Maybe it's just my corner of the Upper West Side, but I still feel like I see at least two or three New Yorker tote bags a day, and sometimes closer to half a dozen. Not as much as Nirvana and "Friends" gear, but a lot. Did they used to be more ubiquitous than that?
Maybe that was clumsy. What I meant was a relic of an earlier time when the New Yorker fit into a whole intellectual “scene.” The New Yorker is like the last institution standing of that world and the tote bag a kind of totem.
OK, I see what you mean. From my perspective the New Yorker tote bag has become almost like the "Coexist" bumper sticker, I hate to use the term "NPC" but looking at who actually tends to carry them it's either proud elderly liberals still spiritually living in the Carter years or very conventional social climbers straining to look savvy in the same way that they might once have worn a T-shirt for a band they didn't actually listen to. I agree that the New Yorker brand regardless of whatever's in the magazine has endured and remains valuable because it conjures up a certain abstract deracinated aura of upscale sophistication that remains sexy to the mass consumer, "totem" is a good word for it.
Tbh the old New Yorker tote bag was of much better quality than those of more recent vintage, which wrinkle (horrors!) when washed. But the New Yorker radio hour ain’t bad on occasion.
Yes I am depressed how even on here how many supposed cultural mandarins would rather listen to metal and watch anime or young adult fantasy, than do the harder work of appreciating Palestrina, Melville, and Miro.
If by contemporary renaissance man you mean a shallow poorly read Philistine fucboi wholly ungrounded in the greatness of western culture from the high middle ages, to high modernism.
In a sense yes that's what I'm saying, but respectfully I don't agree with your idea that just because something is new (say, last 50 years or so) it automatically makes it bad or inferior.
Also don't discount that this type of media is often derivative of the great things that came before (ex. half of Harry Potter is stolen mythology). It can be a access point once people realize it's a shade compared to the source material(s). And I think in a world of creeping anti-intellectualism, that's a good thing, no?
Then there are guys like Ryan Holiday... Daily Stoic. Okay, so he boils down stoicism to little more than daily affirmations. But it leads people to Meditations.
It's like when Lex Friedman was dragged on Twitter for posting his reading list. I don't like the guy, but I respect when someone is trying to improve and become more worldly. The problem with intellectuals has always been upturned noses and gatekeeping.
Yes, they have a reason to feel superior. But I don't think knowledge or enlightenment should be held as some kind of elitist club. Knowledge begets further knowledge....
I will concede some modern pop culture is better than others, i.e. The Talking Heads is better than gangster rap, it's better composed about deeper subjects. But the more I listen to music from the early Renaissance like Palestrina and Dowland the more I think all modern music pales in both complexity and emotional expressiveness.
You're also comparing different genres which can be tricky.
There are lots of very strong compositions coming out of China and Japan these days. They don't have the same timeless quality perhaps but they are quite good on their own merit. The Japanese composers in generally would be more accessible for someone new as they tend to have more repetitive hooks.
It's hard to radically redefine the sounds unless you introduce new instruments... but then it begs the question about whether an orchestra is even an orchestra any longer.
Again I do think there is modern serious music, certain forms of ambient and classical crossover are innovative and musically interesting, but even that does not really measure up to earlier music at the end of the day. And certainly some metal dude riffing on scales doesn’t.
Upturned noses and gatekeeping are crucial if we don't want to be pigs rolling in cultural slop, as that is easier and appeals to our glandular base instincts. And no this doesn't have to be a class thing, I live on less than 12,000 a year yet I manage to engage in a sophisticated cultural life.
I have a good education from Oberlin College, I could have gotten a high paying sinecure in the government or a woke corporation, fuck that, I hate these rich fucks who think that liking pop culture is signifying being a man of the people. I am literally the opposite of all that.
Woot woot! That's a cool scene. I somehow stopped watching The West Wing after Season 2 and didn't get to this. I was working on a campaign and the staffers would watch it obsessively all through the summer, and then the real campaign kicked into gear and I never saw the rest of it....and never went back to it. Funny, I was thinking about The Two Cathedrals like a second ago, before I saw your comment.
Good historical overview, which raises the question: what are intellectuals for? If ideas really are just a source of private pleasure, with no societal benefit, why should intellectual pursuits be considered anything other than an eccentric hobby? Society sponsors athletic and artistic achievement because they offer something to the spectator. If scholars themselves seem confused about whether they are trying to conserve and transmit culture or to subvert it, why would society protect them from the market forces affecting everyone else?
Are you seriously going to try to claim that people whol listen to gangster rap or thrash metal are cultured people? That is misplaced populism, hint this cultural debasement was brought to you by capitalism. It isn't really populist to support cultural debasement. And no this isn't about white people, the people of Bali and Java have a sophisticated culture.
Appreciate the debate! For me, I think both things can be true. The essence of intellectual pursuit is ideas for their own sake, which is necessarily not exactly a social activity. However, if in the process of uncovering those ideas, you come across things that may be of benefit to society-at-large then intellectuals have an obligation to enter into the public sphere and to try to get their ideas across.
I think it was that attachment to socialist/communist ideologies, and later on postmodern thought, that set the ball rolling. There's a reason Orwell once said "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." It's one thing to stand above the masses in matters of taste, curation, and intelligence, it's another to lose touch with reality in such a way that you're unable to enact your theories at all, and see life for what it is on a pragmatist's level.
Maybe so. I haven't quite bought into this narrative that postmodern thought precipitated the cultural decline - for one thing, because I'm suspicious that it's as linear as that - but I take your point.
I don't think it's the arch factor that many claim it to be, but it fits more broadly into the idea of losing touch with reality. There's value in picking apart/subverting/deconstructing concepts, but it, much like communism/socialism, has been played to its absolute extremes, to the point where intellectuals and academia have created their own walled garden of incomprehensible pretense that doesn't connect with much of tangible reality. Again, theorizing oneself out of feasibility.
Thank you for writing such a clear explication of a complex subject. Hopefully, we bottom out soon. The cream of the crop are reading dystopian drivel and the classics are vanishing. The average attention span cannot imbibe a New Yorker, let alone 10 minutes of silence.
