In Defense of Intellectuals

There are a few things that if bashed or lauded by a writer will convince many readers who identify themselves as conservative or traditional values or libertarian that the author is hitting the mark [ditto for Left-liberal readers, but that is not my subject]. These then allow their minds to go into neutral, accepting as essentially right whatever else is presented. The more skillfully sophist authors know this and play their cards to tap the gullible audience. Others fall into it accidentally. The least aware group seems not to know that it taps into unexamined beliefs and associations to draw support and thus believes it is popular due to being correct.

In the article "How the Intellectuals Took Over (And What To Do About It)," David Gerlernter plays a pair of such clichés that certainly must have been successful in riling readers right into thinking he makes perfect sense, which makes it more likely they will have swallowed his main analysis. First, he trots out the worn chestnut quipped by William F. Buckley for decades around the country. I heard it in Tennessee in the early 80s, the audience slurping it up even when he slurred the state as one in which reading was a rarity; I suspect the imitation posh-English accent helped do the trick. I would rather be governed, said the sage, by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculties of Harvard and MIT.

We all know what he means: collectively, academics, in especially socially prestigious institutions, are the source of every imaginable insanity [for example, Princeton professor Peter Singer, a long time defender of infant euthanasia who now advocates bestiality as morally preferable to raising animals for food] that is eventually made mainstream through teaching and publishing. The problem is that the average citizens of Boston are already onboard with most of it. Remember, they re-elect Teddy Kennedy with wide majorities; they love Barney Frank.

In short, with exceptions for a vote here and there for some Irish Catholic of the Cardinal O’Connor school, the citizens of Boston are very much what their forebears were throughout the nineteenth century: proud political supporters of the day’s cultural Loony Left and government centralizing do-gooders. Until Buckley and his crowd start highlighting their idea by saying they would rather be governed by a random drawing of 2000 people from the Warren County, Tennessee phone book or from the rolls of the Sons of Confederate Veterans or from the parents of Wyoming Future Farmers of America students than by the Harvard and MIT faculties, I cannot but see the chestnut as being little more than Yale snob oneupsmanship played against Harvard and MIT snobs.

Gerlernter’s second cliché is tied to the chestnut: a general shot at intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism has always thrived in America; Richard Hofstadter and H. L. Mencken are but a pair of the countless thoughtful men to have commented on American anti-intellectualism. My assessment is that it derives primarily from the Reformation; immigrants brought the most populist clichés of the era and left behind many of the traditions that ameliorated them in Europe. Martin Luther labeled reason ‘the Devil’s whore’ and smeared the chief intellectual of his day, Erasmus, with uninhibited gusto. Anabaptists, the direct or indirect spiritual heirs of hundreds of thousands who immigrated to North America by the nineteenth century, were usually the illiterate and functionally literate led by the unread (except for the Bible), all of whom tended to see nefarious seductions in any non-Bible learning not directly banausic. Anglo-Saxon Puritans were not significantly more supportive of learning than Anabaptists and were perhaps more stridently materialistic.

Ben Jonson in both The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair savages the militant ignorance and self-righteous greed of too many Puritans. Milton stood out like a sore thumb in Puritan ruled England, which was a veritable Athens compared to New England; Milton would not have seemed unique in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, among men such as Spencer, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne. The learning among the elite in Episcopalian churches was decidedly class driven, leaving the lower orders to accept their ignorance as their mark of belonging to their class. Though widely maligned by their English rulers as being necessarily uncultured provincials or worse (Protestant versions of what many Anglo-Saxons were certain to be the Catholic sub-humans in those Celtic lands), Scottish and Irish Presbyterians tended to focus on learning, and not merely learning to recite Bible verses, but many of their charges had jumped ship by the close of the American Revolution to the more emotional, openly anti-intellectual Protestant denominations.

The result of this intellectual-religious heritage: A common hostility to the truly well educated that rarely has been dampened unless the masses have seen how the learning contributes to wealth or power. Americans historically have seen, and continue to see, the intellectual as either a wastrel or an infidel. Gerlernter merely rehashes this prejudice for today’s audience. He is likely confident that most people who know that something is wrong in the corridors of American education will swallow his view just as the same folks nudge one another with uncritical glee when hearing Buckley’s chestnut.

