Essay: THE FLOURISHING INTELLECTUALS

“IF I had learned education,” old Cornelius Vanderbilt once said, “I would not have had time to learn anything else.” That was the voice of a past America, which admired the man of letters but adored the man of action. It was an America that believed in the self-taught pragmatist, the graduate of life, the tinkerer who achieved progress through hunch and persistence. The intellectual was, at worst, distrusted as arrogant and impractical; at best, he was respected as a cultural adornment and considered all right—in his place.

How long ago that seems. Today the intellectual’s place is everywhere. He is far better off than ever before and far more widely respected. He burst out of the academy not only into government but into business and industry, and he moves back and forth between them with complete assurance. A few names tell the story. Presidential Adviser Walter Heller and Ambassador Kenneth Galbraith are now back at their academic posts (Minnesota and Harvard), widely sought after and well paid as consultants and lecturers. The University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor Edward H. Litchfield is also chairman of Smith-Corona and a director of Studebaker and Avco. M.I.T. Nutritionist Samuel A. Goldblith is also a vice president of United Fruit. Around Boston, particularly along famed Route 128, there are some 1,000 space and electronics firms in whose executive echelons businessmen and scientists are often indistinguishable. Professors do consulting work for research firms, often earning double or triple their academic salaries. Similar business colonies and “think factories” have sprung up everywhere: Arthur D. Little in Boston, The Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Aerojet General in Sacramento.

The intellectuals’ new affluence is not confined to the scientists and economists. Archaeologist Nelson Glueck was recently asked to join the board of a Cincinnati insurance company. Philosophers and novelists are not exactly swamped with management job offers, but their salaries are higher, their lecture fees munificent, and, what with paperbacks, they not only can get anything published, but published for gold. Then there are the foundations. If one can’t get a Guggenheim, one can always get a Ford, and if not a Ford, a Rockefeller. At the last meeting of the Northwestern University Finnegans Wake Society, a discussion group of professors and friends, eleven of the 14 members reported they were going to Europe for the summer—and not paying for their trips. For intellectuals, the greeting “Good Day,” it has been suggested, should be replaced by “Fair Fulbright.”

Anti-eggheadry is at a new low. What with the new concern about education, scholars and writers-in-residence are often community heroes; professors get the celebrity treatment on TV. The much-derided middlebrow culture in a sense serves the intellectual because its members look up to him. The ordinary man, suggests Critic Leslie Fiedler, “can now identify with the intellectual.”

Who Qualifies?

Some observers feel that none of this is quite real; that pockets of anti-intellectualism remain, especially in the West and South, and that even when people respect the intellectual they do not necessarily accept his ideas. The fact is, however, that for some time now the U.S. has not been a place that intellectuals flee from, but a place they flee to. Britain’s C. P. Snow has summed it up: “During the past 20 years, the U.S. has done something like 80% of the science and scholarship of the entire Western world.” Chicago Economist George Stigler guesses that in the Athens of Pericles, full-time intellectuals numbered only about 200, or one for every 1,500 persons; he puts the number in the U.S. today at around a million, or about one for every 200 persons.

Such numbers once again raise the question of just who and what is an intellectual. The qualifications for membership in the club are elusive, the admissions committee invisible and capricious. A college degree (even a Ph.D.) has long ago ceased being enough, and even college professors are by no means automatically intellectuals. Many of the touchstones, used not only by the public but often by intellectuals, are part of folklore, fashion, even caricature. Given the same amount of education, a Democrat is apt to be considered an intellectual, but not so a Republican. Some labor leaders used to be intellectuals ex officio, but not any more. Politicians, even with academic degrees, are almost automatically out, unless they write books and are markedly liberal.

Not watching television was once briefly considered a sign of intellectual status, but now this earns hardly any points. Intellectuals used to go to the theater rather than to the movies; now it is the other way round, except for off-Broadway or little-theater groups, which remain intellectually O.K. In the creative arts, the merely popular practitioners are excluded from intellectual status—but so are most of the really great talents. Marquand was no intellectual, but neither was Hemingway, Faulkner or Wolfe. The critic, on the other hand, is almost automatically an intellectual, at least in his own view.

