The quality of their knowledge and reasoning didn’t equal that of the New York Intellectuals, and the bookishness of what Gitlin terms “the SDS Old Guard” gave way quickly to various street theaters, the Sexual Revolution, and the Weathermen. For the originators, though, a background in Leftist tradition from Marx to Frantz Fanon enhanced their standing, and the more they could expound the intellectual foundations of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and inequality, the better they could formulate an oppositional agenda. The reason it didn’t last stems not from a conscious decision to become anti-intellectual, but from a particular corollary to their opposition. It was their conviction of having an unusual place in history, namely, a sense of their generation’s singularity, its specialness. It comes across in the first section of the Port Huron Statement, entitled “Agenda for a Generation,” and the young-old division continues throughout the document, setting a theme for the entire movement. “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living,” it declares. “But we are a minority—the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts.” Complacency rules the 30-and -up crowd, the Statement asserts, while urgent concern motivates the youth. It acknowledges that young Americans “are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders,” but for this cohort of students, “not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present.” No more “in loco parentis theory” for them, for they believed that their Leftist forebears, too, botched the radical project.
You see the impasse. The leaders of the Movement denounced the legacy of their elders, books and ideas as well as mores and institutions, in hasty broadsides, but at least they knew them well. They went to college, read the texts, idolized revolutionaries, and concocted an informed rejection of tradition. But their engagement with the past couldn’t survive their self-affirming posture. They distinguished themselves from every other generation so dramatically, and chastised precursor intellectuals with such pious gall, that the entire relationship of past and present, revolutionary action and ideological tradition, broke down. They admired many thinkers, Mills, Marcuse, etc., but only temporarily, and as the Movement grew the reading of “Repressive Tolerance” and
The Power Elite
brought less credit than emulating men and women of revolutionary action, styles of radical will. To join Alcove 1, you had to have studied
Literature and Revolution
(Trotsky), and to prevail at Port Huron it helped to know your radical sociologists. But while the writing of the Port Huron Statement required book learning, the reception of it didn’t. To compose phrases about “the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs,” you needed some familiarity with social theory. But to read those phrases, especially when they were followed by flat rulings such as “We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things,” social theory was unnecessary. The successors of Old Guard SDS would draw an easy lesson: why bother to learn things and read books that are obsolete and irrelevant? A predictable descent commenced. The sixties generation’s leaders didn’t anticipate how their claim of exceptionalism would affect the next generation, and the next, but the sequence was entirely logical. Informed rejection of the past became uninformed rejection of the past, and then complete and unworried ignorance of it.
DO INTELLECTUAL POCKETS exist today similar to Alcove 1 or to Port Huron? I don’t know of any. Sometimes people mention the College Republicans on different campuses, young conservatives who do read
The Weekly Standard
and
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
and track the acts of Congress. They reside in an environment largely hostile to their outlook, which makes them thick-skinned and intensifies their get-togethers. They are more intellectual than their peers to the left, more experienced in polemic, and they grasp the battling ideas and policies at play in the culture wars. Feeling outnumbered and surrounded, they hone the defense of ideas and question assumptions and read books more than do their opposites. But I’ve observed that they often lack one thing essential to an exacting forensic. They operate too much in agreement with one another, uniting too consistently against a common foe, liberals and leftists on campus. They break down the inconsistencies of the campus Left, but they don’t ponder inconsistencies within their own camps, such as the conflict between the consumerism fostered by market freedoms and the restraints exacted by religious instruction. The tendency is natural, but it’s too partisan, and it deprives the College Republicans of the benefit of, precisely, “internal self-examination. ” It also encourages them to neglect the best traditions of their adversaries, the progressive canon from the Enlightenment forward. They end up responding only to popular, momentary expressions of progressivism on television and in newspapers, not the best books and essays from the last 100 years. So, when I talk with members of the College Republicans and I notice the premature polarization, I urge them to read John Dewey’s
Democracy and Education
and the opening chapters in Marx’s
Capital
on “commodity fetishism.” But I don’t know how many comply.
There are some equally engaged student groups on the other side, too, one of recent note being an updated SDS. About 2,000 novice left-wingers make up the membership, with more than 100 chapters opening across the country. An article by Christopher Phelps in
The Nation
profiles it as an energetic and “inclusive, multi-issue student group seeking social transformation.” Like their 1960s precursor, SDS-ers of the present aim for “participatory democracy,” a kind of local socialism that maximizes the will of citizens in public matters. They are proudly multicultural and fiercely anti-Iraq War. At the University of Alabama, Phelps reports, “SDS recently staged a ‘diein’ to dramatize the war. Three Michigan chapters are investigating their universities’ financial ties to the military industry.” The activist echoes are clear, but one thing distinguishes this SDS from the old one. In all the quotations from the leaders and remarks on their protests, not to mention the many letters
The Nation
printed subsequently, hardly any traces of theories, ideas, arguments, books, or thinkers emerge. Everything is topical. They never ascend to reflective declarations such as “Doubt has replaced hopefulness—and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic,” as the Port Huron Statement does. “While SDSers are extraordinarily skillful at dissecting race, gender, class and sexuality in their personal lives,” Phelps writes, “they show less aptitude, as yet, for economic research and political analysis.” Nothing about Foucault or feminists or Critical Race Theory, or more distant influences from radical tradition. They don’t even have much to say about the old SDS, except that the new one allows more opportunities for minorities and women. One should add, too, that the dissection of race, gender, class, and sexuality they’ve mastered could not be more conventional, as one class assignment after another asks it of students from middle school onward. In their remarks one can’t find anything more complicated than what a standard freshman orientation instills. In fact, the social attitudes and political leanings the new SDS-ers espouse don’t differ from those of their 50-year-old humanities professors at all. They only add to the outlook the energy and antics of youth.
