The Intellectual Crash of 2009

[babylonsister]

The Intellectual Crash of 2009

by Lee Siegel

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As a result of our yapping, endlessly banal, issue-dominated culture, the intellectuals, who work with ideas the way a Realtor works with property, are out of work. No wonder we are surrounded by the Limbaughs, and the Coulters, and the Jim Cramers, the buffoon-priests who preside over the ongoing national game of issue ping-pong. Lacking ideas to grab our attention and make us focus, the intellectuals have given way to ranters, abusers, and screamers, who have the effect of both grabbing our attention and freeing us from having to pay attention.

Of course, no one should blame the intellectuals for not being able to grasp our fathomless economic mess. An old joke went that only two people in history understood Hegel, and even they misunderstood him. Well, the only people who understand the present crisis are economists and tax lawyers, and even they misunderstand it. I have seen award-winning poets and novelists nearly reduced to tears trying to comprehend the relationship between mortgage-backed securities and recession.

Still, the question remains whether we are really the worse off because of the superannuation of ideas and of the people who have them. Not necessarily.

Ideas drove the various responses to the economic calamities of the 1920s—the result was totalitarian ideologies on the left and the right and the annihilation of tens of millions of people, all in the name of one idea or another. The Cold War provoked an incredible intellectual ferment, not just in political rumination, but in every area of culture, from the postwar novel to abstract expressionism, yet that conceptually heated atmosphere also created paranoia across the political spectrum, as well as an endless cycle of payback and score-settling. And the rifts produced by the idea-besotted '60s continue to bedevil us.

Yeats might have been right when he wrote that “an intellectual hatred is the worst.” We, on the other hand, are not in the grip of inflexible principles and unwavering obsessions; we are not motivated by unexamined emotional wounds that have disguised themselves as ideas. We (extremists not included) apply ourselves to the facts as they arise, with a (relative) minimum of conceptual bias. That does not seem to have made our public life less polarized, but at least it is keeping it peaceful and (relatively speaking) civil.

There are dangers, though, that accompany our idea-impoverished condition. Ideas don’t just make sense of reality; they keep our perception of it clear. With the intellectuals off the job, gross distortions of our condition and its broader context may well multiply the way crime would increase if all the cops were let go.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-25/the-intellectual-crash-of-2009/full/