Professional men have never really been considered intellectuals, but there are exceptions. Most doctors are out, but psychoanalysts have a chance—not if they write books about marriage adjustment, but if they discourse on things like the pathology of the cold war. Lawyers who engage in tax or divorce work are out, but if they treat of corporate or antitrust matters, they can be in; civil rights work is an automatic admission badge.

Scientists are, of course, accepted as intellectuals, but with qualifications. Liberal J. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, is unquestionably accepted, but not necessarily Conservative Edward Teller. Members of other disciplines concede intellectual status only to the most creative and original scientists, relegating the rest into a vast limbo of mere technicians and experts. George Babbitt’s sneering at longhairs could not muster anywhere near the savagery of one intellectual’s proclaiming that another isn’t.

The Socratic Role

Whatever the touchstones, most of them are based on two underlying assumptions. One is that the intellectual is more than a learned man; that his mind must have independence and originality, and that he must pursue ideas for their own sake. In his brilliant book,Anti-lntellectualism in American Life, Columbia’s Professor Richard Hofstadter defines the intellectual as a man who lives for ideas, while the professional man lives off ideas. In a new book, The New Radicalism in America, Iowa State Historian Christopher Lasch defines the intellectual as “a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play.”

The second assumption is that the intellectual must be a critic of his society, an opponent of established values, playing the part of a secular and reproachful cleric. This Socratic role has always been one essential function of the intellectual, but only in recent times has it come to be looked on as the only function; a great many intellectuals today demand their daily cup of instant hemlock.

Yet for centuries, intellectuals functioned usefully as part of establishments, and Coleridge visualized an intellectual caste, which he called clerisy, providing teachers and guides for the nation. Only in the last 100 years did intellectuals (the word became current during the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s) emerge as a separate class and organized opposition. This was made possible in part by the bourgeoisie; while the old aristocracy was insult-proof, the middle class positively begged to be told off. Yet the more the intellectuals criticized their societies, the more they complained that their societies did not appreciate them.

The situation—which existed in the U.S. as well as Europe —was described in 1927 by a French intellectual named Julien Benda in a book titled The Treason of the Intellectuals. The “treason” did not consist of disloyalty to their nations, as Benda saw it, but in the fact that intellectuals had abandoned detachment for political passion, and stopped thinking independently. While many intellectuals saw themselves as lonely rebels, heresy became a group affair, and protest turned into a community sing. Alternately repelled and fascinated by violence, dreaming both of power and of justice, intellectuals overwhelmingly (if not unanimously) embraced Marxism as the hope of the future. They were reacting against the baffling evils of World War I and fascism; perhaps the modern intellectual’s main difficulty is that he cannot really account for evil in human affairs.

From Exile to Glamour

In the U.S. the intellectual has probably never fared quite so badly as he sometimes thinks. From the Puritan Fathers through the flowering of New England, intellectuals of the “clerisy” made great contributions and earned respect, including Franklin, Jefferson, William James. At times, the U.S. was governed by Presidents of intellectual stature, including Taft and Wilson. But there was also the old pragmatic suspicion of the intellectual. America’s egalitarian faith that every man is as good as his neighbor, and no better, led to distrust of the intellectual who, by claiming special knowledge, also seemed to claim special distinction.

In the 1920s, the era of Babbitt and Harding, U.S. intellectuals felt themselves rejected and ridiculed by the business civilization. Instead of fighting to improve it, they chose exile in Europe, or that domestic exile which is known as “alienation.” In the 1930s, after business had bungled the job of running the country, the intellectuals held a large share of power in the New Deal—and then it was the businessman’s turn to feel rejected and ridiculed by “the professors in Washington.” By 1953, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. announced that “anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. The intellectual is on the run in American society.” In fact, the U.S. intellectual has never been persecuted in any real sense—not even during the chivying of the McCarthy era. Much of the primitive anti-egghead feeling was really based on envy (as one pro-McCarthy paper put it) of “certified gentlemen and scholars dripping with college degrees.” The Russian launching of Sputnik made education and intellectualism newly desirable. The Kennedy Administration made it glamorous in a slightly Broadway-tinted way by creating a sort of Camelot for brains. If not quite in the same style, the most distinguished old grad of Texas’ Southwest Teachers College continues to employ intellectuals to help run the U.S.