However committed and intelligent these right- and left-wing students are, the social settings they frequent simply do not provide healthy breeding grounds for tomorrow’s intellectuals. It’s admirable for them to organize and convene, to devise civic and political agendas, to turn off the television and join a campaign. But in “activating,” so to speak, before doing their homework, reading Karl Marx
and
Friedrich Hayek, T. S. Eliot
and
Jack Kerouac, they over-attach to trends and circumstances that come and go, and neglect the enduring ideas and conflicts. They will argue vociferously over the War on Terror, or racism in the United States, or religion and the public square, but their points tend to be situational, that is, assertions about what is happening and what should be happening. They don’t invoke what Machiavelli said about the exercise of power, or cite the Federalist Papers on factionalism, or approve what Du Bois wrote about the color line. Their attention goes to the here and now.
These associations do not fulfill the conditions that produce thoughtful intellectuals. Intellectuals must address the pressing matters, but they must also stand apart, living and breathing a corpus of texts, ideas, and events that are independent of current affairs. They skip from the day’s headlines to the most recondite writings, connecting public happenings to Great Books as, for instance, Francis Fukuyama in
The End of History
interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union through Hegel’s dialectic of desire. Intellectuals occupy a middle ground between philosophical thought and popular discourse, between knowledge professionals and interested laypersons. They are positive mediators, reining in propensities on both sides. On one hand, by hauling academic inquiry into public forums, they keep knowledge from evolving into excess specialization and technical expertise, from withdrawing into the university and think tank as a useful technology or policy instrument. On the other hand, by remaining faithful to academic rigor and intellectual forebears, they keep knowledge from decaying into vulgar and cynical uses in the public sphere. They correct the esoteric professor as much as the imprudent politician. In a prosperous open society, the institutions of learning lean toward insulation and professionalism, while popular discourse drops to the least common denominator of mass culture. Intellectuals draw both back from the extremes, synthesizing them into the best democratic communication, an intelligent analysis of ideas and facts accessible to vast audiences.
A healthy society needs a pipeline of intellectuals, and not just the famous ones. An abiding atmosphere of reflection and forensic should touch many more than the gifted and politically disposed students. Democracy thrives on a knowledgeable citizenry, not just an elite team of thinkers and theorists, and the broader knowledge extends among the populace the more intellectuals it will train. Democracy needs a kind of minor-league system in youth circles to create both major-league sages 20 years later and a critical mass of less accomplished but still learned individuals. Noteworthy intellectual groupings such as liberal anti-communists in the forties, Beats in the fifties, and neoconservatives in the seventies steered the United States in certain ideological directions. History will remember them. But in every decade labors an army of lesser intellectuals—teachers, journalists, curators, librarians, bookstore managers, diplomats, pundits, amateur historians and collectors, etc., whose work rises or falls on the liberal arts knowledge they bring to it. They don’t electrify the world with breakthrough notions. They create neighborhood reading programs for kids, teach eighth-graders about abolition, run county historical societies, cover city council meetings, and host author events. Few of them achieve fame, but they sustain the base forensic that keeps intellectual activity alive across the institutions that train generations to come.
Apart from ideological differences and variations in prestige, greater and lesser intellectuals on the Right and the Left, speaking on C-SPAN or in rural classrooms, focusing on ancient wars or on the Depression, blogging on Romantic music or on postmodern novels . . . all may unite on one premise: knowledge of history, civics, art, and philosophy promotes personal welfare and national welfare. Intellectuals may quarrel over everything else, but at bottom they believe in the public and private value of liberal education. Columbia professor John Erskine called it “the moral obligation to be intelligent” 90 years ago, and every worker in the knowledge fields agrees. In the heat of intellectual battle, though, they rarely descend to that level of principle and concord. They usually concentrate on friends and enemies within the intellectual class, where that conviction goes without saying, and in formulating rejoinders for the marketplace of ideas, they forget that the marketplace itself must be sustained by something else against the forces of anti-intellectualism and anti-knowledge. Intellectuals can and should debate the best and worst books and ideas and personages, and they will scramble to affect policies in formation, but what upholds the entire activity resides beyond their circles. It grows on top of public sentiment, a widespread conviction that knowledge is as fundamental as individual freedoms. For intellectual discourse, high art, historical awareness, and liberal arts curricula to flourish, support must come from outside intellectual clusters. Laypersons, especially the young ones, must get the message: if you ignore the traditions that ground and ennoble our society, you are an incomplete person and a negligent citizen.
This knowledge principle forms part of the democratic faith, and it survives only as long as a fair portion of the American people embraces it, not just intellectuals and experts. The production of spirited citizens requires more than meditations by academics and strategies by activists, and it transpires not only in classrooms and among advocacy groups. Learning and disputation, books and ideas, must infiltrate leisure time, too, and they should spread well beyond the cerebral cliques. This is why leisure trends among the general population are so important. They log the status of the knowledge principle, and when they focus on under-30-year-olds, they not only reveal today’s fashions among the kids but also tomorrow’s prospects for civic well-being.