You Otta Be an Intellectual!

No Coberst, you're evading the questions and you know it. I can't reject your answers when you're not answering. I'm simply asking you to show us what being an intellectual looks like in practice, not in theory. That means details and examples. Is that too much to ask for? You might find that I don't disagree with you as much as you think I do.

To put it in the language you profess to speak, I'm asking you to live up to these tenets of Critical Thinking:



This is one of your rare posts where I think there's a chance for genuine dialogue. Let's not waste the opportunity. What are the indications of an intellectually healthy society? What things would you look for to assess whether it has or hasn't been achieved?

Apologies, Coberst. I should have said "uninterested" (as the opposite of passionate). You're right: "disinterested" is a loftier posture. I believe Hegel and/or Kant used the term to characterize artistic appreciation.

JL

I awoke this morning with the thought "Disinterested knowledge is the progeny of passion". Without passion disinterested knowledge and, thus, understanding does not exists.

(The portion of that that was directly pertinent to the questions could have been covered in one-third of the space, but at least it was there! Now we might be able to get somewhere.)

In response to my question



you gave many details about what you look for within yourself. My question had more to do with what kind of hard data you would look for to assess whether the society around you is doing something similar--because unless we are mindreaders, hard data are all we have to go on. The most specific thing you offered is that "intellectuals" read more books. A survey of research libraries by the ARL showed that while total circulation of library materials went down .1% between 1991 and 2004, interlibrary loan went up by 7.2%--an indication not that patrons stopped using their closest libraries, but had need of resources that exceeded their closest libraries. A 2002 survey by the ALA noted that the use of public libraries for educational purposes was still higher than their use for recreational purposes. Do you not find this encouraging? Is it still not enough?

You seemed to agree with Asherman and me that the resources for self-learning are more widespread and more available now than at any other point in history, but you expressed doubt that many people were taking advantage of them. The number you gave as the minimum requirement for a new Age of Enlightenment was "one half of one percent of the population." I'm guessing this number was given somewhat facetiously, but it speaks of your belief that no one is really taking the intellectual life seriously. What is the basis of this belief? As I noted, more students are pursuing Ph.D.s in the humanities than in past decades; the number for science & engineering Ph.D.s dipped down in recent years but still represents a net gain of several thousand from the 1990s (according the the Chronicle of Higher Education). How do you reconcile your view with these phenomena?

As JLNobody suggested, the world is a big place and it would be foolish to think you can grasp the "intellectual tenor" of an entire nation. Things vary from city to city. Is it possible that your outlook on the intellectual sophistication is so bleak because of your locale? Most of your pronouncements about the intellectual capabilities of the average American do not match the people I see around me in my city.

More on the status of college education later...

Shapless

Let me ask a few questions.

Why are you asking these questions? What do you think I am doing and why do you think I am doing it? How long have you been reading my threads and how many threads would you guess that you have read?

Broadly speaking, I ask because I think anyone who purports to make social diagnoses is obliged to provide reasons, preferably in the form of data, for why they make the judgments that they do; I also believe that social diagnoses need to get closer to the data, not further away. But in the immediate context of this thread, I ask because I'm trying to understand how you came to these insights about the thoughts and feelings of the American population. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt that your judgments about the nation's intellectual capacities come from more than just a (pre-)determination to paint as bleak a picture as possible, since it would be a flagrant contradiction of Critical Thinking to begin with the diagnosis and then mold the facts to fit it (what logicians call "confirmation bias"). It is one thing to make claims and judgments about your own life's journey; you do that quite often, sometimes eloquently. But it is quite another to extrapolate this onto "today's men and women."

In short, I am asking of you what any reasonable person would ask of any other reasonable person: to measure your claims against data.

I estimate that I've been reading your threads for about two years. I haven't the slightest idea how many threads I've read total.

To continue where I left off...



What leads you to suspect this? Do you speak from personal experience? Your education may have been like this, but I'd be interested to know why you believe it's endemic to American formal education writ large.



I think it is a mistake to imply that disinterested knowledge will get you to "understanding" faster or more effectively than interested knowledge. Here's a seemingly unrelated but analagous anecdote: shortly after September 11, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said the attacks on the World Trade Center were "the greatest works of art" in the history of mankind. This appalling comment was just the latest in his decades-old quest to achieve pure aesthetic disinterestedness. He was speaking for a generation of composers who believed that true Art came from renouncing all engagement with the world; only by holding oneself above such mundane and worldly concerns like politics--in other words, only by transcending that in which we have invested interests--can we see true Art. It's a compelling illustration, I think, that "disinterested understanding" (like anything else) can be abused. I don't think you disagree with this, but it's a part of the story that needs to be told when you're valorizing disinterested knowledge.



Surely you are not claiming to speak for all, or even many. I don't see how this statement could be made of anyone but the speaker of the statement.



This is quite true. Some weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about students who spend their college careers transferring from place to place, trying to find the perfect fit, as if colleges were outfits. There was an unspoken judgment behind the article, and one that I share: that undergraduates (and their parents) often believe they are entitled to a certain kind of college experience because of the money they pay. There is a certain truth to this, colleges costing what they do these days (my undergraduate institution's current tuition is at an all time high, nearing $42,000 per year). But this is symptomatic of the belief that colleges must do what they can to cater to students, including (but not limited to) matters of grades. As the Chronicle of Higher Education put it in a now-famous piece:



of which I am in total agreement. Thus, when you ask



I would say that one way would be (paradoxically) to discourage the pursuit of post-undergraduate degrees. It would make education at both the undergraduate and the graduate level more meaningful (not to mention help the academic job situation right now, especially in the humanities).



