After The Last lntellectuals

 

Russell Incoby

hat abOut Garrison Keillor?? The ques-

tion, drained by the journey from a

Wisconsin phone through a radio station
hookup to my telephone, barely reached me. I tried to
focus, to think. My book, The Last Intellectuals, had
just been published. I was in the midst of a book ?tour.?
Not the blue-chip package, much bemoaned, much
enjoyed: ten cities, plush hotels, television shows, and
book signings. This was the El Cheapo version, rarely
mentioned, frequently used: no hotels, no lunches, no
cabs, no book signings. Also: no expenses. This tour
requires the authors to ?eld questions from call-in radio
shows across the country while remaining comfortably
at home.

I was trying to concentrate because I was in a funky
California beach town gazing out my window into the
harsh sun. The wind was blowing sand and trash up
the street. A few thousand miles away, a snowed-in
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, radio listener was on the line to
a call-in talk show. The host was saying something like,
?Yes, that?s a very good point. Isn?t Garrison Keillor a
public intellectual, someone who plays a role you claim
no longer exists? What do you say to that, Mr. Jacoby??

I was trying to gather my thoughts. How was I to
participate in a discussion with unknown people, from
unknown places, on unknown radio programswon a
telephone, no less? It required an imagination I lacked.
Moreover, my two-year-old was about twelve feet and
two doors away; I could hear him banging. In ten
seconds he would be grabbing at the phone, a favorite
activity. I wondered how it might sound: my desperate
effort to keep him at bay without alerting radioland;
his angry cry. If not this interruption, there were sure
to be others. I was sitting in my messy study, looking
at bills, old notes, open books, and a disintegrating
universe. How could I think?

The arrangements for this and several other shows
had been strikingly casual. A radio station inquired
whether I.was interested in participating in a call-in
program at a certain time and date, usually several

 

Russell jawbth most recent boo/e is The Last Intellectuals:
American Culture in the Age of Academe, wbz?cb bar been
published in paperback (Noonday, 1989).

58 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

months away. I looked at my real and mental calendar;
both seemed open. That was about it. No one checked to
see ifI would be at home. What ifI forgot? At 10:00 AM.
the day of the interview I might be showering. What if
I had a ?call waiting? telephone service, and during a
forceful reply I were insistently buzzed and took the
call? ?Mom?! Could I call you back?? This might be
OK with Mom, but what if it were a job assignment or
offer? Could I seriously explain that, well, this is hard
to believe, but at that very moment I was ?on the air?
and could they please call back in thirty minutes? Or
would live radioland simply disappear with a click?
These thoughts weighed on me.

I realized this: writing about intellectuals does not
lead to the fast lane of real book tours. I rarely doubted
it; now I knew it. Only intellectuals care abOut intellec-
tuals. ?Put intellectuals into a book title,? an agent
informed me, ?and forget about sales.? Several reviewers
compared my book to Allan Bloom?s best-selling Tbe
Closing of tbe American Mind. They were off the mark
by about 490,000 copies. Still, sparks flew: intellectuals
may not buy the books, but they do the reviewing;
they were drawn to a book about themselves. Everyone
wanted to review my book. This is a kind way of stating
that many couldn?t wait to blast me. They lined up. I
had touched a nerve.

I was a little surprised, thOugh I should not have
been. My book was polemical; it named names, critically
appraising American intellectuals, especially younger
ones?my (our?) generation. As the reviewers took aim,
I dreamt I reversed the thesis: instead of offering a
critique, I sang praises of younger intellectuals; instead
of ?decline,? I argued for the ?rise.? I was endlessly
toasted, partied, thanked. In the era of the computer,
reversing my argument was simple. I commanded my
computer to remove all the negatives and to substitute
?rise? for ?decline.? My next book.

I thought my thesis responsible, if not sober; many
have commented on the passing of independent writers.
Using a generational grid, I surveyed twentieth-century
literary critics, philosophers, social commentators, econ-
omists. Those born around 1900, whom I call classic
American intellectuals?the Edmund Wilsons, Dwight
Macdonalds, Lewis Mumfords?wrote forcefully on

 

diverse subjects for the educated public; they were
iconoclastic and independent, keeping a distance from
universities. The next generation, born around 1920,
might be called transitional. The Irving Howes and
Daniel Bells bear the imprint of urban culture; their
writings are direct, often elegant, the essay and memoir
being the preferred form. Although rarely holding ad-
vanced degrees, by the 19503 many of that generation?s
intellectuals joined universities as the possibilities for
independent writers worsened.

