‘Adjust Your Ear Trumpets’: Intellectuals and Their Public in Canada

SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 491 back into the existential playground. To theory render the things that are theory's; render the rest to the world. DESMOND MORTON I Adjust Your Ear Trumpets': Intellectuals and Their Public in Canada Are Canadian intellectuals too busy writing scholarly papers for tenure and promotion to spare a thought for Jane Q. Public, HA? Have the great free-ranging 'public intellectuals' of our youth been supplanted by mere 'policy experts,' translatable only by the mass media? Does the lack of a Canadian Forum cripple our intellectual life? Are all these things managed better in France - or French Canada? Toronto, wrote Wyndham Lewis in 1941, 'is not a good place to be an intellectual in,' but most people had thought it had improved. What gust of gloom persuaded the editors of the University ofToronto Quarterly to get their chums to chomp on such chestnuts about the alienation of the intelligentsia from the educated masses? By most reasonable standards, we jaw-merchants and 'Foolosophers' - the phrase was 'Bible Bill' Aberhart's - should be in fine fettle. Only five years ago, a palpable intellectual wound up sixteen unbroken years as prime minister. Scores of intellectuals on both sides of the Free Trade debate felt their names carried enough weight to deserve huge advertisements in the major newspapers. A cash-starved CHC cared enough about Patrick Watson's ideas on democracy to spend $8 million to carthim and a crew from Ayer's Rock to the shores of Tripoli. Whatever shortages Canada may suffer, from cash to compassion, intellectuals and their influence both seem in abundant supply. Not everyone, even among well-educated Quarterly readers, will rejoice. The intellectuals' club, as the editors hint, may be exclusive, but even the eligible don't necessarily want to carry a card. Without actually being called 'pointy-headed,' Canadian intellectuals live in a sufficiently American climate to recognize the double meaning in Webster. On the one hand, an intellectual may be 'one given to study, reflection and speculation, especially large, profound or abstract issues.' Equally common is the alternative: 'a person claiming to belong to an intellectual elite or caste, given to empty theorizing or cerebration and often inept in the solution of practical problems.' 'An intelligent person who is not an intellectual,' explained H.M. Fowler, 'we most of us flatter ourselves we can find in the looking glass.' Far from helping us be precise about the topic, the Quarterly editors have added their own rips to a huge net with huge holes. A majority of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 492 DESMOND MORTON our intellectuals, they explain, are in the universities, presumably hidden among our fifty thousand professors and instructors and not solely in the humanities and social sciences. What about the minority outside the universities? Are they among the 38A75 men and women the 1981 census classified as 'literary'? A further distinction, necessary for any useful discussion of the 'public intellectual,' is between the free-ranging intellectual and those lesser members of the caste, 'a new class of "policy intellectuals,'" 'technical specialists,' and other 'experts.' Do David Suzuki's views on the environment derive from expertise while Margaret Atwood's comparable passion for our ecology qualifies her proudly as a 'public intellectual'? On Free Trade, the playwright Rick Salutin claims the coveted title while Professor John Crispo's contrary views befit a technical specialist. Does Dr Linus Pauling become an intellectual when he forsakes molecular chemistry to promote peace or mega-doses of vitamin c? If so, the word 'intellectual' risks new and even more derogatory meanings. The editors and their readers will judge the Canadian intelligentsia from their own definitions, finding many or few according to taste. My own disposition being a nervous optimism, I tend to definitional catholicity: the more the merrier. If the habitues of Paris salons, London coffee houses, and Greenwich Village bars qualify, we should not set a standard higher, say, than admission to a Master's program, with a certain capacity to leap disciplinary frontiers. No one since Leibniz, claimed Norbert Weiner, has understood all the science of the day; but anyone hoping to add significantly to knowledge or...