This is a point with which I've wrangled with you before, of course. "Culture" doesn't define anything; people do. By placing the blame on abstract concepts rather than people, you are insuring that you will never get to the root of the problem. It's like blaming crime on "evil." Both are palatable enough to be indisputable, evasive enough to be unfalsifiable, and vague enough to be meaningless as courses of action. You are correct when you say



but without a second step you are doing nothing to help. This is why intellectuals get such a bad rap: they are quick to yell at laymen to take that first step, but they are frequently vague about what to do after that.

Shapless says--"but without a second step you are doing nothing to help. This is why intellectuals get such a bad rap: they are quick to yell at laymen to take that first step, but they are frequently vague about what to do after that."

After schooling is completeed a person must begin the process of becoming an independent thinker capable of making good judgments without the aid of a teacher or any other person. This skill can best be learned by studying Critical Thinking.

Critical Thinking combines the knowledge contained in Logic 101 (a fundamental course in logical thinking) with the proper attitude and intellectual character. These skills, knowledge, and attitudes must be studied by the adult, generally because most adults were never taught Critical Thinking in school.

Let's not confuse education with pursuit of an intellectual life. Education is a wonderful thing, the key to social and economic success in the developed world. It opens doors and piques curiosity while teaching usable skills (not least of which is effective written and oral expression). Literacy is a product of education, and is one of the essential tools for later intellectual development, but it isn't in and of itself an indicator of more than minimal intellectual attainment. A person may read thousands of books and in the end be no more "intellectual" than if they had stopped reading after the comic section. An individual can have a great storehouse of facts and knowledge yet be unable to assemble/re-assemble those into novel insights, useful solutions, or innovative thinking. Pursuit of the intellectual life is something that individuals choose for themselves, and schooling is just one means toward that end.

Cultural expectations aren't something that are directed and dictated by an individual, or policy-making group. Culture is a product of the sum of the historical events and trends experienced by a set. It doesn't matter in the least that a ghetto kid might not know anything at all about history, he will still be a part and expression of his culture. American Culture at the beginning of the 21st century has been greatly influenced by WWII, the "Baby Boom", the Cold War "Balance of Terror", the Civil Rights Movement, the electronic revolution, material abundance and both First Officer and Doctor Spock. Americans made individual choices in their pursuit of happiness, and the result in aggregate was 21st century American Culture. How does one change culture and cultural expectations anyway?

As I mentioned a few days ago, the opportunities for those who choose the intellectual life have never been greater in human history. Those who choose to avail themselves of the opportunities is almost certainly greater in raw numbers, and I suspect even the percentage of the total population choosing the intellectual life is greater today than in the past. It is a fair question to ask if our world is really any better for having more "intellectuals" in it. What, after all do intellectuals produce? The movers and shakers of our world aren't the intellectuals, but the technical engineers, lawyers, and, the least intellectual of all god's creatures, the politicians. Intellectuals have to make a living, just like everyone else. The flock to the universities and tenure, but can be found emptying trash cans, driving taxicabs, designing advertising campaigns, herding cattle, selling farm equipment and preaching. There may even be intellectual hit men for all we know. Some folks make a living in the Arts; writing, painting, sculpting, theater, dancing, singing (Snoop Doggy Dog as an intellectual)… ah umm), but none of those really require practitioners to follow a life dedicated to "dis-interested knowledge". The thing is people are seldom renowned for their intellectual interests, or even what little wisdom they might have acquired along the way. Joe Doaks may gain fame and fortune selling junked cars, and no one will ever know that he spoke a dozen languages, had written two plays and a book on metaphor and myth, or that he was an expert on the theology of the Middle Ages. Doaks epitaph won't probably mention that his appreciation of fine art and music was highly developed, and that he loved books more than buying low and selling high.

What is the point of being intellectual? People avoid suffering and seek pleasure as an antidote to disappointment and pain. Being an intellectual will not keep old age, disease, and loss from the door. Intellectuals aren't any happier, or more content than those who are not. They still put their pants on one leg at a time, and are just as often mistaken in their judgments as Ralph Cramden. In the film Sullivan's Travels, the protagonist is an intellectual film maker who becomes a tramp to insure that his next serious film will be properly researched. He meets a beautiful girl, played by Veronica Lake, and is ready to start writing when he is mugged and ends up on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder as a convict in the Deep South. There he learns that what is really needed isn't another Great American Film with a lot of arty touches and sly insider references, but simple laughter.

Asked for his last words before being hung, W.C. Fields quipped, "on the whole, Id rather be in Philadelphia". Let me paraphrase that, "on the whole, Id just as soon be a happy and contented yahoo with no education and limited mental capacity than an intellectual."

Asherman

It is, as you imply, a matter of values.

Our culture is driven primarily by the value of maximizing production and consumption. Money talks and intellectual values walk.

But of course the culture is not a happening of mother nature like the wind and the rain. Culture is a product of the people living it and primarily it is driven by the ideologies promoted by those who wish the culture to reflect their particular values. Intellectual values are not largely held in a culture dominated by the possession of stuff.

Interestingly (though not always surprisingly), many of the 20th century's most prominent non-American intellectuals emigrated to the United States. Some, like the German community that formed in L.A. in the 1930s and 40s, came out of necessity; others, like the British scientific community that came here in the 1950s and 1960s, came out of choice. Many of them were as vociferous as anyone about the decadence of American "commodity culture." Still, that's where they came.



Quite so. This is why I am skeptical of the neat mapping of "disinterested" onto "intellectual" and "interested" onto "non-intellectual."