This, I have learned, is what Orwell called it. This bon mot is one of many in James Piereson's review of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini. Pierson contrasts this work with The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) by John Gross.

The “man of letters,” as Gross understands him, is one who lives by writing and makes a living by doing so—that is, a professional writer, albeit one with literary interests. . .

The disintegration of the literary culture of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the gradual disappearance after 1900 of the man of letters himself. Within a short time, the man of letters began to appear as a dilettante, a dabbler, a dying species, even as a crank. The term itself came to be used as an instrument of abuse to signify an aged and somewhat eccentric bookman. In short order, modern life began to evolve its own substitutes for the dying breed. “Instead of men of letters,” Gross writes, “there are academic experts, mass media pundits, cultural functionaries.” He is right to wonder if we have gained or lost from the exchange, and the passage of nearly four decades since the publication of his important book has only reinforced our skepticism.

It seems plain, however, in looking back across the century that the man of letters, no matter how he is defined, was pushed aside not so much by academics and experts, but by that distinctive twentieth century phenomenon—the intellectual. The term itself is more or less coeval with the century, having been coined in 1898 to describe the collection of writers and teachers that came to the defense of Captain Dreyfus. The pedigree of the term was thus more political than literary, was associated with protest and opposition, and associated also with the political left. These have been enduring characteristics of the intellectual, and perhaps they serve as well to distinguish the species from the man of letters it supplanted.

I'm reminded of this Roger Scruton review of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?.

As an Englishman, I am bothered by the term “intellectual”, which came late to our language. Humane education was shaped in our country by Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and — in the political sphere — Macaulay, Gladstone and Disraeli, people who would have described themselves as educated men, but not as intellectuals. The intellectual is a synthesis of French bohemianism and Russian nihilism. Intellectuals have an inveterate tendency to be on the Left and to turn on dissenters with a venom that no educated person could comfortably endorse. Much of the decline that Furedi is describing in this book could be described in another way, as the gradual vanishing of the educated person as the goal of education, and its replacement by the intellectual instead. Intellectuals are critics of the established order; they are on the side of the victim, and against the bourgeois normality; they repudiate discipline, authority, family, tradition, and nothing gets up their nose so much as the calm forgiving acceptance of human imperfection. And, as we know from the cases of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Sartre, Pol Pot and a thousand more, they are dangerous.

Moreover, intellectuals value their oppositional and transgressive stance far more than they value truth, and have a vested interested in undermining the practices — such as rational argument, genuine scholarship and open-minded discussion — which have truth as their goal. They will seize on the relativist arguments — even if they are as shoddy as Foucault’s or as empty as Rorty’s — as they will seize on any kind of mumbo-jumbo that silences the critic and furthers their subversive aims. And when they take hold of institutions they form a “confederacy of dunces” whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line.

That is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places, and why Furedi, who must have one hell of a time in the University of Kent, still tries to claim the status of a left-wing intellectual, and to conceal as best he can the truth, that he is a genuinely educated (and transparently conservative) man.

Scruton seems to describe Furedi as a “man of letters” as opposed to an "intellectual", and accuses him of being conservative, even though Furedi at one time founded the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Great Britain. It occurs to me that it is the “confederacy of dunces” disorder that is the issue here. Pierson comments on this too.

Julien Benda, in La Trahison des Clercs, traced the disasters of his time [1927] to the rise of German historical and nationalist thought in the nineteenth century. The triumph of German ideas, he wrote, led to the “bankruptcy of Hellenism”—that is, to the tradition of classical learning that had earlier been so influential. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, wrote something similar when he pointed out that the ideals of liberty that prevailed among thinking men in 1800 were gradually overtaken during the nineteenth century by German historical thought that originated with Hegel and Marx. By the time of World War I, he wrote, most intellectuals had been converted to one or another version of socialism. By this Benda and Hayek meant not that most intellectuals were Marxists or Hegelians, but that they accepted the main presumption of historicism that history is moving in some identifiable direction toward a grand destination. In the case of left-wing or progressive thinkers, this meant that history is moving inevitably in a secular and egalitarian direction which will culminate either in socialism or a version of a democratic welfare state. The proper role of the intellectual, then, given the assumptions of historicism, is to assist the movement of history along this general path. If we are to believe Benda and Hayek, the intellectual advanced through the twentieth century in tandem with the historical premise.

A false premise that distracted society from useful progress, in the name of progress, for a hundred years and more. How could such a thing happen? In the earlier post Size Matters Herb Gintis provided one explanation:

Fitness enhancing, however, does not always mean true in the scientific sense. Thus, many untrue beliefs have proliferated in even the most advanced societies.

Fourth, advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight to any of the above assertions. Think of our own society, where the most educated classes have believed such things as (a) autism is cause by poor mothering, (b) fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you, (c) colds are caught by sitting in a draft, (d) second hand smoke is so bad for non-smokers that smokers have absolutely no right to smoke in public. And so on. Not to mention whole ideologies, such as Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory.

Gintis focuses on evolutionary game theory and shows how false beliefs can be beneficial when they support social cohesion. Social cohesion is a good thing for societies but can also lead to collapse since this sort of fitness enhancing tendency does not mean that the beliefs are true, and other societies with better socialization will best them even if they don't simply collapse due to the effects of erroneous belief.

