Do we need intellectuals?

What do we mean by “intellectuals”?

The original meaning was “Dreyfusard”, more generally an ideologue of the Left, an anti-clerical working for the social marginalization of Christianity.  By that definition, we certainly don’t need intellectuals.  The world would be immeasurably better without them.

Of course, the common meaning for “intellectual” is broader.  It’s also rather vague, so let’s see if we can nail it down a bit.  How about this:  an intellectual is a person who does original intellectual work for a broad public audience.  This would distinguish intellectuals from specialists on the one hand, who write only for their particular community of scholars, and popularizers on the other, whose work for general audiences just presents the scholarly consensus rather than presenting new arguments.  By my definition, it’s possible to be both a specialist and a popularizer without being an intellectual, and this says nothing about that person’s intelligence or creativity.  Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking would be examples among physicists who, as far as I know, did their original work in exclusively in physics journals, but also wrote successful books for the general public.  (Feynman’s popular book on QED is really marvelous, by the way.  He builds up all the basic ideas behind the theory pictorially.)  Physicist intellectuals might include Arthur Eddington, Freeman Dyson, and Roger Penrose.  All of these did their “serious” specialized work first, but also presented first-rate new stuff to the public.  Eddington’s writings on the philosophy of science made a big impression got referred to by philosophers and theologians long after they were written.  Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind is a wonderfully broad and exciting book which amazingly brings together why he thinks artificial intelligence will never work, why time reversibility is a flaw in the laws of physics, how gravity might affect the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, …  Of course, if you’re going to attempt something ambitious like this, it helps to already have a solid reputation as a genius, as Penrose (and Eddington and Dyson) had.

The above examples are all scientists, where the specialist/general audience gap is hardest to bridge.  Where a subject is a matter of public interest–e.g. anything relating to politics–the gap can be leaped more easily.  Political scientists have it easy.  The End of History and The Clash of Civilizations were both big intellectual hits when I was younger.  Like The Bell Curve, everybody had a cartoon version of what was in these books and could tell you why they were wrong and were horrible, wicked ways of thinking.  To name just one philosopher intellectual,  Josef Peiper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture presented a new and important argument directly to the general public.  Intellectuals can even do their work entirely outside an academic community, e.g. Jane Jacobs.

By this definition, I think it is beneficial to have intellectuals.  Historically, they are more important than specialists, because the specialists can only exist after the intellectuals–the Galileos, for example–have established a field of inquiry and brought together a community of interest.  Intellectual conservatism only exists because of intellectuals like Roger Scruton; our voices are not welcome in academia, and they play little part in the debates of professional political philosophers.

A final definition:  an intellectual is a person who does intellectual work and is precisely not a specialist in any field.  In other words, people who mouth off about everything without knowing much about anything.  People who have never subjected their minds to the discipline of going deep into any subject and who deliberately abstain from learning the subtleties of any question they address.  Because they don’t really know anything, these intellectuals are valued for their rhetorical skills or their supposed moral passion.  (Note the large overlap with the Dreyfusard definition.)  Christopher Hitchens is an example that comes to mind, but in all fairness G. K. Chesterton would also fall into this category.  I doubt one man in a million has a similar opinion of these two men (I certainly don’t); what you think about them no doubt depends on whether you agree with them.  I am often surprised by the seriousness and depth I find in Chesterton hidden behind his glib style.  I’m sure some atheist and neoconservative readers would say they’ve found layers of profundity in Hitchens that are entirely invisible to me.  Still, even I would say that Chesterton’s tendency to mouth off prior to careful study marred his work.  One sees it in his sharing the fashionable prejudice against Calvinists, his overly rosy view of the French Revolution, and his anti-evolutionism.

I think it should be made more difficult rather than less for someone to win respect as an intellectual of this sort.  I would like there to be a social penalty if someone writes on a subject, and their work is then shown to be inexcusably ignorant.  People should make fun of them.  Publishers and readers should be wary of them in the future.  Instead, there seems to be an effort to make a place for these people.  Today, that place is the editorial columns of the newspapers.  There is, in fact, a strong prejudice I’ve found among the educated that one can’t really be an informed person without reading the editorials in the major newspapers.  This really baffles me.  Why should I care what journalists think about this or that issue?  What do they know that I don’t?  We shouldn’t be overly credulous to specialists either, but there is at least some sense in reading the opinion of an expert.  In the opinions of a journalist I see no value at all.  It’s especially odd given the things about which the educated class feel safe in boasting their ignorance.  The doctrines of religions they despise, for example.  As it gets easier to be an intellectual of this sort, they keep getting stupider and stupider.  Consider the line of devolution that runs from Erasmus (with his silly scholastic-baiting but serious translation work) to Voltaire (with his mindless anti-Catholic bigotry but respectable histories) to Hitchens (an all-around ignoramus).  The barriers to entry need to be raised.