Assaults on the Mind

THE HOUSE OF INTELLECT (276 pp.)--Jacques Barzun--Harper ($5).

That the forces striving to make a great big fool of American man have struck a winning streak is the contention of Jacques Barzun, a Columbia University professor who would like very much to nag at the U.S. conscience if he knew where to look for it. It is not at the U.S. as such that Barzun fires his bullets; it is at the modern world at large--"egalitarian democracy, mass education and journalism, the cult of art and philanthropy, and the manners coincident with these ..."

Barzun takes a proud position as defender of a castle called Intellect, which is being attacked while "the dissemination of its products has become a planetary frenzy." Barzun's House of Intellect is an austere conception, of which the unfashionable practices of logic, authority, discipline and learning are the pillars. The enemies of the house that Jacques built are three popular idols--art, science, and something he calls philanthropy.

Painters & Probers. By art, Barzun seems to mean a cult of the sensibility; by science, a mystical cult of facts; and by philanthropy, he means a kind of goofy general doctrine of charity that holds that no idea or person can be dismissed just because the idea is absurd or the person incompetent.

Barzun cites the exurbanite foible of Sunday painting to illustrate the prevalence of artiness and to point to the decline of judgment. In a democratic society, a do-it-yourself canvas proves sincerity, if not taste. But sincerity is no substitute for Intellect. Thus, Tough Teacher Barzun records that a sweet girl graduate student burst into tears when he gave her a failing grade because she did not write good like a girl graduate should. It had never happened to her before.

Fantasy & Fog. As for science, Barzun insists that scientists cannot communicate with each other--the increasing "fantasy" of their symbolic language prohibits communication. But his sharpest nips at contemporary American are in his attack on togetherness. Barzun charges America with "hostility to intellect," of personality "coddling." His particular enemy is the "adjustment curriculum" by which rigorous studies are submerged in a queasy tide of "social" projects and group activity in the hands of "soul probers" who were once teachers.

Barzun invites all "genuine intellectuals" to take arms against the "liberal" teachers'-college products who have "a special language, a flatulent Newspeak, which combines self-righteousness with permanent fog . . ." In a sonorous exhortation, Author Barzun invites readers to remember that spelling and adding--the alphabet and mathematics--are the foundations of all learning and reason, and that the U.S. shakes them at its peril.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.