Yeah, it's really crazy thinking about the kinds of books that were 'popular literature' in the '50s say - Herman Wouk, James Jones, James Mitchener, etc - and the kinds of books that occupy the same niche in the culture now. And then it seems like there's absolutely no room, at least in the publishing industry, for Faulkner, Gaddis, etc.
This is a surprisingly linear narrative from the author of „Against Stories.” 😉 While I think that the position of intellectual culture varies from nation to nation (think France) and that there are some residues not just in „far corners of the web“ (wasn’t part of the 44th President’s appeal that he is, well, an intellectual?), I agree that things get serious when even intellectuals give up cultivating a particular type of sophistication. On the other hand, intellectual influence on politics makes a comeback in disguise, in the form of a) the theorist (a thinker with strong takes that fuel culture wars) and b) the expert (e.g., on climate change). Which is a complicated way to say that what the question of the intellectual comes down to is a) a specific education that isn’t valued as it used to be (cultural capital in decline) and b) a way of thinking that is not functional but instead embraces ambivalence, doubt, even the abysmal. The latter is not only a joy but also crucial for society in an indirect way because it’s the only way to prevent anybody from falling prey to ideologies of all flavors.
Thank you Dirk. These are really complicated interesting points. I wanted to get into some of this in the post but didn't have space. People like Kissinger and Morgenthau ended up with immense practical political power out of their intellectual backgrounds - and Kissinger in particular can be treated as a kind of case study of the kinds of tensions and dynamics that play out when an intellectual enters into politics. Where political culture seems to have moved to is to have a few fields - economics, in particular - where politicians have an almost superstitious reverence for duly-credentialed intellectual experts but that otherwise (for mass communication, etc) politicians tend to rely on their own instincts. I think some of this is a result of being in a democracy as opposed to some kind of technocracy, which was where for instance the 'enlightened despots' were evolving towards. But, yes, I feel like if I continued with this topic I would lose the linearity of my post. Another reason why 'stories' are a kind of lie and shortcut!
Thanks, Sam. I’d appreciate a follow-up article on the complicated relationship between intellectuals and practical politics. On the one hand, it’s good that intellectuals criticize public affairs regardless of pragmatic considerations if only to stimulate the political imagination. On the other hand, it feels cheap to pretend to know how to cook while avoiding the kitchen’s heat. Therefore, a closer look at intellectuals who entered politics would probably be the most rewarding approach. Still, it’s a very challenging topic: the particular ideology an intellectual represents, the specific political circumstances and windows of opportunity, the human factor, chance, and so much more—no happy ending in sight.
If you are free read Saul Bellows's Ravelstein and summon the ghosts from Saul's long friendship with Allen Bloom one of the champs of the Federalist society. The book is dirgeful as if Bellows was seeking saner words than Bloom spoke, from their whole history? One of Sartres inventions was to say when a body dies their meaning becomes graspable. Well then, Bloom looks to be the hardliner he appeared, because Bellows as the narrator Chick has to worry abt Ravelstein/ Bloom and the book makes friendship look like a job with appntmnts and scheduling to make work.
I enjoyed this very much, but I think the following is far too resigned: “Ideas aren’t really of value for how they contribute to society or advance your own position or anything like that but because, if treated with proper respect, they are a source of almost infinite pleasure within one’s own life.” Personal pleasure is good but not enough. Society must be turned toward the production of culture. Human existence is justified only to the extent we create beyond ourselves. The People need a boot on the neck, said boot to belong to someone who worships intellectuals and puts the vast resources of the mega state at their disposal. Malatesta for the 21st century. Enslave the masses. Rage against the dying of the light.
Hmm hasn’t enough culture been produced for awhile? (Not counting translation which will always be necessary, updating older translations, keeping up with language—in our case English, but eventually languages that have been rescued from oblivion by…umm…mass culture?
Yes, there is a battle for ideas, but I suspect the battle for ideas is more about mimetics than the 'best ideas' winning it. I don't mean to be too resigned! - it is important to participate in that battle. But I think no one should be too surprised if intellectuals continue to lose in that field. That doesn't, however, make intellectual activity less worthwhile.
Thanks for this fascinating post, and I have an anecdote from a time before the “out-flanking” became as complete as it now is. I’m thinking about a cultural/political moment from the early 1990s. The not-for-profit theater was sponsoring first productions of work that would become “big”, as sources of cultural understanding, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Robert Schenkkan’s Kentucky Cycle. Self-aware artistry was reaching towards the wider society, finding and building audiences for stories from the edges. August Wilson, too, was one of those voices. The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) supported the regional theaters where a lot of that work opened before finding its way to Broadway and was also funding a number of really challenging performance and studio artists. So, the spirit of the day was one of challenge and of “new voices”, some of them really aggravating. Congress was ablaze with demands that the NEA be de-funded, and it was probably only the grace of Jane Alexander and her surprisingly good relationship with Jesse Helms, a key committee chair in Congress, that carried the NEA through.
Anyway, I remember sitting in meetings of policy and funding panels in the Old Post Office digs of the NEA, on the very day when congressional hearings about the Endowment’s choices were going on, and what I was feeling at the time was the “American-ness” of our deliberations: we were funding a regional theater in Johnson City, Tennessee in one moment and a provocative performance artist in another, and then a children’s theater or an ethnic theater, or a puppet theater somewhere. So, the calls to dismantle the NEA seemed to me grotesque in that moment, betraying a lack of confidence in a big American idea of many voices. I personally might regret the spirit that caused an artist to want most of all to outrage a public, but a demonstration of transcendent artistry could keep me on board. We had cultural power, of course we did, but we also had an ethos, I think, to listen to each other and to be open to persuasion. We changed our minds a lot as a result of talking.
Onward to my point: I do see the “out-flanking” you describe, but it seems to have only something to do with elite failure or with tons of own-goals by the intelligentsia and maybe more to do with a set of social choices we’ve made, destroying a sense of shared citizenship and risk. Thus, the foundation for a lot of mutual contempt and of closedness to persuasion. The set of commitments that together make up the “least common denominator” of the American project is surely variable and a product of ideology and actions. We could have done so much better at producing a bigger number.
