Norm makes brief mention of Terry Eagleton's review of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Furedi's book has several other reviews ^{1 ,2 ,3 , 4} as well and seems to have touched some nerves in both academia and government. Noel Malcolm's review states the gist of the argument:

What Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, mostly tries to do in this book is to analyse the growth of "philistinism" in our contemporary culture - the dumbing down of politics, the arts and education. It is true, of course, that in a dumbed-down society there will be less esteem for intellectuals; it is also true that, if the intellectuals themselves have participated in the dumbing down, they may no longer have anything smart to say...

Universities, libraries, museums and art galleries are all under pressure to be "inclusive", to promote the "self-esteem" of the people who enter them, and so on. In short, as Furedi says, they have been subordinated to a kind of social engineering modelled - however fatuously - on psychotherapy.

Making as many people as possible feel better about themselves is the aim; the study of literature, art, philosophy or whatever is merely the means towards it.

This is what Prof Furedi calls "instrumentalism", and it brings us to the heart of his argument. In the old days, according to Furedi, people pursued knowledge for knowledge's sake and art for art's sake, because they believed in the Enlightenment ideals of truth and beauty. Recently, however, sinister anti-Enlightenment forces have succeeded in persuading us that knowledge and art should be means or instruments towards other ends - whether economic growth (as in the Thatcherite approach to the universities) or social "inclusiveness" (as in the Blairite one).

It is possible to sympathise with many of Furedi's complaints without finding this analysis convincing. "Art for art's sake" was more a Romantic concern than an Enlightenment one, and instrumentalism has its own Enlightenment origins. The instrumentalism he discusses is able to function only because people have already given up believing that knowledge or art possess intrinsic value. That loss of belief is the root cause of the problem; the fact that, once rendered valueless, culture and learning can be manipulated for other purposes, is merely a symptom.

But where, in any case, does the public intellectual figure in all of this? Furedi often writes as if the intellectual was, traditionally, the person pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake; but that is a description of a scholar, not an intellectual. A scholar might devote his life to the utterly non-instrumental study of Greek verbs without ever taking on the role of a public intellectual. Having outlawed all forms of instrumentalism, Furedi finds it hard to describe what intellectuals do when (as he puts it) they "influence public life" or contribute to "the flourishing of a democratic ethos".

Public intellectuals, surely, are people who devote themselves not so much to knowledge as to methods of critical thinking, and who demonstrate the power of such thinking by applying it to the public issues of the day. Furedi never makes this basic distinction between knowledge and critical thought; and so he misses the greatest irony of all.

Norm dismisses the kerfuffle:

Whatever the shortcomings of contemporary intellectual and cultural life, it is not uni-dimensional. The terrain of criticism and opposition is as open as it has ever been.

While true this misses Furedi's point as well as Malcom's critique of Furedi's point. And I have my own critique. They are all studiously avoiding discussing the elephant in the room, the one we are all using to have this exchange. When the dominant search engine company Google went public after having crushed the competition as a private company they included in the prospectus what were then taken to be typically grandiose statements of intended futures; they plan to put all of the world's knowledge online in a searchable format. Equally curious perhaps was the huge amount of hardware they had amassed, computing and storage capacity far in excess of that needed for their business - which they acquired cheaply due to their radically insightful ideas about what types of hardware to use, choosing cheap and readily available machines made reliable through massive redundancy rather than high end or leading edge machines as is common in industry. Toys for boys the analysts sneered.

But the recent announcement of the Google partnership with leading research libraries to scan and upload their collections makes it all clear. They really do plan to put the knowledge of humanity online. They are already ahead of the plan. Now all that massive hardware makes sense. What was taken as the idealistic but unfeasible bragging of youths now seems more like the grand vision of geniuses. The head librarians of those research libraries, sober people not given to exaggeration, claim that the earth moved, that this is simply huge and that the effects on society in coming decades are incalculable.

Grumpy old men like Furedi worry that mush minded academics, bureaucrats and politicians are making libraries comfortable and attractive to youths as places to hang out, that they are democratizing knowledge, art and culture as instruments to achieve social, economic and political objectives, and so losing the romantic ideals of their own youth - knowledge for knowledge's sake. While Furedi is right so are the mush minds but they are all irrelevant. Libraries are becoming museums. It will take time for the transition to complete but the youths of tomorrow will in fact sit in comfortable surrounds while accessing the knowledge of the world. They will sit in cafes or parks or lounge in their robes at home unshaven while thinking and reading. They will do this while simultaneously conversing with others, sometimes about the subject of inquiry and sometimes just hooking up, who are in turn located wherever they find congenial.

The Enlightenment (actually, Enlightenments since there were several) didn't happen in the library it happened in the street. The libraries and universities, then as now, were the haunts of those who chose not to participate, the old guard happy with their places in life, reactionary defenders of the status quo. Their purpose was to raise new generations of priggish flatterers who would continue the order, assume rank and privilege after long and often demeaning apprenticeship. Then as now academic manners and social life were beliefs rather than knowledge. Meanwhile, "there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air".

As Malcolm said:

Furedi often writes as if the intellectual was, traditionally, the person pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake; but that is a description of a scholar, not an intellectual.

Or a monk. This is an important distinction, one that has been more or less at the heart of many disputes of late. Monks are not intellectuals yet they defend their turf by calling others anti-intellectual. Medieval alchemists, their natural philosopher successors and the public intellectuals that in turn followed them weren't just bright people interested in knowledge, they were privileged people with access to treasures and patrons. The successors to public intellectuals could be anyone at all once knowledge is literally available to the world at the press of a button. It isn't just the writings that are accessible, so are other people wherever they reside. Conversation and debate no longer requires copresence to avoid being asynchronous.

It isn't just that the monks guild is dissolving, giving unmannered commoners access to sacred texts for free, it is that there will be a lot more of them. Democratizing existing knowledge will result in an explosion of new knowledge. The Renaissance man has been said to be impossible today in the sense of any person being able have a command of all formal knowledge. There is simply too much knowledge for any person to have a working grasp of all fields. This will be be very much truer in the fairly near future. The whole idea of expertise will be redefined and devalued since it will be so narrow.

Those who think the large thoughts that span disciplines, in other words those capable of making any useful decision or creating any useful entity, will chafe at the requirement to marshall the efforts of so many experts to achieve anything and the effort needed to resolve the conflicts among them since they can't even talk to each other. Many of these experts will be automated, AIs with large knowledge bases, but someone will need to possess judgement, the ability to analyze and detect rubbish and irrelevant but true proposals.

The difference between intellectuals and experts will grow. The difference between intellectuals and scholars will grow. Expertise and scholarship will eventually be automated, must be automated unless humans hack themselves to become more vast. Seeing the nature of intellectualism more clearly by examining its past as well as possible futures clarifies present conflicts among the diverging activities of knowledge workers, both those in institutions and the rising professional-amateur ranks. Democratizing knowledge is and will continue to be exceedingly important. Charges of anti-intellectualism will continue to be made but it is useful to consider the source and context of the accusers. When they do not grasp the dynamics of our age and the speed with which futures are arriving their accusations and judgements are of little and diminishing worth.

» Frankensteining from Crumb Trail
Crumbs from here, such as Gap Analysis as well as some poached from other trails, are soaked in water and other beverages to make them swell and stick for construction of an Invisible Pachyderm at M&M. Grumpy old men......[read more]
Tracked: February 7, 2005 10:08 PM