How The Intellectuals Lost (Many Times Over)

What Happened To High Culture

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a kind of thought piece. This week I have a piece up on travel writing at the partner site

Inner Life

and a piece on the DNC at Compact Magazine.

Best,

Sam

HOW THE INTELLECTUALS LOST (MANY TIMES OVER)

If you’re the sort of person who’s on Substack, there’s an underlying narrative that you’re almost certainly familiar with and that is baked very deeply into you. The narrative is of ever-unfolding high culture and intellectual attainment. You start early in your life getting as many books as possible crammed into you. The idea is that “the more you read the smarter you’ll be” and then you continue with that essentially indefinitely. You get high grades in school, you attend the best colleges possible, if you’re particularly excellent you go on to graduate school, and eventually you ascend to some position of cultural influence. Some of this structure threads all the way back to Plato’s guardians and then to priestly castes that existed long before that — for the ‘wise,’ as determined largely by the equivalent of their level of education, to rule — and then some of that structure participates in the newer phenomenon of ‘high culture,’ of intellectual attainment continuing well beyond its school applications and leading in the direction of ultimate truth.

We all believe this almost implicitly and we try to instill it in our kids from the earliest possible age, but, if I think about the larger arc of history, what I see is intellectuals taking it on the chin again and again — and to the point, now, where ‘high culture’ seems to a startling extent to be almost wiped off the societal landscape.

It’s not enough here to resort to the obvious stereotypes about intellectuals being impractical eggheads. At different phases of history, intellectuals have wielded astonishing power and influence. The question is what the structures are that in some cases move intellectuals towards the center of the society and in some cases obviate their influence almost altogether.

The most obvious technology that would push intellectuals towards the center of the discourse is literacy — the steady growth of literacy since the pre-modern era and the ability to exert influence, in some cases through wide swathes of the society, through written text. That capability is at the core of intellectuals’ social position and it would seem to almost infinitely enhance intellectuals’ status. The more widespread literacy, the greater the respect and authority for those who have harnessed its inherent abilities.

In that pursuit of social clout, intellectuals have had two ancient enemies. One is illiteracy, which is obvious enough. The other is priestly castes — most famously the Catholic Church — which tended to keep literacy artificially narrow and to reserve authority for received wisdom as opposed to critical thinking. The millennium-long battle of intellectuals from, say, the 12th century renaissance to the present has tended to be directed against these two enemies — with intellectuals pushing constantly for more widespread access to literacy (universal education is the high-water mark) while doing at times violent battle with the priestly castes who are viewed as instruments of regression.

But, over that same period and less noticed, intellectuals found themselves outflanked from several directions.

The greatest single enemy of the intellectual outlook isn’t some Attila the Hun or Torquemada but Francis Bacon. Bacon’s crowning idea was to do things through an organizational structure in which personal attainment as well as the search for higher truth were deemphasized. What mattered was the ability to contribute to the task at hand, and to have managerial types who could be swapped into leadership roles but without one person ever being in any way indispensable. As Thomas Macauley wrote of Bacon, “The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man…Bacon fixed his eyes on a mark which was placed on the earth and within bow-shot and hit it in the white.” What he set up, in other words, was the philosophy behind companies. This wouldn’t necessarily seem to set him at odds against intellectuals — one of my favorite people, the 19th century writer Delia Bacon, came up with a madcap theory attempting to prove that Shakespeare and Francis Bacon were the same person and that some kind of union of the humanities was possible — but as time went on the distinction became more apparent. Baconianism could benefit from widespread literacy, from the gospel of universal education, but the purpose always was to form tight organizations for the sake of material amelioration, as opposed to the essential task of true intellectuals, which is to pursue truth and expression for their own sake.

The next outflanking of intellectuals came, probably, from the direction of the popular democratic movements that intellectuals had been so influential in orchestrating. To a great extent, the American Revolution and French Revolution were intellectual activities — through people like Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the gentlemanly Founding Fathers — but democracy, famously, has a certain anti-intellectual character. Elections (this is why ancient people were very wary of elections) have a tendency to play to the least common denominator. Tocqueville— famous for his enthusiasm about early America — actually, in 1840, delivered his parting valediction for the US with the following: “I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve around themselves without repose procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” One of the more subtle disputes in American history is between the ‘republican’ vision of America, which retained authority with a small number of highly-educated gentlemen and the ‘democratic’ strain, which finally prevailed in the era of Jackson and which tended to obviate intellectual attainment in fovor of a more crowd-friendly style of mass communication. For people like Tocqueville and Sinclair Lewis, the result was a constrictive conformity. For D.H. Lawrence and for the modernists who shared his way of thinking, it was this democratizing that was the catastrophically wrong turn and which produced a kind of majoritarian dictatorship.

Alexis de Tocqueville. Unimpressed.