Very interesting Greg. I really don't know a lot about the NEA. Would be very interesting to see a real history of the NEA. Curious what the critical turning-points were.
Is there also an element of fragmentation? As mass media allows ever more personalised content choices, we lose a common understanding of what is high culture - and so what is worth the investment of trying to understand?
Yes, I think that's a big piece of it. I read a book - Salon's top authors c.2000, where they were saying that around 1960 everybody knew who the 'top authors' were but it was impossible to do that around 2000. They were trying to make the case that this diffusion was a good thing, and I can see that to some extent. I think we have moved out of the era of a single focal point for national consciousness, but that was always a little artificial anyway - based on some structures within the nation-state - and it's now more about people finding the communities that they wish to speak to and many different communities existing within the same body politic.
It's funny -- because my parents banned TV from our home, I grew up reading intellectuals and fancied myself one, even though I had virtually nothing in common with the (mostly) bourgeois writers I read other than my own intellect. A quality public school and affordable college education kept that illusion alive, and I suppose I followed the fancy far enough, since it led me to a PhD.
But you might say that a lot of PhDs aren't intellectuals anymore, not in the historical sense that you're describing, not as real innovators. Many of my peers were busy slapping Foucault onto any obscure text they could find. I'm sure others are doing that now with Žižek or whoever has succeeded him. It's a different version of the "American Fiction" masquerade. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of smart people, but that articles and books are being churned out to feed a non-monetary market of status. And because I studied at a land grant university, there were rungs on the status ladder that I'd never reach.
So I'm circling back to a question about how to define an intellectual. I think historically an intellectual has been a kind of innovator, someone in conversation with other thinkers who either contributes a new system or who articulates an idea that comes to wield great influence. Typically the time and resources required to produce that kind of innovation meant that intellectuals were either independently wealthy or the equivalent of starving artists -- the kind of figure Willa Cather imagines sacrificing everything on the altar of art.
Perhaps you're right that real intellectualism now means sating one's private intellectual hunger without regard for anything like achievement or real public influence. That is pretty sad to me, because I still think that colleges and universities should be safe havens for people like us. But no one working in higher ed has any time left for exchanging ideas or even for reading deeply. They're too busy completing academic assessments, managing hybrid learning environements, and making a thousand accommodations for their students.
My 12 year old reads quite deeply. She writes beautiful sentences. So there's still hope that literacy has not vanished. But she has not yet entered the "real world," which will quickly disabuse her of her intellectual leanings, if she has any left.
"But you might say that a lot of PhDs aren't intellectuals anymore, not in the historical sense that you're describing, not as real innovators. Many of my peers were busy slapping Foucault onto any obscure text they could find. I'm sure others are doing that now with Žižek or whoever has succeeded him. It's a different version of the "American Fiction" masquerade. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of smart people, but that articles and books are being churned out to feed a non-monetary market of status."
Very sad, and very true. I got a B.S. in Computer Science, and now wish to study somethign else more humanities-oriented for graduate school, but then when I look at what grad schools are churning out (for tenure/research purposes or for "book" purposes), and how you just become a hyper-specialist for other hyper-specialists in your ivory echo chamber, then it feels kind of revolting and a disservice to higher education in general. Like you say, it's for "market of status", so it's not really the fault of the professors, but still quite disheartening. In a weird way, grad school might not be the greatest place to flower intellectually. Which is why my current plan is just to be a freelance programmer for 20 hrs/week, and read maniacally in my spare time on everything from mathematical logic to comparative poetics. But I'm very fortunate to have this skillset in this era of techno-religiosity.
"My 12 year old reads quite deeply. She writes beautiful sentences. So there's still hope that literacy has not vanished. But she has not yet entered the "real world," which will quickly disabuse her of her intellectual leanings, if she has any left."
I have a 20 year old cousin who can run circles around me intellectually, and she gives me hope. She eschewed social media and smartphones as long as she could, but eventually gave in to the "democratizing effects" of online life.
I definitely sympathize with your depression. I hope against hope that some new space is emerging - in beautiful platforms like this one - that are conducive to genuine peer-to-peer inquiry and fall outside of the academic structure, which has its points but is also coercive and hierarchical in many different ways.
Yes, I think there was some fundamental change that happened within our lifetimes, by which the number of people laying claim to 'intellectual space' metastasized. (Maybe this is Turchin's 'elite overproduction' hypothesis, although I haven't read Turchin.) There had been a period of time, say in the Victorian era, where people laid claim to a certain kind of gentlemanly status by reading high-end books and quoting Shakespeare - and they ended up very pretentious and we've been mocking them ever since then. But something happened recently by which an industry developed that claimed to cover all possible questions. This was the liberal arts schools giving out too many degrees and people who had entirely professional aspirations picking up those degrees as a path to credentialing, but without ever really being interested in underlying questions. So a certain type of person would look at the numbers and say, things are great, so many books are being published, so many people have advanced degrees, but somehow intellectual pursuit is as far away from the 'cultural mainstream' than it ever has been.
12 and 13 and 14 yr old women write the most expamsive conversational epics. I will venture a weekend project to show her how high flying you find her sentences. Och, take an essay of hers and record it overtop of say Kirk Douglas in space in Saturn- whatever that camp Douglas space film was called. Maybe she will see the marriage sound/ and sense that called Tennessee williams .
It seems you're mainly referring to upper class and/or academic intellectuals. I think the intellectual situation, or range, has been far broader and also far more fluid, for centuries. Not to be too glib, but there continue to be intellectuals for every occasion, so to speak, whether these intellectuals are activist, or cultural, or scientific, or aesthetic, or philosophical, or working class, or minority, or religious ... often with great overlap, including crossing back and forth from the social and practical to the more theoretic and abstruse. Certain intellectual roles have remained more or less consistent over the years too, even despite the rise of the mass pr/propaganda/advertising industry a century ago. The responsibility of the intellectuals, as not uncommonly noted, is to tell the truth, especially to the right people at the right place at the right time. And like anyone, they're free to go off and do their own thing.
