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February 7 - March 24, 2024
Wolfe committed in this article both the ontological error of thinking that the question who won the presidential election in Florida is of the same order as the question how many telephone jacks I have in my office and the epistemological error of thinking that to deny that something is knowable is to deny that it exists.
E. L. Doctorow argued that if Clinton was impeached and tried, it would mean a rebirth of Puritanism. He was wrong, just as the public intellectuals at the other end of the political spectrum were wrong to predict that the president's acquittal would usher in a new era of depravity.
A new era of depravity ?
"a vote against impeachment is not a vote for Bill Clinton. It is a vote against bigotry. It's a vote against fundamentalism. It's a vote against anti-environmentalism. It's a vote against the right-to-life movement."129 I am sure he made other such statements, but, to sound a frequent note in this book, it is difficult to retrieve a public intellectual's broadcast statements.';'
This is not well known; and (a closely related point) public intellectuals do not lose their standing in the public-intellectual market when their predictions are falsified by events. No one is keeping score. This
Public intellectual predictions that fail don't count
A public intellectual can be cast into the outer darkness for taking a politically incorrect position, in other words for offending people, but not for being wrong.
Yet his declaration that "the decade of the 1970's represents the last chance for both conservation and for man"" must have been made when he was feeling optimistic, because in an interview published the same month he said, "We're dead and we don't know it yet."14
This equivocation may be related to what philosophers call the "fallacy of induction," which is the tendency to generalize from past to future without an adequate theoretical basis. If pollution is growing, it is predicted to continue to grow until we're all dead; if government is growing, it is predicted to grow until capitalism gives way to socialism;
[We are] a society in which most of the population is treading water, the bottom is sinking, and the top is rising."24
As recently as 1996, with the U.S. economy booming, he wrote: "The facts are clear. Income and wealth inequalities are rising everywhere. Real wages are falling for a large majority. A lumpen proletariat unwanted by the productive economy is growing. The social contrac...
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Nor is there any sign that "the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government" or that "the entire complex of prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities"
One can imagine public intellectuals' predictions being treated similarly, as scientific hypotheses to be tested empirically and rejected if they flunk. They are not so treated. They are not tested.
people are uncomfortable being in a state of doubt and therefore dislike having their beliefs
nothing is more reassuring, so far as the felt soundness of one's beliefs is concerned, than to find an intelligent, articulate person who shares them and is able to make arguments and marshal evidence for them better than you yourself could do and thus arm you to defend them better if challenged, as well as to still your own doubts.
It is hard to think of a dictatorial regime brought down by ideas, other than religious ideas, rather than by material circumstances such as war, political infighting in the governing class, corruption, or economic failure.
The USSR? Read Solzhenitsyn
Congress)-their efforts, in short, to shape public opinion through their public rhetoric.
Singer ignores
the affinity between animal protection and the Nazis' celebration of Darwinism and their elevation of instinct over intelligence, barbarism over civilization, cruelty over compassion, struggle over peace, and the natural and the rooted over the humanistic and the cosmopolitan. The
The revolt against postmodernism
battens on postmodernism. The rise of the conservative public intellectual owes much to the "counterculture" of the 1960s.94 A
Much of what I try to do in this book is simply to place the public-intellectual market in perspective by showing that, and why, its average quality is low ("disappointing") and perhaps falling.
The problem with being a public intellectual is you get more and
more public and less and less intellectual.2
Although about two-thirds of the public intellectuals in Table 5.5 are politically to the left, the average number of citations to the left-leaning and to the right-leaning public intellectuals is very close.
65 percent of the publications weighted by volume are left-leaning.
The two-thirds preponderance of left-leaning public intellectuals suggests that the market for public-intellectual work is primarily a left-wing market, which is consistent with one's general impressions about the political leanings of highly educated people who take an interest in public affairs,
The heavy overrepresentation of Jews among prominent public intellectuals is no doubt related to their overrepresentation in the media and in academia,
An academic who wants to succeed as a public intellectual might be well advised to substitute government service for additional scholarly publications!
If there is discrimination of
the sort suggested earlier, it appears to be weak. There is, as I expected, no indication of political discrimination.
The large sample is therefore dominated by public intellectuals who can fairly be described as obscure to the popular media, especially when correction is made for characteristics such as government service that might propel some of them to public attention.
marked by a Heideggerian despair at the increasingly technocratic organization of society.4 We'll encounter that theme, a public-intellectual staple,
The aestheticist's slogan is Wilde's dictum, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
The difference between the moral value of such works and that of the late novels of Henry James is the difference between sympathy (or compassion) and empathy.24 James's
Steiner is well aware that few people nowadays are interested in works of high culture and that there is no evidence that force-feeding the populace, even the educated populace, with such works would yield any social, political, or moral dividends.
her observation misses the essential point-that the cultural sophistication of the Gymnasium-educated upper and upper-middle class of Germany, including the judiciary and the professoriat, did not inoculate the members of that class against participating, often with passionate enthusiasm, in the Nazi system.
to show that James rejects any notion of hereditary aristocracy "by insisting repeatedly that it is material conditions, conditions that can be changed, that make the difference in thought."36
There is a superficial primness to Henry James, a function of a personal and a prose style easily misunderstood. But he was a great artist, and his vision was aesthetic rather than ethical.
when political criteria are imposed on literature, the list of canonical works that emerges (Maurice, Native Son, Uncle Tom .c Cabin, and so forth) is mediocre (preachy, dreary, banal, sentimental, implausible, poorly written), making readers wonder-if this is the "best" literature, why bother with literature at
To say that Shylock is an ogre grates on modern sensibilities. But to an Englishman of Shakespeare's time a Jew was almost a mythical being. The Jews had been expelled from England by Richard the Lionheart in the thirteenth century, and though there were a few Jews in London in Shakespeare's time, they were hardly a regular part of the city's
Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright, and there is an actor's adage that no man is a villain in his own eyes. To play a villain convincingly, the actor must play him from the inside, must make him appear to us as he appears to himself. It is much easier to do this if the playwright has given the villain self-exculpatory speeches.
There is a certain naivete in the idea that a person can't be a real villain unless he's 100 percent a villain. It is an aspect of the fallacy that I mentioned in Chapter 2 of exaggerating the degree to which an individual is a unity. We should not be surprised that Hitler loved children and animals, or Shylock his wife.