An intellectual is nothing more than a person who is well read and attempts to use his intellect, his reasoning from a depth and breadth of knowledge, to comprehend. The intellectual strives to know from logic and study rather than to decide based on emotion and/or personal experience. The intellectual believes that one must attempt to master knowledge before affirming; he reflects. The anti-intellectual assumes that whatever he knows is all he needs to know to be as competent to address an issue as anyone else, and he often responds in such a way as to indicate that he believes only the class-tainted (or race or sex tainted) would say his knowledge is limited.

Those who know the contemporary academy will know that it features few true intellectuals, at least who are willing to show themselves. To know, for example, Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil (and/or Aquinas, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Vico, Dostoevsky, and Yeats) and to assert the importance of knowing them, the impossibility of being educated while not knowing something of the ideas of most of them, is to be an intellectual. To denounce the dead white men, except for those like Marx who were overtly anti-Western, and replace the study of their works with those of the latest fashionable lesbian or black rage-oholic is to be anti-intellectual. And it is that equally anti-Western and anti-Christian (and anti-Southern) anti-intellectualism that is utterly hegemonic in contemporary academia.

Gerlernter is wrong from the get-go. The intellectuals of the Left (pre-conversion Eugene Genovese is a prime example) took over virtually nothing and kept that only briefly; the anti-intellectual Leftists, a postmodernist horde of marauding Vandals, Huns, and Mongols tossing priceless monastery manuscripts into the pools of blood, have wrested control of American education, journalism, popular culture, and significant power centers in both major political parties, calling their work progress, diversity, and tolerance.

As he eschews intellectuals, it comes as no surprise to me that Professor Gelernter fails to recognize any of this. His lack of historical vision compromises his case early on. "It is generally agreed,’ he asserts, "that our big national change happened in the 60s." That is only superficially true, as the intellectual would sense if not know. The moment the unaware man notices the half-grown oak is not when the change happened. The changes grew slowly and naturally from several causes, with professors in place at various schools watering and waiting for the fruition. John Dewey’s educational and philosophical ideas, which permeated America in somewhat diluted form by mid-century, were indispensable.

In God’s Funeral, A.N. Wilson reveals how deeply imbedded in Victorian consciousness was the sense of loss of God and thus absolute values, which spurred changes in education and culture. Increasing numbers of immigrants from central and eastern European communities devoted to centralizing government and education to provide collective weight against traditional values and rulers, clerical and secular, cannot be omitted; the first sizeable such group, Germans fleeing the failed 1848 revolution, may have elected Lincoln and seem to have been led by men who grasped the situation as one in which their communistic ideas could thrive and take American root (thus it is no anomaly that Karl Marx was an ardent supporter of the Union war effort, nor that the Marxist and socialist idealists who fought for the Spanish Republicans dubbed themselves The Lincoln Brigade).

Peter Gomes’s widely praised bestseller The Good Book features a persuasive case that every imaginable Leftist social and moral change derives from the way antebellum northern liberal churchmen, particularly those part of the Abolitionist movement, privately interpreted their Bibles before demanding public policy changes spawned from those private interpretations. Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences locates the source of twentieth century moral philosophical quagmires as Medieval nominalism, which in his fine recent study Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death Richard Marius calls, "the deconstruction of its age."

Gerlernter ‘proves’ that intellectuals are inherently bad by noting two groups: First, the circle of artists around Picasso in Paris; Second, the Depression era Trotskyite Partisan Review crowd in New York City. "There is scant love lost in either group," he inveigles, "for organized religion, the military, social constraints on sexual behavior, traditional sex roles and family structures, formality or fancy dress or good manners, authority in general."

The linking nudges readers to view artists, this group better described as aspiring and pseudo-intellectuals than as intellectual artists, as one would view Marxist revolutionaries that are intellectual primarily in the limited sense that they ponder long and hard the works of Marxists. It also tells us that Gerlernter sees as roughly equal to societal decay the flaunting of traditional Christian views of sexual responsibility and the failure to dress formally. I know many farmers, factory and construction workers, and growing numbers of computer programmers who despise wearing ties and suits, or the female equivalents, and would laugh at the Ivy Ivory Tower spokesman who believes such nonsense. Gerlernter’s equations would persuade most of them that their disrespect for the professoriat as ranging from ultra Leftist to well-meaning but out of touch and often condescending is well founded.