That's an interesting point. I'm of course eliding over a tricky question, which is what the definition of intellectual is. To me, intellectual means anyone who deals with and believes in the power of ideas, but in practice, naturally, intellectual tends to mean a very particular, often hyper-educated caste.
I just read your piece on Contact, "The Art of Saying Nothing at the DNC". [I couldn't figure out how to comment on Contact, perhaps because I'm not a subscriber, so I'm commenting here.]
I think you overlooked a fundamental point. National presidential nominating conventions are pure theater. They have little to do with substance. And during prime-time, absolutely nothing to do with specifics. They are designed, like high school pep rallies, to get people fired up—and elocutions on policy just don't do that.
Two highly intelligent men I know, who identify as "independents" (one of whom voted for the Libertarian candidate in 2020, and the other who most likely held his nose and voted for Trump (for financial policy expectations)) told me, after Kamala's speech last night, that they would "probably vote for Harris". That's big. And it's not because of her policies, some of which they don't agree with. It's because of her ability to engage them with rhetoric. Think about the Gettysburg Address. There's really no substance there either. It was designed to make people feel proud and hopeful. That's what conventions are supposed to do, and that's what Harris did last night. It was great theater.
Yes, I definitely need to amend a bit of what I wrote there. I was getting a sinking feeling over the first day or two of the convention and that was largely gone by the end. Kamala is a very smooth speaker and so is Walz. I really think she's going to win and that's pretty much all that matters. I do stand by my basic gist from the article, though. Even by the standards of political conventions, this one was unusually anodyne. Kamala, for instance, didn't give a primetime-speaking spot to a young star in the party, she picked someone almost perfectly inoffensive to be the VP, and she didn't articulate much of a platform. The concern is that it IS possible to be too boring in politics - this was some of the problem with the Hillary 2016 campaign - and that can allow the narrative to be seized by the other side.
Intellectuals found themselves aligned, for tactical reasons, to a lot of things that were not, really, their essential pursuits. They were aligned with socialist and communist ideas from the mid-19th century to long after those ideas’ sell-by date. They were aligned with the somewhat stuffy cultural capital projects of the mid-20th century. And, maybe more often than they should, they found themselves opposing democratic movements out of a fear of upsetting their own social positions
As a poet with a first collection newly out, I’m trending back to socialism just to get my work into readers’ hands. Capitalism doesn’t support (high) culture, government does so only desultorily, the Church is more or less dead and other religions waver between open hostility (“no graven images” being sometimes interpreted to prohibit painting/sculpting from life, go figure) and indifference. To paraphrase a fifties era commercial that echoes still in my 21st c brain, what’s a poet (or mother/father for that matter) to do?
Thank you for the comment Patricia. Yes, there's something in there that I really agree with and found not articulated very much - that we're in a mixed system, and we're capitalist in some ways and socialist in others. The arts industry is almost completely socialist, with the benefits and demerits of socialism (it's nice to be freed from capital but, on the other hand, 'equality' is very rarely equal and these various committees tend to end up with way too much power).
Wondering what “arts industry” you’re referring to…for sure I don’t consider US poetry/literature in general an integrated “industry,” though some of us subsist on university salaries and universities are perhaps socialistic enterprises.
Given that you agree that all that really matters is that Harris manages to win, I feel your disappointment :) It was boring, but that was the point, not its weakness. Her speech (and the whole convention) was designed to appeal to undecideds — and to not contain any sound- or video-bites that the opposition could successfully use in their scare ads in swing-states. Granted, the convention won't get youngish or disaffected people to register and vote, but those guys weren't watching the convention anyway.
PS I heard Hillary speak on the Roma issues at Columbia several years ago and was awe-struck by her grasp of the situation and her eloquence. But the problem was, and is, that she's just not charismatic. Harris wisely kept hers in storage until Biden stepped down.
PPS My brother who lives in Ohio told me a story that I find incredibly telling, although I'm not always comfortable telling it, but I will repeat it here: A friend of his was polling people in southern Ohio in 2008 when she went up to a ramshackle house and knocked on the screen door and asked the woman who she was planning to vote for. The woman called back to her husband watching TV behind her, "Hey, Earl, who're we gonna vote for?" After a brief pause, the answer came back, "The nigger."
Similarly—I attended a Dems event in SW Michigan, not far from South Bend IN, while I was living there (so, 2020 election cycle). A big White guy in overalls told some helpful stories about door knocking in local rural communities (where folks don’t answer their front doors, apparently, so he advised going to the back while carefully maintaining a means of quick escape haha)…and we all listened politely to a presentation about Marianne Williamson (then a primary Pres candidate). At the coffee hour, I sidled up to Big Guy and asked who he favored in the primary—feeling certain he’d fall into the anyone-but-Buttigieg category. And…that was a hard nope…he, like me, was Mayor Pete all the way.
That's an amazing story Leslie. It speaks to how effective great politicians really can be - that Obama was able to overcome so much entrenched racism and still build a coalition.
For these posts, I tend to be wearing two hats. In one hat, I'm a loyal Democrat and think that all that matters is electoral success. In the other hat, I'm trying to think from a broader perspective and analyze the dynamics that are going on - and which can be easy to gloss over in the midst of election mania.
Maybe it's just my corner of the Upper West Side, but I still feel like I see at least two or three New Yorker tote bags a day, and sometimes closer to half a dozen. Not as much as Nirvana and "Friends" gear, but a lot. Did they used to be more ubiquitous than that?
Maybe that was clumsy. What I meant was a relic of an earlier time when the New Yorker fit into a whole intellectual “scene.” The New Yorker is like the last institution standing of that world and the tote bag a kind of totem.
