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Tyranny of the Mind
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17216 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1990 |
2,993 Words |
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Jeffrey D. Wallin
Jeffrey D. Wallin is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for
Foreign Policy Analysis. His books include Rhetoric and
American Statesmanship and By Ships Alone: Churchill and the
Dardanelles. |
THE WAR AGAINST THE INTELLECT
Episodes in the Decline of Discourse
Peter Shaw
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989
201 pp., $22.50
Peter Shaw's new book reminds us of just how much - and not for the better - the academy has changed since the American poet Randall Jarrell published A Sad Heart at the Supermarket in 1962. The title essay of that book, which lamented American democratic culture's assault on the life of the intellect, expressed a theme familiar to generations of somewhat snobbish academics. That this culture is chronically hostile, or at best indifferent, to the life of the mind, to rigorous standards of proof and demonstration, and to high culture, had been argued at least since Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It had served as the bread and butter complaint of American intellectuals until the 1960s. Jarrell differed form many others only by the moving elegance with which he articulated the problem, and by his unusual sympathy with the plight of the unlearned.
American culture still adheres in some measure to its gut anti-intellectualism, despite the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Education Association's (NEA) efforts to turn it into a friendly, lap-dog admirer of esoteric art and thought. About all that has been accomplished so far is to make democratic culture mildly guilty about its shortcomings of taste. Why this should be necessary is not self-evident, except form the standpoint of the class interest of the intellectuals, a not insignificant matter in an age when the public
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