Another way to think about the proliferation of false, ultimately fitness reducing beliefs is to consider the record of error among political pundits, including intellectuals as well as those who fit the older idea of men of letters. Their predictions and prescriptions are laughably wrong far more often than not. Historicism was a foolish notion as a grand narrative but they are just as bad at near term predictions.

The earlier post Science Class touched on this subject, using Philip Tetlock’s book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” as a source of insight. I saw that work as an aspect of the larger issue of group cognition, and linked it to the work of James Surowieki, Scott Page and Lu Hong. Happily, Scott Page has a new review of Tetlock in Comparative Politics Newsletter. I don't have a link but Scott was kind enough to send me a copy (Thanks Scott!) and permit some excerpts to be posted.

Among the most laudable features of this book is Tetlock’s attempt to take these lemons and make lemonade. First, he considers the use of scenarios to create better predictions. Thinking through scenarios can sometimes work, but sometimes eating peanut butter cures cancer as well. Tetlock asks for systematic evidence. It’s a good bet. Contemplating multiple scenarios could make foxes of hedgehogs and add musculature to the todds, vixens, and kits. Sadly, it doesn’t work. The hedgehogs dig in their little paws, rejecting any scenario inconsistent with their worldview. And the foxes? They fall victim to their open-mindedness and cannot distinguish the reasonable from the ridiculous. Instead, Tetlock suggests that pundits should get regular scorecards based on how well they predict. If followed, we might know when to turn that radio dial or flip that channel. Certainly, this is a good idea. And, one would think that Google would already be doing it.

The book has intriguing tangential implications as well. First, consider that much of current international relations research considers rational actors. Many of these models assume that those actors have perfect foresight – aside from some uncertainty, which they absorb in perfect Bayesian fashion. Yet, as this book makes clear, the world ain’t that way. No one seems to have much of a clue what will happen next. Shouldn’t our models and theories embrace that fact? SecondJB, most “real” empirical social scientists restrict their predictions to events that took place in the past. That hardly seems a challenge – it’s like finding a Poisson distribution in a barrel of data. No wonder I, an adult male, accept the idea of empirical integration of theoretic models. I see nothing difficult about that at all. Finally, I couldn’t help but wonder what Hayek might say. So, individually the hedgehogs are not so good. What about a crowd of hedgehogs? Tetlock tells us that a crowd is quite good: the average of the hedgehogs predicts better than 95% percent of the hedgehogs. He arrives at this percentage without following his own advice and first sweeping out the most prognostically challenged of the short prickly onesJB. Had he done that, the crowd of hedgehogs would have been even better. This logic leads to the observation that we might have expert political judgment after all, but that producing it requires an ark -- one that includes hedgehogs, foxes, and even donkeys and elephants. From diversity comes wisdom.

I hadn't known of the medicinal value of peanut butter. Page makes other stunning revelations in the article as well, so find a copy if you can. He also has a book in the works which I'm eager to read when it is published (I'm trying to get a review copy and will do an exegesis of it if I succeed). He describes it as being about "his diversity stuff", referring to his paper Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers.

Diversity. It seems to be a key to group problem solving. All of the efforts to purge the ideologically impure - one of the most prominent characteristics of the past 100 years of leftist intellectual futility as well as a continuing characteristic of the quasi-leftist Democrats in the US (kill Joe) - seem to be precisely mistaken. The purification of universities, journalism etc. that Scruton referred to above is contrary to a presumed goal of advancing knowledge, making social progress and pursuit of truth. This isn't diversity in the vulgar sense of race, gender or ethnicity. It is heuristic diversity, diversity in the way team members think and set about problem solving.

The failures of public intellectualism and the consequent predictions of demise might be mitigated by grasping at long last that heuristic diversity in "the club" is a key to progress. If they are genuinely progressives, not merely reactionaries seeking to preserve the perquisites of intimate tyrannies in their institutions, then the canon must be enlarged and the gates opened to those previously considered to be enemies. It may be galling but it must be done.

Update:

Hizbolleft

It's only one opinion piece, and Judt is only one writer. But what he has written here has a general significance, and one strangely relevant to his chosen subject. For, if you want to reflect on a failure of recent liberalism (in the American sense of that word), it is the current this opinion piece of his represents that you should take note of. Forget - in this context - the Hizbolleft: those who were unembarrassed to hope for a US defeat in Iraq by Saddam's armies, then to express solidarity with an anti-democratic and murderous insurgency, and more lately to do the same with an avowedly anti-Semitic movement opposed to the existence of Israel. More interesting are all those good liberals and leftists of anti-war conviction to whom none of this applies, but for whom nonetheless there has been only one truth and one virtue, to be the same as them; and the main object of whose animus, whose almost daily passion, has been - what? - not 'malign regimes', not apologists for terror, certainly not the denizens of the aforesaid Hizbolleft; no, as demonstrated again here by Tony Judt, that main object has been the segment of the liberal-left (when they allow that we do actually remain liberal or left) which has taken a view on current international conflicts that is opposed to theirs. What a sorry debacle.

He's on to something there. This is especially true of those stricken with BDS in addition to their already high opinion of themselves.