OK, I see what you mean. From my perspective the New Yorker tote bag has become almost like the "Coexist" bumper sticker, I hate to use the term "NPC" but looking at who actually tends to carry them it's either proud elderly liberals still spiritually living in the Carter years or very conventional social climbers straining to look savvy in the same way that they might once have worn a T-shirt for a band they didn't actually listen to. I agree that the New Yorker brand regardless of whatever's in the magazine has endured and remains valuable because it conjures up a certain abstract deracinated aura of upscale sophistication that remains sexy to the mass consumer, "totem" is a good word for it.
Tbh the old New Yorker tote bag was of much better quality than those of more recent vintage, which wrinkle (horrors!) when washed. But the New Yorker radio hour ain’t bad on occasion.
Yes I am depressed how even on here how many supposed cultural mandarins would rather listen to metal and watch anime or young adult fantasy, than do the harder work of appreciating Palestrina, Melville, and Miro.
I would argue it's possible to enjoy all these things. That's what makes a contemporary renaissance man
If by contemporary renaissance man you mean a shallow poorly read Philistine fucboi wholly ungrounded in the greatness of western culture from the high middle ages, to high modernism.
In a sense yes that's what I'm saying, but respectfully I don't agree with your idea that just because something is new (say, last 50 years or so) it automatically makes it bad or inferior.
Also don't discount that this type of media is often derivative of the great things that came before (ex. half of Harry Potter is stolen mythology). It can be a access point once people realize it's a shade compared to the source material(s). And I think in a world of creeping anti-intellectualism, that's a good thing, no?
Then there are guys like Ryan Holiday... Daily Stoic. Okay, so he boils down stoicism to little more than daily affirmations. But it leads people to Meditations.
It's like when Lex Friedman was dragged on Twitter for posting his reading list. I don't like the guy, but I respect when someone is trying to improve and become more worldly. The problem with intellectuals has always been upturned noses and gatekeeping.
Yes, they have a reason to feel superior. But I don't think knowledge or enlightenment should be held as some kind of elitist club. Knowledge begets further knowledge....
I will concede some modern pop culture is better than others, i.e. The Talking Heads is better than gangster rap, it's better composed about deeper subjects. But the more I listen to music from the early Renaissance like Palestrina and Dowland the more I think all modern music pales in both complexity and emotional expressiveness.
You're also comparing different genres which can be tricky.
There are lots of very strong compositions coming out of China and Japan these days. They don't have the same timeless quality perhaps but they are quite good on their own merit. The Japanese composers in generally would be more accessible for someone new as they tend to have more repetitive hooks.
It's hard to radically redefine the sounds unless you introduce new instruments... but then it begs the question about whether an orchestra is even an orchestra any longer.
Found this great YT channel a few years ago- there was a video on accordions and orchestrations that you might find interesting... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4eULAsGiWk&t=1s
Again I do think there is modern serious music, certain forms of ambient and classical crossover are innovative and musically interesting, but even that does not really measure up to earlier music at the end of the day. And certainly some metal dude riffing on scales doesn’t.
Upturned noses and gatekeeping are crucial if we don't want to be pigs rolling in cultural slop, as that is easier and appeals to our glandular base instincts. And no this doesn't have to be a class thing, I live on less than 12,000 a year yet I manage to engage in a sophisticated cultural life.
There's a duality here. Some of the smartest people I know are povvos, lol. (Not everything in this world is a function of class.)
Others are raving lunatics on the street corner who think they're smart.
I find your writing compelling so, to put a fine point on it, I put you in the former.
Povvos?
Absolutely a POVO, fuck the rich "cool kids" who have been brain washed to think Beyonce is high culture.
I have a good education from Oberlin College, I could have gotten a high paying sinecure in the government or a woke corporation, fuck that, I hate these rich fucks who think that liking pop culture is signifying being a man of the people. I am literally the opposite of all that.
This is every intellectual's dream scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvr1T1sFvEg
Woot woot! That's a cool scene. I somehow stopped watching The West Wing after Season 2 and didn't get to this. I was working on a campaign and the staffers would watch it obsessively all through the summer, and then the real campaign kicked into gear and I never saw the rest of it....and never went back to it. Funny, I was thinking about The Two Cathedrals like a second ago, before I saw your comment.
Good historical overview, which raises the question: what are intellectuals for? If ideas really are just a source of private pleasure, with no societal benefit, why should intellectual pursuits be considered anything other than an eccentric hobby? Society sponsors athletic and artistic achievement because they offer something to the spectator. If scholars themselves seem confused about whether they are trying to conserve and transmit culture or to subvert it, why would society protect them from the market forces affecting everyone else?
Because quality and truth are important in and of themselves, in the same way we ought not destroy an old growth forest for short term (((profit))).
If we’re being truthful, should we not admit that the desire for short-term gain is a human universal?
Among stupid vulgar people, there has always been a spiritual cultural elite who strives for a more meaningful life.
What I find suspicious is the need to denigrate others in this pursuit of meaning.
Are you seriously going to try to claim that people whol listen to gangster rap or thrash metal are cultured people? That is misplaced populism, hint this cultural debasement was brought to you by capitalism. It isn't really populist to support cultural debasement. And no this isn't about white people, the people of Bali and Java have a sophisticated culture.
Appreciate the debate! For me, I think both things can be true. The essence of intellectual pursuit is ideas for their own sake, which is necessarily not exactly a social activity. However, if in the process of uncovering those ideas, you come across things that may be of benefit to society-at-large then intellectuals have an obligation to enter into the public sphere and to try to get their ideas across.
I think it was that attachment to socialist/communist ideologies, and later on postmodern thought, that set the ball rolling. There's a reason Orwell once said "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." It's one thing to stand above the masses in matters of taste, curation, and intelligence, it's another to lose touch with reality in such a way that you're unable to enact your theories at all, and see life for what it is on a pragmatist's level.
Maybe so. I haven't quite bought into this narrative that postmodern thought precipitated the cultural decline - for one thing, because I'm suspicious that it's as linear as that - but I take your point.
I don't think it's the arch factor that many claim it to be, but it fits more broadly into the idea of losing touch with reality. There's value in picking apart/subverting/deconstructing concepts, but it, much like communism/socialism, has been played to its absolute extremes, to the point where intellectuals and academia have created their own walled garden of incomprehensible pretense that doesn't connect with much of tangible reality. Again, theorizing oneself out of feasibility.
