Journal: The New Intellectuals

John Stoehr, arts editor for the Charleston City Paper, has written a rather interesting blogpost on the need for "The New Intellectuals." He rejects the post-modernism that he was exposed to as a student and seems to be pointing to a more "integral" version of philosophy and criticism. The article is long, but it's worth the read.

Stoehr is arguing four broad points:

1. Intellectuals need to talk less with each other and more to everyone else
2. Scientists have taken the traditional place of the public intellectual
3. Intellectuals need to re-establish the self-evident reality of objective truth
4. As newspapers recede, and the traditional hubs of intellectual activity recede with them, a new grassroots movement of intellectuals is needed to take its place.

Here is one indicative passage:

How can we talk about issues, debate points of view, engage in any kind of public conversation if there is no agreement on reality independent of human whim, desire, interest, folly, fear and ignorance? The intellectuals are suppose to talk about our country’s important issues. Instead, for the past 30 years, they’ve turned inward, addressed themselves, left the pulpit to the pundits and undermined our ability to talk coherently, objectively and constructively about the things that matter most.

The failure of the intellectuals, some say, has lead to America’s cultural and political decline. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, noted in a widely read speech to graduates at Stanford University in June that such decline has occurred even as our economy has flourished and renewed itself since the ’60s.

” … surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.”

Gioia continued:

“This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.”

In 1963, the novelist and chemist C.P. Snow wrote a book that provided a vision of just the kind of intellectual transformation that Gioia talks about. It was called “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” a follow-up to his 1959 book “The Two Cultures.” In the first book, Snow talked about the division between literary intellectuals and scientists, how each didn’t understand the other. In the second book, he envisioned a middle way, a “third culture” that was a consensus in which intellectuals talked with scientists, scientists to intellectuals, feeding the expertise and creativity of each other.

But that never happened.

Take a few minutes to read the whole thing -- it's worth the time. Although I have to that it ended abruptly and unsatisfyingly.

Tags: The New Intellectuals, John Stoehr, philosophy, post-modernism, deconstruction, Third Culture