I recall François Mauriac, who had been a young Dreyfusard (albeit Catholic), saying to me in 1953, ‘We had all the minds of France fighting for her soul.’
Today, I suspect, the intellectuals are impotent because so many of them are no good. In America it is a sign of the times that their leader is the mobile cheeseburger. The Right attracts at least as many stars as the rest: they write in the New Criterion, the National Review, Commentary and the American Spectator, and don’t call themselves intellectuals at all. By contrast, the anti-Bush stage army are often ill educated and ignorant. I doubt if any of the so-called pundits who have been holding forth about Iraq in the Guardian have ever been there or know anything about the complex peoples and history of the area. They have no intention of going there either; might be dangerous. They don’t mind going to safe, generous America, though. While cursing the US and all its people, they love tripping over to New York to party and collect their royalties. At least those original French intellectuals were prepared to make sacrifices and take risks. Zola went into exile (like Victor Hugo before him) and might well have gone to prison. Today’s anti-Americans risk nothing.
Forgive the self-reference, but one thing I noticed during arguments with anti-war, anti-Bushites during the election was how unread and uninformed so many were. A little CBC boilerplate, Sixty Minutes and Michael Moore were all they needed to ground their angry certainties on the war on terror and, indeed, whatever else ails the world. Brothersjudd savages the intellectual “elites” mercilessly, but in many cases it is all too easy. Too often, the enemy is not a courageous cutting edge of iconoclastic and original thought, but rather a sort of dull, crabby lumpen-elite that keeps repeating shibboleths adopted decades ago. Perhaps, like arcades and television talk shows, leftist cant is dumbing down and working its way down the social ladder. We may live to see the day it is featured primarily, not in centers of serious, original thought and debate, but in articles by Theodore Dalrymple .
Well, I certainly don't understand part of his opening paragraph because I'm not well-read (intellectual), but I do understand the Spectator is now The Sexator, IIRC.
Nice little sex scandal going on over there.
Posted by: Sandy P. at November 18, 2004 6:51 PMAnd liberal. I heard that Clinton guy might have had one.
OJ:
Your commentary hit the nail precisely.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at November 18, 2004 7:29 PMJeff:
No, they are never liberal. In order for them to be scandalous, they have to be conservative. That's why we are so sexy.
Posted by: Peter B at November 18, 2004 7:35 PMYour reference to T.Dalrymple is unclear in meaning. You are not,I hope, implying a deficiency.
Posted by: des harte at November 18, 2004 8:59 PMI wouldn't venture to guess their numbers, but a certain segment of the anti-war, Bush-hating crowd are just sublimating fear.
To approve of the Iraqi pacification is to acknowledge that the world is less ordered and more dangerous than Americans had believed during the 90s; it's easier to hate Bush, to believe that he wages war unprovoked, than to face the suddenly unknown and peer into Death's deep black cowl.
Bush is a scapegoat for their fear and anxiety.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at November 19, 2004 12:37 AM"I hate Bush. Therefore I am."
Posted by: Barry Meislin at November 19, 2004 3:07 AMPeter:
"a little CBC boilerplate, Sixty Minutes and Michael Moore were all they needed to ground their angry certainties on the war on terror and,...Perhaps, like arcades and television talk shows, leftist cant is dumbing down and working its way down the social ladder."
Very well put. That's certainly my experience too.
It amuses me that people who proudly express their worldly cynicism by refusing to believe that a politican can utter so much as a syllable without lying, will nonetheless swallow whole any outlandish conspiracy Michael Moore cares to name, so long as it thoroughly damns the 'stupid white man'.
Posted by: Brit at November 19, 2004 5:24 AMWhat has happened is the descent of intellectualism from excellence to pedantry. The key to advancement in the academic world is one's ability to march in lock-step with the people who make tenure decisions. Even in fields where subjectivity should be absent, one must be careful not to mouth anything other than the party line should one wish to advance. In fields where originality is not necessary, like the liberal arts, the decision is totally subjective and advancement appears to depend solely on one's political loyalty or willingness to sexually serve one's superiors, hetero or homo.
Actual scholarship is unnecessary and teaching ability is a detriment.
Posted by: Bart at November 19, 2004 6:33 AMBart;
That was certainly my experience in graduate school in Computer Science. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as non-technical fields, but if your advisor brought in the cash, then he could just declare you thesis OK and that was that. Those of us stuck with poor advisors had to do actual work. However, it was money that drove the politics, not the other way. I.e., it wasn't about who was more politically correct but who generated the largest cash stream in to the department.
Luckily I was just as annoying then as now and they considered a PhD a small price to be rid of me.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at November 19, 2004 9:54 AM"You don't need any intellect to be An Intellectual."
-- either George Orwell or C.S.Lewis (not sure)
For the record, I have a 160+ IQ and like to hang out with rural-raised rednecks. (Might even be co-authoring a book or two with them.) At least when they're mad at you, they show it to your face instead of the dagger in the back or poison in your drink. Getting denounced as a hopeless retard by an Intellectual who scored ONE IQ POINT above me might also have something to do with it.
Never did get into NASCAR though. My favorite motorsports were always classic drag racing and Sixties sports car/GT/Can-Am.
Posted by: Ken at November 19, 2004 7:11 PMThis post was worth it to see Derrida called "Jumping Jack".
Paul Johnson is a treasure. The letter he quoted, about the pretense of writers, scientists, et al. aspiring to be supermen, is excellent.
Posted by: jim hamlen at November 19, 2004 8:41 PMTheodore Dalrymple is a British physician and author of generaly conservative articles that are published in places like Wall Street Journal, City Journal Spectator.
I was just reading his Why Theo Van Gogh Was Murdered: The filmmaker focused on the shameful abuse of Muslim women by Muslim men in Europe. 15 November 2004, which I thought was very good.
I think Peter was refering to William Dalrymple. Another British author, not a physician, whose politics seem to be a good deal woolier.
I did read and mostly enjoy (except for the Jew bashing) his:
From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, by William Dalrymple
Product Description:
In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes "an evensong for a dying civilization" --Kirkus Reviews, starred review