Thank you for writing such a clear explication of a complex subject. Hopefully, we bottom out soon. The cream of the crop are reading dystopian drivel and the classics are vanishing. The average attention span cannot imbibe a New Yorker, let alone 10 minutes of silence.
Yeah, it's really crazy thinking about the kinds of books that were 'popular literature' in the '50s say - Herman Wouk, James Jones, James Mitchener, etc - and the kinds of books that occupy the same niche in the culture now. And then it seems like there's absolutely no room, at least in the publishing industry, for Faulkner, Gaddis, etc.
This is a surprisingly linear narrative from the author of „Against Stories.” 😉 While I think that the position of intellectual culture varies from nation to nation (think France) and that there are some residues not just in „far corners of the web“ (wasn’t part of the 44th President’s appeal that he is, well, an intellectual?), I agree that things get serious when even intellectuals give up cultivating a particular type of sophistication. On the other hand, intellectual influence on politics makes a comeback in disguise, in the form of a) the theorist (a thinker with strong takes that fuel culture wars) and b) the expert (e.g., on climate change). Which is a complicated way to say that what the question of the intellectual comes down to is a) a specific education that isn’t valued as it used to be (cultural capital in decline) and b) a way of thinking that is not functional but instead embraces ambivalence, doubt, even the abysmal. The latter is not only a joy but also crucial for society in an indirect way because it’s the only way to prevent anybody from falling prey to ideologies of all flavors.
To call the 44th president an intellectual is to debase conceptual currency. In the Middle Ages you’d lose a hand for that.
Thank you Dirk. These are really complicated interesting points. I wanted to get into some of this in the post but didn't have space. People like Kissinger and Morgenthau ended up with immense practical political power out of their intellectual backgrounds - and Kissinger in particular can be treated as a kind of case study of the kinds of tensions and dynamics that play out when an intellectual enters into politics. Where political culture seems to have moved to is to have a few fields - economics, in particular - where politicians have an almost superstitious reverence for duly-credentialed intellectual experts but that otherwise (for mass communication, etc) politicians tend to rely on their own instincts. I think some of this is a result of being in a democracy as opposed to some kind of technocracy, which was where for instance the 'enlightened despots' were evolving towards. But, yes, I feel like if I continued with this topic I would lose the linearity of my post. Another reason why 'stories' are a kind of lie and shortcut!
Thanks, Sam. I’d appreciate a follow-up article on the complicated relationship between intellectuals and practical politics. On the one hand, it’s good that intellectuals criticize public affairs regardless of pragmatic considerations if only to stimulate the political imagination. On the other hand, it feels cheap to pretend to know how to cook while avoiding the kitchen’s heat. Therefore, a closer look at intellectuals who entered politics would probably be the most rewarding approach. Still, it’s a very challenging topic: the particular ideology an intellectual represents, the specific political circumstances and windows of opportunity, the human factor, chance, and so much more—no happy ending in sight.
If you are free read Saul Bellows's Ravelstein and summon the ghosts from Saul's long friendship with Allen Bloom one of the champs of the Federalist society. The book is dirgeful as if Bellows was seeking saner words than Bloom spoke, from their whole history? One of Sartres inventions was to say when a body dies their meaning becomes graspable. Well then, Bloom looks to be the hardliner he appeared, because Bellows as the narrator Chick has to worry abt Ravelstein/ Bloom and the book makes friendship look like a job with appntmnts and scheduling to make work.
I enjoyed this very much, but I think the following is far too resigned: “Ideas aren’t really of value for how they contribute to society or advance your own position or anything like that but because, if treated with proper respect, they are a source of almost infinite pleasure within one’s own life.” Personal pleasure is good but not enough. Society must be turned toward the production of culture. Human existence is justified only to the extent we create beyond ourselves. The People need a boot on the neck, said boot to belong to someone who worships intellectuals and puts the vast resources of the mega state at their disposal. Malatesta for the 21st century. Enslave the masses. Rage against the dying of the light.
"Human existence is justified only to the extent we create beyond ourselves." Yes this is the best positive message from Nietzsche.
Hmm hasn’t enough culture been produced for awhile? (Not counting translation which will always be necessary, updating older translations, keeping up with language—in our case English, but eventually languages that have been rescued from oblivion by…umm…mass culture?
)
Yes, there is a battle for ideas, but I suspect the battle for ideas is more about mimetics than the 'best ideas' winning it. I don't mean to be too resigned! - it is important to participate in that battle. But I think no one should be too surprised if intellectuals continue to lose in that field. That doesn't, however, make intellectual activity less worthwhile.
Dear Sam,
Thanks for this fascinating post, and I have an anecdote from a time before the “out-flanking” became as complete as it now is. I’m thinking about a cultural/political moment from the early 1990s. The not-for-profit theater was sponsoring first productions of work that would become “big”, as sources of cultural understanding, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Robert Schenkkan’s Kentucky Cycle. Self-aware artistry was reaching towards the wider society, finding and building audiences for stories from the edges. August Wilson, too, was one of those voices. The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) supported the regional theaters where a lot of that work opened before finding its way to Broadway and was also funding a number of really challenging performance and studio artists. So, the spirit of the day was one of challenge and of “new voices”, some of them really aggravating. Congress was ablaze with demands that the NEA be de-funded, and it was probably only the grace of Jane Alexander and her surprisingly good relationship with Jesse Helms, a key committee chair in Congress, that carried the NEA through.
Anyway, I remember sitting in meetings of policy and funding panels in the Old Post Office digs of the NEA, on the very day when congressional hearings about the Endowment’s choices were going on, and what I was feeling at the time was the “American-ness” of our deliberations: we were funding a regional theater in Johnson City, Tennessee in one moment and a provocative performance artist in another, and then a children’s theater or an ethnic theater, or a puppet theater somewhere. So, the calls to dismantle the NEA seemed to me grotesque in that moment, betraying a lack of confidence in a big American idea of many voices. I personally might regret the spirit that caused an artist to want most of all to outrage a public, but a demonstration of transcendent artistry could keep me on board. We had cultural power, of course we did, but we also had an ethos, I think, to listen to each other and to be open to persuasion. We changed our minds a lot as a result of talking.