The next and more obvious outflanking was the Industrial Revolution, which can be thought of as a time-bomb set in place by Baconianism. The Industrial Revolution signaled the triumph of capital and the marketplace, of people who had the organizational capacity for large-scale manufacturing, and authority tended to fall on anybody (inventors, engineers, efficiency experts, etc) who was capable of making stuff. By the way, The Man Without Qualities — at least the Arnheim sections — is basically about this tension; the difficulty that intellectuals (like Ulrich) have in accommodating themselves to manufacturers who seem to have no particular personal qualities whatsoever but nonetheless accrue great wealth and social status.

Starting around the middle of the 19th century, intellectuals responded to the challenge of capital and industrialization by adopting, virtually en masse, socialist and communist positions. For whole generations of intellectuals, the temptation proved irresistible — to envision a future, which would first be worked out in theory and then applied systematically to rectify the injustices of industrialization. That sort of sentimental attachment in the end put intellectuals on the wrong side of history, as it were, and resulted in their discrediting in so many Western countries. If intellectuals could as a group so ignore the obvious evidence of Communism’s failings, what that tended to mean was that intellectuals tended to rely on shaky epistemological ground — and it was better to rely either on more ‘scientific’ models of economic development or on more hard-nosed practical political types.

Intellectuals took another blow with the development of mass entertainment technology, which rode in on the back of the Industrial Revolution. If, for centuries, the most effective means of cultural transmission were the book, the song, the painting, etc, intellectuals found themselves in an attractive cultural position. All those forms were conducive to highly-educated individuals with a great deal of personal attainment, who found themselves with an ability to communicate their ideas sometimes very widely. But the successive development of photography, film, radio, and television created mass technology that seemed to point in a very different direction from intellectual attainment: the premium was placed, first of all, on an organizational ability to harness complicated and sometimes-expensive technology; and, secondly, on an ability to disseminate one’s work as widely as possible, which tended to conflate with the same democratizing spirit that intellectuals had started to find uncomfortable in the 19th century.

Another blow came from the development of a rhetoric of mass communication. I think we have a tendency to underestimate how powerful and distinct of a form this is. The new technological forms all had their own quirks to them, and the people who excelled did so by finding certain formulae that tapped very deep into the brain stem. In the case of advertising, this was by dint of repetition and suggestion; in the case of radio through a certain soporific coziness that, interestingly, could interweave with provocation as in the Limbaugh model; in film, through archetypal story structures; in television, through gimmicks like cliffhangers and sentimental attachment to characters. And, at the same time, democratic politics came to be dominated by those who had mastered the new technological mediums. Nowhere, in a century of mass communication, did intellectuals — with the exception of a handful of high-end film directors and some somewhat embarrassing ‘intellectual’ talk shows — succeed in anything like mass appeal.

If, in the 19th century, part of being a ‘gentleman’ required having a certain degree of educational attainment, participation in an elite class in the mid-20th century similarly required at least a passing familiarity with ‘high culture.’ You were sort of supposed to have read the ‘great books’ in school, prior to thoroughly forgetting them, and to least look at arts sections of newspapers before flipping back to sports. It’s very interesting to watch, say, early Woody Allen movies and to see how deeply affected he was by the reigning high culture. Great educational uplift projects — Leonard Bernstein’s classical music lectures, Mortimer Adler’s Great Books collections, etc — were based on the assumption that a rising middle class would necessarily need to familiarize itself with high culture. This was the premise that the leading writers of the era, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, etc, toyed with and satirized throughout their careers. The idea was so baked in to the culture that Bourdieu developed a sort of pseudo-science out of it with his theories of cultural capital.

Pierre Bourdieu. Snob.

But, as it turned out, cultural capital was largely built on a house of cards. What David Brooks was describing with the ‘bobo’ was the easy peeling away of the underlying premise of ‘cultural capital’ in the last decades of the century. There just was no need to read a lot, or use a lot of fancy terms. Cultural attainments didn’t help you mark out status as part of a Bourdieuian cultural elite; they just made you weird and pretentious. Better, instead, to watch the same TV shows as everybody else and listen to the same music as everybody else and advance your social capital simply by having more money.

Now that we’re deep into the ascendance of bobo-ism, the adornments of high culture have all but disappeared — with a New Yorker tote bag fast becoming something like a saint’s relic, while real intellectuals have become more or less an endangered species hidden in the far corners of the web. I’ve been going through a little bit of a shock to the system recently realizing how extensive this really is — youth culture is almost completely non-literate, business culture is resolutely bobo, mass media is avowedly middle-brow, and even the ostensible paladins of high culture, publishers and critics, etc, have openly declared that what they are interested in are market forces. The new ‘high-brow’ style seems to be about being as low-brow as possible — that’s what something like Fuccboi is; and what American Fiction satirizes.

It’s all very depressing, but, I suppose — because you have to bottom-out somewhere —I should try to find this liberating. 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. With ‘the life of the mind’ stripped away of almost all social capital, those who are interested in this sort of thing are at least free to pursue it for its own sake — because, fundamentally, almost everything gets kind of boring; and because 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.