These earlier intellectuals wrote to be read because
they saw themselves as belonging to a larger community;
they prized a supple and direct prose. Some younger
intellectuals still do, but fewer and fewer. The most
recent thinkers and writers, born since 1940, have become
professionals, mainly professors with disciplinary loyal-
ties. They have little reason to write for the educated
public. Often the reverse: to academics, readable prose
hints of shallowness, a suspicion that can derail a career.
In other words, one classic American type?public
intellectuals?should be listed as an endangered species.
As I saw it, younger intellectuals are virtually missing
from public life. The wider culture is the poorer with-
out them.

he dearth of young public intellectuals is sur-

prising. Younger intellectuals belonged to the

sixties generation, the least conformist, the least
tolerant of conventional lives. More than any other gen-
eration, the impolite sixties intellectuals were destined
to overturn culture. Surprise! After the smoke has
cleared, they?we! ?have become a more professional?
ized, buttoned?up group than were earlier American
intellectuals.

Last July an acquaintance, a sociologist, sent me a
paper he had written. News of Jesse Jackson?s candidacy
and the Democratic National Convention, soon to be
held in Atlanta, filled the atmosphere. This acquaintance,
a former Students for Democratic Society (SDS) activist,
included with his essay a note that closed, ?See you in
Atlanta! I was startled and embarrassed, for he seemed
to assume I was joining some nationwide protest in
Atlanta. I pictured the buses pulling out at dawn across
the nation; but I knew nothing about it. I asked around.
I learned he was referring to the annual meeting of
sociologists, also scheduled for Atlanta in August.

The evolution from the streets to hotel conventions
and campus parking lots is neither new nor disturbing.
People grow up; they also need jobs. Nevertheless, the
younger generation has accepted or even embraced
professional roles to a greater degree than have earlier
American intellectuals. The earlier models have faded.
To be an intellectual means to be a professor of some-
thing with primary loyalty to a discipline. As graduate

students, we often heard about ?the ?eld?: where it was
going, what was needed. Young intellectuals have become
historians, literary critics, sociologists.

 

People got excited. They called
me names. One witty New Yorker
revealed I lived in California.

 

To be sure, they have become labor historians, decon-
structionist literary critics, Marxist sociologists, radical
economists, dialectical anthropologists, feminist theore-
ticians, left geographers, anarchist political scientists,
Leninist philosophers, and so on. It would require stun-
ning arrogance to dismiss their contribution. That is
not the point. Rather, their writings smack of the academy
and its imperatives; the idiom even more than the issues
breathes of seminars, lectures, and conferences. This
style renders their work almost closed to the uninitiated,
the educated public that once constituted an interested
audience. Let there be no misunderstanding: the issue
is less motive than circumstances.

Only after it became an empire in the later 19505
could higher education fully sustain?though not neces-
sarily ?nancially?its inhabitants: it provided enough
colleagues, conferences, and journals to occupy the
busiest souls. Evidently it was always possible, no matter
how small the ?eld or college, to snuggle inside a dis-
cipline. Yet the limited size of the academic universe had
always tempted its ambitious intellectuals to step out,
not up. Earlier intellectuals such as John Dewey or Lionel
Trilling or Richard Hofstadter were professors, but they
obtained an identity as urban and public intellectuals.

I found it revealing that today an educated cultured
person would stumble if asked to name an important
or creative younger philosopher or literary critic or
sociologist or economist. Who are the successors, I
asked, to the Edmund Wilsons, the Lewis Mumfords, the
John Kenneth Galbraiths? What happened to sociology
since C. Wright Mills.> Philosophy since William James
and John Dewey?

These questions were not diplomatic. People got
excited. They called me names. One witty New Yorker
revealed I lived in California. Others spluttered and
shook. Why the fury? They were insulted. In my less
than upbeat survey of younger intellectuals I failed to
mention that Professor So-and-so, his or her friends,
and their journal constitute?breathtaking exceptions;
they are lucid, original scholars fully participating in
public life. I was not simply wrong; they were living
proof I was wrong. ?Look at me! Look at us! they cried.

The very ?rst review ef?ciently cured me of reveries.
In the Village Voice Literary Supplement (VLS), Walter

AFTER THE LAST INTELLECTUALS 59

Kendrick, an English professor, heaped scorn; he flunked
me on writing and reasoning, but the nub seemed to be
that I left him and the VLS out of the picture. ?There?s
plenty of intellectual activity going on in America now,?
stated Kendrick, then senior editor; ?the very
existence of the VLS (a public intellectual journal) proves
that the situation isn?t quite as bleak as Jacoby main-
tains.? Proves?