I will take much of my stand with a group of intellectuals contemporary with the NYC Trotskyites: the Southern Agrarians, a group that included both scholars and literary artists. In addition to those who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand, the agrarian manifesto for local, traditional values, including economy as self-sufficient as possible (foremost among whom are John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Frank L. Owsley, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Stark Young), are intellectuals associated with them such as Caroline Gordon and Cleanth Brooks. Not only were these intellectuals and artists decidedly conservative in terms of traditional values espoused, conservative in its best and purest sense of honoring place and patrimony together, but most were conservative religiously at least late in life, and those who were not were fully respectful of the centrality of orthodox Christianity and its moral teachings to Western civilization. Their direct philosophical heirs include Richard Weaver, Melvin Bradford, Madison Jones, and Wendell Berry.

Gerlernter plays on common American anti-intellectualism to make an obvious case: that the contemporary world of higher education is well nigh hopeless. With that I concur wholeheartedly. With Gerlernter’s specifics I disagree almost equally. Gerlernter rightly notes that the "prestige colleges" of the northeast set standards aped by schools in the rest of the nation. He also rightly notes that this trend-setting historically has had little to do with knowledge and intellectual excellence. Rather, it is, which he does not state, essentially a pattern of bowing to the academic examples of the winning region from the War Between the States, particularly bowing to its mandarin class.

That aside, Gerlernter’s view that whatever gets ensconced in the Ivys will be aped throughout the nation is certain. What he defends in the ‘old Ivys’ should at least irk anyone capable of reflection. "The goal of the fancy colleges used to be to civilize the undergraduates," the professor says, "which involved a certain amount of teaching and a large amount of socializing, domesticating, and attitude-inculcating." Observe that this civilizing comes but incidentally from classroom assignments; the bulk is social. These schools, he notes with approval, were once focused on training the children of the wealthy to be the next generation of wealthy gentlemen and ladies; their faculty members were hired as much by social ties as anything else: elite college students in the good old days were "mainly the richest, not the smartest; on the faculty, social connections used to be as good a criterion for tenure as any."

Query #1: Is it not at least a smidgen hypocritical, or perhaps just plain selfish, to praise ‘higher education’ that is primarily ‘social civilizing’ for the (preponderantly northern) English and German descended Protestant rich while utterly condemning ‘higher education’ of today that is largely ‘social civilizing’ for Marxist and postmodernist ‘diversity’ goals?

Query #2: Is not anyone who believes that positive, lasting ‘civilizing’ derives best or most easily from the domesticating socializing of wealthy youth rather than from serious study of the great artifacts of civilization perilously close to the inanities of Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart?

At this point I think of Faulkner’s Gowan Stevins, an ineffectual alcoholic notoriously proud of having attended UVA (the South’s state university version of Ivy), where he learned to drink like a gentleman. Similar to the non-wealthy students at the old Ivys praised by Gerlernter, the smart, hard-working student from a non-genteel background at the UVA of Faulkner’s imagination would not have fit in socially; he would be too far behind in the rituals demanded by those running the exclusive country clubs and debutante balls. Upper crust social fitting, not academic excellence, is the name of that game.

What Gerlernter fails to recognize in his lamentation for the old system of using elite colleges to grant superficial, social sanction to the next generation of silver spoon kids ready to inherit power is that such a stand places him against, say, the Jude Fawleys. Hardy’s hero desires desperately to go to university to master knowledge so that he can serve as minister for Christ, but his family station precludes that. The university world is for the class of English gentlemen, which group is defined by title and money. Jude does not fit socially, and thus his knowledge and his desire to work academically mean zilch in a world operating to prepare the sons of the wealthy and powerful to inherit the rule of the nation economically, politically, and spiritually. He writes to numerous professors at Christminster asking advice; only one bothers to answer: to advise him to stick to his manual laboring class.