Onward to my point: I do see the “out-flanking” you describe, but it seems to have only something to do with elite failure or with tons of own-goals by the intelligentsia and maybe more to do with a set of social choices we’ve made, destroying a sense of shared citizenship and risk. Thus, the foundation for a lot of mutual contempt and of closedness to persuasion. The set of commitments that together make up the “least common denominator” of the American project is surely variable and a product of ideology and actions. We could have done so much better at producing a bigger number.
Greg
Very interesting Greg. I really don't know a lot about the NEA. Would be very interesting to see a real history of the NEA. Curious what the critical turning-points were.
It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen, no-one is walking around with a flashlight in broad daylight looking for an honest politician.
Is there also an element of fragmentation? As mass media allows ever more personalised content choices, we lose a common understanding of what is high culture - and so what is worth the investment of trying to understand?
Yes, I think that's a big piece of it. I read a book - Salon's top authors c.2000, where they were saying that around 1960 everybody knew who the 'top authors' were but it was impossible to do that around 2000. They were trying to make the case that this diffusion was a good thing, and I can see that to some extent. I think we have moved out of the era of a single focal point for national consciousness, but that was always a little artificial anyway - based on some structures within the nation-state - and it's now more about people finding the communities that they wish to speak to and many different communities existing within the same body politic.
It's funny -- because my parents banned TV from our home, I grew up reading intellectuals and fancied myself one, even though I had virtually nothing in common with the (mostly) bourgeois writers I read other than my own intellect. A quality public school and affordable college education kept that illusion alive, and I suppose I followed the fancy far enough, since it led me to a PhD.
But you might say that a lot of PhDs aren't intellectuals anymore, not in the historical sense that you're describing, not as real innovators. Many of my peers were busy slapping Foucault onto any obscure text they could find. I'm sure others are doing that now with Žižek or whoever has succeeded him. It's a different version of the "American Fiction" masquerade. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of smart people, but that articles and books are being churned out to feed a non-monetary market of status. And because I studied at a land grant university, there were rungs on the status ladder that I'd never reach.
So I'm circling back to a question about how to define an intellectual. I think historically an intellectual has been a kind of innovator, someone in conversation with other thinkers who either contributes a new system or who articulates an idea that comes to wield great influence. Typically the time and resources required to produce that kind of innovation meant that intellectuals were either independently wealthy or the equivalent of starving artists -- the kind of figure Willa Cather imagines sacrificing everything on the altar of art.
Perhaps you're right that real intellectualism now means sating one's private intellectual hunger without regard for anything like achievement or real public influence. That is pretty sad to me, because I still think that colleges and universities should be safe havens for people like us. But no one working in higher ed has any time left for exchanging ideas or even for reading deeply. They're too busy completing academic assessments, managing hybrid learning environements, and making a thousand accommodations for their students.
My 12 year old reads quite deeply. She writes beautiful sentences. So there's still hope that literacy has not vanished. But she has not yet entered the "real world," which will quickly disabuse her of her intellectual leanings, if she has any left.
"But you might say that a lot of PhDs aren't intellectuals anymore, not in the historical sense that you're describing, not as real innovators. Many of my peers were busy slapping Foucault onto any obscure text they could find. I'm sure others are doing that now with Žižek or whoever has succeeded him. It's a different version of the "American Fiction" masquerade. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of smart people, but that articles and books are being churned out to feed a non-monetary market of status."
Very sad, and very true. I got a B.S. in Computer Science, and now wish to study somethign else more humanities-oriented for graduate school, but then when I look at what grad schools are churning out (for tenure/research purposes or for "book" purposes), and how you just become a hyper-specialist for other hyper-specialists in your ivory echo chamber, then it feels kind of revolting and a disservice to higher education in general. Like you say, it's for "market of status", so it's not really the fault of the professors, but still quite disheartening. In a weird way, grad school might not be the greatest place to flower intellectually. Which is why my current plan is just to be a freelance programmer for 20 hrs/week, and read maniacally in my spare time on everything from mathematical logic to comparative poetics. But I'm very fortunate to have this skillset in this era of techno-religiosity.
"My 12 year old reads quite deeply. She writes beautiful sentences. So there's still hope that literacy has not vanished. But she has not yet entered the "real world," which will quickly disabuse her of her intellectual leanings, if she has any left."
I have a 20 year old cousin who can run circles around me intellectually, and she gives me hope. She eschewed social media and smartphones as long as she could, but eventually gave in to the "democratizing effects" of online life.
I definitely sympathize with your depression. I hope against hope that some new space is emerging - in beautiful platforms like this one - that are conducive to genuine peer-to-peer inquiry and fall outside of the academic structure, which has its points but is also coercive and hierarchical in many different ways.
Yes, I think there was some fundamental change that happened within our lifetimes, by which the number of people laying claim to 'intellectual space' metastasized. (Maybe this is Turchin's 'elite overproduction' hypothesis, although I haven't read Turchin.) There had been a period of time, say in the Victorian era, where people laid claim to a certain kind of gentlemanly status by reading high-end books and quoting Shakespeare - and they ended up very pretentious and we've been mocking them ever since then. But something happened recently by which an industry developed that claimed to cover all possible questions. This was the liberal arts schools giving out too many degrees and people who had entirely professional aspirations picking up those degrees as a path to credentialing, but without ever really being interested in underlying questions. So a certain type of person would look at the numbers and say, things are great, so many books are being published, so many people have advanced degrees, but somehow intellectual pursuit is as far away from the 'cultural mainstream' than it ever has been.
12 and 13 and 14 yr old women write the most expamsive conversational epics. I will venture a weekend project to show her how high flying you find her sentences. Och, take an essay of hers and record it overtop of say Kirk Douglas in space in Saturn- whatever that camp Douglas space film was called. Maybe she will see the marriage sound/ and sense that called Tennessee williams .