Kendrick closed with rolling drums: embrace the
glorious future. He informed ?self-appointed gloomsters
like Jacoby? that ?we?ll have to live in the future whether
we like it or not, and it?s worse than useless to maunder
on about the dead virtues of the past.? This by a professor
who has written about 

Kendrickism surfaced in almost all the reviews by
younger intellectuals; it can be identi?ed by the follow-
ing: (1) delusions of grandeur. Openly or covertly the
reviewer advances self, friends, colleagues, and journal?
and in one case husband?as conclusively disproving
my thesis. (2) futurism. The future is here, beautiful,
inescapable; any efforts to appraise losses are hopelessly
retrograde. I was charged with ?nostalgia,? a capital
crime in the left-liberal criminal code.

Reviewers nominated scores of journals and intellec-
tuals that invalidate my argument; the periodicals ran
from Humanist Sociologist, the New Republic, Radical
American, and Daedalus to Performing Arts Journal and
Tikkun. The individuals covered the map. ?Bad news, Mr.
Jacoby,? Mark Falcoff wrote in the American Spectator;
?there is a whole new crop coming along? of young
(conservative) intellectuals. (His ?rst ten nominations:
Nick Eberstadt, Joshua Muravchik, Scott McConnel,
David Gress, Bruce Bawer, Mary Tedeschi, Mark Lilla,
Roger Kaplan, Suzanne Garment, Terry Teachout.) More
bad news, announced Richard Kostelanetz in American
Book Review: due to my ?appalling ignorance? I failed
to salute an emerging generation. (His first ten: David
Horowitz, Tom Disch, Henry Thomas Fleming,
Richard Morris, Dick Higgins, Ishmael Reed, Stewart
Brand, Michael Hudson, Marjorie Welish.)

he real bad news is the endemic failure to think

in social terms. The issue is not the merits of

one, two, or six intellectuals, but the cultural
trajectory. Reviewers, however, preferred to reach for
their address books. To be Sure, generalizations require
specifics. But they also require more: a willingness to
think beyond individuals and groups. It is fair, even
necessary, to identify counterevidence and countertrends,
but the ?counter? should not be confused with the
whole. This confusion always bedeviled the left: every
strike or protest announced the onset of revolution. No
one doubts the complexity of Cultural life. History is
not a one-way street; some commute ?against? the traf?c,

60 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

but this fact does not negate the rush hour.

Moreover, the countertrends often seem less than
convincing. To trumpet postmodernism and 
turalism, for instance, hardly proves all is well. Do
these disciplines engage a wider audience? Do the post-
modernists write to be read? Do they even try to?
Richard Wolff, an editor of Rethinking Marxism, faults
me for failing to pay fealty to the ?new combinations of
Marxism, and postmodernism.? He
admits the writing is inaccessible, the excitement profes-
sorial; but this is understandable. Why? Because ?to
uphold radical and Marxist ideas and to develop them
. . . quite predictably produce writings out of tune with
the prevalent presumptions and desires of the postwar
public: ?bad? writing in the eyes of many.? He anticipates
that ?clearer writing follows as more people struggle
with the materials.? Is this a countertendency? Rethought
Marxism? It smacks of elitism and positivism: the future
will bail out intellectuals.

 

I was sitting in my messy study,
looking at bills, old notes,
open books, and a disintegrating
universe. How could I think?

 

I did not write The Last Intellectuals to celebrate
intellectual passivity. A description should not be con-
fused with a blessing. I would be happy to reissue The
Last Intellectuals with a new preface stating that a fresh
group of public intellectuals has rendered it obsolete.
Is it possible a flourishing Tikkun?magazine, confer-
ence, writers?requires that preface? Might Tikkun and
its supporters, among whom I count myself, be hastening
the opening of a new phase? I hope so. Yet I am
sketching cultural shifts over almost a century. Even the
most enthusiastic discussion of Tikkun must concede
that the magazine cannot singlehandedly reverse history.

Many reviewers (and some callers) offered some telling
criticisms. A professor phoned the radio show, rejecting
the view of the university as a retreat and refuge; she
argued that teaching itself is a public activity. A good
point. Millions pass through college classrooms and
presumably enter society the wiser for it. Almost every
school boasts of at least one ?famous? teacher?famous
because of lectures, zeal, ability to inspire. These teachers
are unknown outside their campuses but have an incal-
culable effect on their students.