Is it any wonder that so many of the brightest and hardest working of Britain’s non-genteel classes jumped onto Leftist political bandwagons? If your education system is an aristocracy of birth rather than of merit, you will guarantee that those of merit lacking the birth qualifications will eventually fight you.

Perhaps Gerlernter fails to see any of this because he is driven by his thesis: the old style elitist colleges were not ruled by postmodernists and Marxists; therefore, they were ideal or so close that we should idealize them. An intellectual would not rest on such superficiality. He would recognize the problems. In fact, he should grasp that the socially exclusive system itself creates revolution from the Left. He also would see that the new system of admitting students and hiring and retaining faculty is nearly identical to that of the old Ivys, with the chief exception that the elite has been altered. The children of the rich and powerful still attend the elite colleges even when they are poorly prepared academically, but now the ‘elite corps’ in those schools includes those who meet Affirmative Action quotas euphemistically dubbed goals.

And the Jude Fawleys are still denied entrance far too often. With the slots taken by the scions of the rich and the scions of government mandated lowered standards, there is precious little room for the capable sons of what we hill Southerners call ‘just folks.’ Those intelligent people lacking either social elite ties or government preferences attend colleges with less prestige and eventually realize that the average dullard with an Ivy degree will always be accepted as better educated and qualified that he is. In desperation, some of them will sidle up to Left-liberal politics, seeing that as preferable to continuing a system of elitism by wealth and social registry.

Those inclined to believe that the old system protected the good while refuting the bad need only ponder the significance in this: the horrors in contemporary academia arose in the midst of the old system. The revolution that has culminated with anti-intellectual Leftism wielding hegemony bubbled up from within. It happened, I submit, for two reasons primarily: 1) because the old system was largely unintellectual (which differs from anti-intellectual) it was intellectually hand-tied and failed to perceive the threats fully; and 2) the old elite professors came from the class of those who had embraced various trendy Leftisms in the northeast and upper midwest from antebellum times on.

If you are faced with an intellectual enemy, you are a fool if you settle for an intellectually lazy or minimally competent but socially preferable defender. If history suggests that the people of a region, nationality, or ethnicity are prone to lead or follow the Leftist absurdities and government centralizing and expanding tyrannies of their eras, you are a fool to believe that group will save you from the next round of Leftism.

And that brings me back to the Agrarians. In his biography of Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Blotner notes that the Vanderbilt version of the old Ivy social-class elite professors were quite hostile to the young Agrarian intellectuals. It was a combination of unintellectual inability to comprehend and class/generation hostility. I have heard it expressed by professors of the old school type of academic conservatism. The most quintessentially snide was mouthed by a long-since retired, old school academic conservative Ivy League PhD, descended from both New York patroons and Texas oil millionaires, laughing that anyone would take seriously the ideas of a man like Andrew Lytle: prone to dirt digging and calling people to ruminate about God’s prophets tending to smell of stock.

Those who doubt the indispensable importance of the Southern Agrarians to everything that is conservative, or traditional values, or libertarian in these United States should note that it is no mistake that in most postmodernist theory, New Criticism is railed as the epitome of every imaginable ‘reactionary’ evil and that the Agrarians have been almost totally expunged from recent textbooks while the Ralph Waldo Emersons, Henry David Thoreaus, Henry Adamses, and Henry Jameses have remained. Though largely anti-intellectual, postmodernists are sharp enough to know both their real enemies whose ideas must be denied hearing and those who philosophically can be seen as their partial precursors or who pose no serious threat.

Gerlernter closes his article by acknowledging that the elite colleges are likely well past being saved; it seems to me that the vast majority of state universities and perhaps a majority of even church related colleges are likewise beyond probable saving. Gerlernter calls for new schools to be founded. I agree with that. My advice is that if those new schools reflect the presumptions of the old Ivys, they will contain within them the seeds of their own interior philosophical and moral rot. They will produce fruit that eventually will be as poisonous as that of Signor Rappaccini.

May 29, 2001

Jimmy Cantrell [send him mail] holds a PhD in English with a specialty in Southern fiction. In an attempt to be found fit to teach in the tolerant and diverse world of educratdom, he soon may label himself an albino African-American considering sex change surgery and working to bring socialist justice to all.

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