THE WAR AGAINST THE INTELLECT
Episodes in the Decline of Discourse
Peter Shaw
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989
201 pp., $22.50
Peter Shaw's new book reminds us of just how much - and not for the better - the academy has changed since the American poet Randall Jarrell published A Sad Heart at the Supermarket in 1962. The title essay of that book, which lamented American democratic culture's assault on the life of the intellect, expressed a theme familiar to generations of somewhat snobbish academics. That this culture is chronically hostile, or at best indifferent, to the life of the mind, to rigorous standards of proof and demonstration, and to high culture, had been argued at least since Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It had served as the bread and butter complaint of American intellectuals until the 1960s. Jarrell differed form many others only by the moving elegance with which he articulated the problem, and by his unusual sympathy with the plight of the unlearned.
American culture still adheres in some measure to its gut anti-intellectualism, despite the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Education Association's (NEA) efforts to turn it into a friendly, lap-dog admirer of esoteric art and thought. About all that has been accomplished so far is to make democratic culture mildly guilty about its shortcomings of taste. Why this should be necessary is not self-evident, except form the standpoint of the class interest of the intellectuals, a not insignificant matter in an age when the public treasury is expected to pay for many of their products, through public grants, university salaries, and so on. In any event, the vulgarity of mass culture's reservations about intellectuals has always been tempered by its rugged honesty, and even by its grudging admiration for excellence of all kinds, including, at times, that of the eccentric thinker. Certainly it has never been a mortal enemy, if only because it never engaged the intellectual in his hearth and home, the search for truth. Such a search might appear foolish to many, but if fellows want to be foolish, well, it's a free country.
Today we live in a world turned upside down. American democratic culture may still, as Tocqueville thought, admire breadth and superficiality over depth and comprehensive understanding, practical and useful knowledge over knowledge of its own sake. Still, it would be difficult for mass culture not to admire the glittering world of scientists and humanists, with all their self-congratulatory awards and self-promotion. Most Americans, it is probably safe to say, envy the intellectual far more than they despise him.
Nevertheless, as Peter Shaw demonstrates, intellectual life is more seriously threatened now than at any time in the recent past, but not by its old "enemy," the common man. Today it is threatened by the intellectuals themselves. Because the source of that threat is internal, and because it no longer focuses on the life-style of the intellectual, but upon his standards of judgment - upon any standards of judgment - this time the threat is mortal.
Shaw demonstrates how, in the sixties, historians and literary critics began to ignore commonly accepted standards of proof in order to
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