The Vanishing Intellectuals

486 JACK LUDWIG JACK LUDWIG The Vanishing Intellectuals TomAdamowski's letterintroduces ideas Iwould like to examine further: 1 that intellectuals are sealing themselves off from the educated public outside the universities ... that the conditions of ... [their] professional lives define their writing ... [that the] gulf between the educated, non-academic public and the university intellectuals ... is new (or widening). For the most part these are the published views of 'older' intellectuals, but similar laments are made satta voce by younger academics not committed to theory, the current opiate of university intellectuals; a single-minded attachment to theory marks the professionalization of the intellectuals who have set up academic banana republics - in literature, economics, sociology, history, philosophy, psychology, even the sciences - smart little empires dedicated to such good things as heterogeneity, contradiction, discordance, displacement, frictions, and collisions, and hostile to squishy doctrines, dangerous fallacies, and reactionary deviationisms such as 'formalist liberal humanism' and 'hubristic objectivism.' Younger professors who dissent risk banishment by that converted 'cohort of graduate students' and almost certain exile to the Siberia of survey courses. Graff, Himmelfarb, Fiedler, and others imply something more, that the 'profeSSionalism of the intellectuals' is, in its way, la trahison des clercs, a new failure ofnerve that exposes some serious dyscrasia in the contemporary sense of scale. The best minds of this generation are now Laputan projectors sealed off in a Beckett Depeupleur chamber where cultural materialism is used to search out and thrash historical or literary 'socio-sexual' abuses and 'socio-economic' tyrannies while, right outside, ongoing oppressions flourish and 'scape whipping. When Terry Eagleton says the contrast between two readings of a text is 'a distinction between different forms of politics ... [and] You simply have to argue about politics/ the message received seems to be that politics is something you only 'argue about/ just another harmless topic for debate. Most of the intellectuals mentioned by Adamowski - Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, George Woodcock, Dwight Macdonald, George Grant, Susan Sontag - had a powerful commitment to politics, traditionally the link between the intellectual and the outside world. On her first trip back to Germany after the end of the 'Thousand-Year Reich,' Hannah Arendt was introduced by one university's rector magnificus with an apology for what Germany did to her, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann: her response was 'never mind Einstein, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 487 just tell me why Germany killed Moolie Cohen, the tailor, who never harmed a fly.' All her research into the origins of totalitarianism, all her theories about complex intellectual matters such as juridical identity, led to one overwhelming question publicly expressed - about someone unknown, powerless, who could not ask the question himself. In contrast, a strange either/or is at work now: either the intellectual professions inside or the 'popular' outside world. Forty or fifty years ago, let's remember, most intellectuals weren't in the university that walled off its areas and departments against 'generalists ' who would discuss Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Einstein, the Spanish Civil War in a single paragraph, yea, a sentence! There was also a significant difference in class then: intellectuals could still align themselves with the proletariat, the Depression's dispossessed, while the professoriat, no matter how badly paid, came off middle class, borderline la classe dirigeante. By the late 1960s, however, intellectuals had moved into the university - and were themselves middle class. Perhaps the condition of their economic lives is as much a factor as the condition of their professional lives in determining what and how they write and where they publish. An all-points bulletin to round up a passel ofyuppies would likely yield as many college professors as stockbrokers; a revolutionary manifesto would now have to begin 'universityintellectuals ofthe world unite, you have nothing to lose but your RRSPS, house, sporty car, frequent-flyer points, &c, &c.' A yuppie proletariat is hard to imagine. Perhaps we're just experiencing a collapse of expectation: every age dreams a new Ten Commandments, wakes to the Golden Calf. Ifthis one hopes its prophets, the intellectuals, will explain and comfort, it finds in their place careerist Osrics tripping the tune of the times...