It seems you're mainly referring to upper class and/or academic intellectuals. I think the intellectual situation, or range, has been far broader and also far more fluid, for centuries. Not to be too glib, but there continue to be intellectuals for every occasion, so to speak, whether these intellectuals are activist, or cultural, or scientific, or aesthetic, or philosophical, or working class, or minority, or religious ... often with great overlap, including crossing back and forth from the social and practical to the more theoretic and abstruse. Certain intellectual roles have remained more or less consistent over the years too, even despite the rise of the mass pr/propaganda/advertising industry a century ago. The responsibility of the intellectuals, as not uncommonly noted, is to tell the truth, especially to the right people at the right place at the right time. And like anyone, they're free to go off and do their own thing.
That's an interesting point. I'm of course eliding over a tricky question, which is what the definition of intellectual is. To me, intellectual means anyone who deals with and believes in the power of ideas, but in practice, naturally, intellectual tends to mean a very particular, often hyper-educated caste.
I just read your piece on Contact, "The Art of Saying Nothing at the DNC". [I couldn't figure out how to comment on Contact, perhaps because I'm not a subscriber, so I'm commenting here.]
I think you overlooked a fundamental point. National presidential nominating conventions are pure theater. They have little to do with substance. And during prime-time, absolutely nothing to do with specifics. They are designed, like high school pep rallies, to get people fired up—and elocutions on policy just don't do that.
Two highly intelligent men I know, who identify as "independents" (one of whom voted for the Libertarian candidate in 2020, and the other who most likely held his nose and voted for Trump (for financial policy expectations)) told me, after Kamala's speech last night, that they would "probably vote for Harris". That's big. And it's not because of her policies, some of which they don't agree with. It's because of her ability to engage them with rhetoric. Think about the Gettysburg Address. There's really no substance there either. It was designed to make people feel proud and hopeful. That's what conventions are supposed to do, and that's what Harris did last night. It was great theater.
Hi Leslie,
Yes, I definitely need to amend a bit of what I wrote there. I was getting a sinking feeling over the first day or two of the convention and that was largely gone by the end. Kamala is a very smooth speaker and so is Walz. I really think she's going to win and that's pretty much all that matters. I do stand by my basic gist from the article, though. Even by the standards of political conventions, this one was unusually anodyne. Kamala, for instance, didn't give a primetime-speaking spot to a young star in the party, she picked someone almost perfectly inoffensive to be the VP, and she didn't articulate much of a platform. The concern is that it IS possible to be too boring in politics - this was some of the problem with the Hillary 2016 campaign - and that can allow the narrative to be seized by the other side.
Intellectuals found themselves aligned, for tactical reasons, to a lot of things that were not, really, their essential pursuits. They were aligned with socialist and communist ideas from the mid-19th century to long after those ideas’ sell-by date. They were aligned with the somewhat stuffy cultural capital projects of the mid-20th century. And, maybe more often than they should, they found themselves opposing democratic movements out of a fear of upsetting their own social positions
As a poet with a first collection newly out, I’m trending back to socialism just to get my work into readers’ hands. Capitalism doesn’t support (high) culture, government does so only desultorily, the Church is more or less dead and other religions waver between open hostility (“no graven images” being sometimes interpreted to prohibit painting/sculpting from life, go figure) and indifference. To paraphrase a fifties era commercial that echoes still in my 21st c brain, what’s a poet (or mother/father for that matter) to do?
Argh, no edit button…the first para above is lifted from Kahn’s fine piece, second is my opinion only.
Thank you for the comment Patricia. Yes, there's something in there that I really agree with and found not articulated very much - that we're in a mixed system, and we're capitalist in some ways and socialist in others. The arts industry is almost completely socialist, with the benefits and demerits of socialism (it's nice to be freed from capital but, on the other hand, 'equality' is very rarely equal and these various committees tend to end up with way too much power).
Wondering what “arts industry” you’re referring to…for sure I don’t consider US poetry/literature in general an integrated “industry,” though some of us subsist on university salaries and universities are perhaps socialistic enterprises.
Given that you agree that all that really matters is that Harris manages to win, I feel your disappointment :) It was boring, but that was the point, not its weakness. Her speech (and the whole convention) was designed to appeal to undecideds — and to not contain any sound- or video-bites that the opposition could successfully use in their scare ads in swing-states. Granted, the convention won't get youngish or disaffected people to register and vote, but those guys weren't watching the convention anyway.
PS I heard Hillary speak on the Roma issues at Columbia several years ago and was awe-struck by her grasp of the situation and her eloquence. But the problem was, and is, that she's just not charismatic. Harris wisely kept hers in storage until Biden stepped down.
PPS My brother who lives in Ohio told me a story that I find incredibly telling, although I'm not always comfortable telling it, but I will repeat it here: A friend of his was polling people in southern Ohio in 2008 when she went up to a ramshackle house and knocked on the screen door and asked the woman who she was planning to vote for. The woman called back to her husband watching TV behind her, "Hey, Earl, who're we gonna vote for?" After a brief pause, the answer came back, "The nigger."
Similarly—I attended a Dems event in SW Michigan, not far from South Bend IN, while I was living there (so, 2020 election cycle). A big White guy in overalls told some helpful stories about door knocking in local rural communities (where folks don’t answer their front doors, apparently, so he advised going to the back while carefully maintaining a means of quick escape haha)…and we all listened politely to a presentation about Marianne Williamson (then a primary Pres candidate). At the coffee hour, I sidled up to Big Guy and asked who he favored in the primary—feeling certain he’d fall into the anyone-but-Buttigieg category. And…that was a hard nope…he, like me, was Mayor Pete all the way.
That's an amazing story Leslie. It speaks to how effective great politicians really can be - that Obama was able to overcome so much entrenched racism and still build a coalition.
For these posts, I tend to be wearing two hats. In one hat, I'm a loyal Democrat and think that all that matters is electoral success. In the other hat, I'm trying to think from a broader perspective and analyze the dynamics that are going on - and which can be easy to gloss over in the midst of election mania.