Scapegoating Intellectuals

482 CHARLES LOCK themselves castigated by a future generation of Laskys for having had no permanently true ideas. The alternative, doing nothing while waiting for absolute truth to arrive on our doorstep, is not worth thinking about. What we can do is to do our best in an endless struggle with questions of value and judgment. After all, most of us know, in barely creditable philosophical terms perhaps, what we want in the world. We want peace, fairness, equality, and so on. What remains in dispute is the method of realizing those simple ideals. IfLasky would have us all shut up until one of us comes up with the solution, then he would have us give up on history. And so would Johnson if he would have us all be beyond moral reproach before we ventured an idea in an active and changing world. I for one cannot envisage that. It is better to struggle with error, in error, producing error and so making oneself publicly available for instruction, within history, than to make a gesture that in itself (by giving up on active thinking) is an open invitation to totalitarianism. Perhaps the day of the heroic intellectual is gone. Heroes all tend to be 'he.' Perhaps the day of the new intellectual is at hand. If so, she will be found working in an intelligent political shaping of universities, community organizations, feminist movements, local political groups ofa variety of kinds. This work may lack some of the public fanfare of the old masculine hero of the mind. But we can easily forego that. We cannot forego the game of livingby our wits. We need to be ready to welcome the advent of a new kind of organic intellectual, without expecting too many heroics. CHARLES LOCK Scapegoating Intellectuals 'Is there a gulf between the educated, non-academic public and the university intellectuals ... ?' What university intellectuals? 'Commitment to a profession' is a cover for careerism and has little to do with being an intellectual. The assumption that intellectuals find their natural habitat in universities hardly stands examination, in North America or Europe. The assumption is presumably extrapolated from fractional instances - the odd Cambridge college for a couple of decades, the New School for Social Research or Chicago's Committee on Social Thought episodically. There is and ought to be no institutional preserve for intellectuals: if there were, intellectuals would constitute a professional class much like any other. When it happens, infrequently, that intellectuals are perceived to form a group, that perception may be due to academic affiliation. There is no likely place to find intellectuals, any more than there is a likely place to UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 483 meet strangers. Wittgenstein thought that no honest, thoughtful person could be a professor. Ihave encountered intellectuals in the most unlikely places, including universities. The nostalgic terms of the question - 'gulf ... widening ... decline' - are themselves disturbing. Cultural pessimism is politically suspect (more than suspect, by now) and especially so when we look back to celebrate a degree of criticism and disaffection within society. Are we not in danger of lamenting that there is less now to complain about than there was in the 1950S? McCarthyism made intellectuals look and feel important, for that kind of 'tame persecution' (by this century's standards) is a most gratifying form of flattery. The institutional conservatism of the 1950s, in both governments and universities, provided the frame and the tension withinwhich radical and liberal critics worked: attached but not confined to academic life, contributing to journals independent ofinstitutional support and control. Those journals - notably Partisan Review - were read by academics as well as by the educated public, and their influence was widespread. That influence has been most concentrated and enduring in the universities; and perhaps only within departments and colleges of the liberal arts has a note of progressive consensus been held. Here, if nowhere else in society (we may hypothesize with glum satisfaction), 'liberal' is not a dirty word. For the rest of society liberal thinking is not dangerous, even as a threat, for it is entirely outmoded. And it may be precisely because liberal arts institutions...