Incalculable is the rub, however. It is impossible to
evaluate an almost completely invisible activity. Has an
increasing impact of teaching by intellectuals compen-
sated for a dwindling public presence? Are intellectuals
in?uencing culture, not in books and magazines but in

 

college classrooms? How can this be decided? More-
over, it is hardly news that major universities, no matter
the lip service, belittle teaching; brilliant teaching does
not help schools gain grants or visibility. Any young
professor devoted to teaching eventually gets the message
or the boot.

An irritated caller, and several reviewers, contended
that narrowness rendered my book inconsequential:
I excluded too many varieties of intellectuals, particu?
larly scientists. Scientists such as Jeremy Bernstein and
Stephen Jay Gould are elegant and accessible authors,
but I am not convinced they have (yet) succeeded earlier
humanist intellectuals. Nevertheless, the matter is open:
is it possible that the energy that once fueled the tradi-
tional humanities now heats the sciences?

Some critics charged that I failed to acknowledge the
new cultural forms and that I pine for the older intellec-

political cartoons, stand-up comics, video, alternative
cable, and gay, female, and black culture have replaced
the parochial culture of old white intellectuals. There
is more here than I can shake a stick at. Nor do I want
to shake that stick. I hardly deify past American intel-
lectuals and their contribution. Nor do I write off
developments by Black and feminist intellectuals. Never-
theless, no matter how they are judged, do these intel-
lectuals constitute a refutation of my argument or merely
a quali?cation?

And Garrison Keillor? Millions more listen to him
than ever read, much less heard about, Lewis Mumford.
But is Keillor a replacement for past public intellectuals?
Or just something different? I began to stammer some-
thing about the nature of public intellectuals. The door-
bell rang; I heard footsteps; my boy was yelling ?Daddy.?
The end was near. am very sorry,? said the radio host.

 

tuals. They noted that vigorous and popular music,

Indian Giver

?We have no more time.? My book tour was over. 

 

Andrew Bard Schmookler

hen I was a kid there was an

expression you don?t hear much
anymore: Indian Giver. It meant some-
one who gave a gift and then expected
to get it back.

It was a pejorative term, and I sup-
pose the expression has fallen into
disfavor because people think it is an
ethnic slur against the Native American.
But recently, after reading Lewis Hyde?s
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic
Life of Property (1983), I?ve come to
understand that it is not the name
itself?Indian Giver?that shows our
ethnocentrism. It is our thinking that
there is something wrong with being
an Indian Giver.

The root of the matter is that the
Indians had a different sense of owner-
ship from ours. And different does not
mean worse?particularly in this case.

Among the Indians, a treasured ob-
ject would be the ?Gift??something
that would move among the tribe?s

 

Andrew Bard Schmoo/eler is the author
of Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds
that Drive Us to War (Bantam, 1988).

members, never belonging to anyone.
So an Indian might pass the Gift to an
Englishman who, with his sense of
property, would think, ?Great! We can
keep this in the British Museum.? The
Englishman is into accumulation, and
so he is annoyed when an Indian,
seeing the Gift in the White Man?s
house, keeps it moving by taking it
with him.

In the Indian Giver and his counter-
part, the White Man Keeper, we see
two ways of relating to the goods of
life: as things that ?ow on through, or
as things that are stored and possessed.

We all know how the contest be-
tween these two approaches to life
turned out. Those who were into ac-
quisition acquired the homelands of
those who were not. The continent is
now possessed by those with a sense
of possession.

But to say that the way of possession
has triumphed is not to say that we are
the winners. Not if we ourselves are
possessed by the spirit of possession.
We live in the richest country in the
history of the world, but it seems we?re

always hungry for more?was if our
things were themselves so much stored
up happiness. As if money, embodying
all the grati?cation we have delayed,
were a promissory note that promised
a future of ful?llment. Like magic.

I remember seeing on television a
few years back a feature on some I-Iolly-
wood mogul with 250 telephones lining
his Beverly Hills estate, as if by magic
his owning those phones assured that
he would forever be connected with
the world. And then there?s Imelda
Marcos?s amazing collection of three
thousand pairs of shoes?as if she
thought that, by magic, she herself
would last until all those shoes were
worn out.

But life is not like that. As the saying
goes, ?You can?t take it with you.?
Anyone who insists on ?ghting that
fact of life is sure to end up a loser.

Life is a gift that is not ours to keep.
All we can do is pass that gift along in
our tribe, which alone endures.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh
away. There is the archetypal Indian
Giver. Cl

61