The Pangs of Success

The intellectuals’ influence and affluence worry many of them deeply. They agonize that the alliance with power will corrupt them, and that, as they are recognized, accepted and used, they will cease being creative, critical and useful. In Hofstadter’s words, when intellectuals are not afraid of being shut out, they are afraid of being sold out.

Says Yale’s Philosophy Professor Paul Weiss: “They were never true eggheads, those tempted by cocktail parties and Government grants. The true intellectual does not even belong in his own group and never has many friends.” Robert Hutchins agrees, distinguishing between operators and real intellectuals. “An intellectual is trying to find out what truth is,” he says. “Operators are trying to get something done. Socrates wasn’t trying to free slaves, help the poor, or even get federal aid to education. He tried to find out how people ought to live, how a good community is organized.” The “operators” are active in universities too. Says Columbia’s Jacques Barzun: “Professors keep giving advice all over the world, getting ideas on the run, dropping them here and there—they are nothing but airport thinkers. In a certain sense, our best politicians today are our best intellectuals; they have not been unionized or homogenized.” A great many other intellectuals, particularly the younger ones, are far less worried about being corrupted by “the world.” They may suspect intellectuals in authority, but they have little patience with what Brandeis Political Scientist John P. Roche calls “career alienationists.” A retreat into academe does not guarantee intellectual purity. Universities are full of “pure” academics, uncorrupted by politics (except academic politics, of course), who are thinking in cliches. On the other hand, a great many intellectuals in government or business retain their ability to think for themselves. In the end, what counts is not having an independent position but being capable of independent thought.

Smaller Causes

The need for independent thought is greater than ever. With the decline of ideology, the large causes and massive generalizations of past decades have vanished. The Marxist Utopia broke down in shame and despair—but the relatively simple anti-Communism of the early cold war years is no longer tenable either. Nothing as large and easy as antiFascism or anti-McCarthyism is available to the intellectual today. The Government has so steadily adopted the radical programs of yesterday that some intellectuals are desperately trying to stay left of Washington and attempting, not very successfully, to create “a new radicalism.” There are plenty of causes left in a far from perfect world, but they tend to be smaller and more specific. Many have turned from politics to preoccupation with “environment.”

Intellectual life has become increasingly specialized; as Editor-Critic Irving Kristol remarks, it is no longer easy for the all-purpose sage to dash off a tract on economics or morals without highly specific knowledge. A case in point u Viet Nam. The current swirl of protest may be useful in encouraging the makers of U.S. policy to sharpen and define their views, but it is also heavily uninformed, riddled with emotional cliches and misunderstandings of both Asia and Communism—a throwback to the oversimplicities of the 1930s. Many intellectuals pounced on Viet Nam almost with relief, because it once again gave them an easy target and a chance to feel a little martyred.

Actually, a great deal of significant anti-intellectualism today comes not from outside but inside the intellectual community. New York University Sociologist Ernest van den Haag points out that much campus protest, though carried on in the name of academic freedom, is really mindlessly anti-intellectual in its indiscriminate call for “activism” and hell raising. Critic Renata Adler thinks that perhaps the strongest anti-intellectual forces at present are the “uneducated and unearned nihilism” of pop art, which holds that the meaningless is entertaining, and the enthusiasm for “camp,” which holds that the mediocre and the ugly are amusing. The attitude is typified by Pop Painter Andy Warhol, who, after seeing Tiny Alice, was heard to say: “It’s boring, of course, but then I love to be bored.”

The real intellectuals, without publicity and without worrying about who is “in” or “out,” have made tremendous contributions to U.S. society. So tremendous, in fact, that any future hostility will probably arise not from the old feeling that intellectuals are not needed but that they are needed too much. Their expertise has been essential in creating the affluent society, and keeping it affluent. The U.S. depends on intellectuals for defense, education, health, city planning, space exploration, the care and feeding of the computer—for the shape, virtually, of its entire environment. The U.S., of course, also depends on them to serve the truth, in the old role of Socratic gadflies. In fact, there are so many different kinds of intellectuals today—the spread between the systems engineer and the literary critic, for example, is so wide—that the common label threatens to become meaningless. The word intellectual should probably be done away with.

But if it is still possible to speak of the American intellectual as a type, by no flight of the imagination can he be looked on as alienated from American life. He is too much a part of it, and when he quarrels with his society, he quarrels with himself.