THE TORTURED ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL IN AMERICA

THE most depressing aspect of many campus disorders is what they reveal not about students but about professors. The academics are so divided that some are resisting desirable reforms while others are joining student rebels in disrupting their own universities. Worse, the faculty split reflects a division that afflicts intellectuals far beyond the campus. Never before have U.S. intellectuals enjoyed such affluence and celebrity, yet never before have they so vilified one another for "complicity with the Establishment." To hear some intellectuals tell it, the U.S. has entered a new period of anti-intellectualism--fomented by intellectuals themselves.

All this seems peculiar at a time when the U.S. teems with putative intellectuals--in hospitals, foundations, think tanks, the government, "knowledge industry" corporations. A company of RCA's scope is now involved not only in manufacturing but also in producing novels and doing research in linear algebra. The Pentagon's interests range from high-energy physics to tutoring for school dropouts. The U.S. needs intellectuals for defense, city planning, space exploration, for running computers and training more intellectuals. The intellectual's horizons are almost unlimited. Then why is he so unhappy?

The chief problem is that some intellectuals are helping to run society--while other intellectuals are busy accusing them of botching the job. Many denounce the Viet Nam war as "an intellectuals' war," because assorted academics helped conduct it. Meantime, the New Left has attacked liberals for having failed to cure the country's social ills. Caught in this cross fire, the intellectuals are wavering between passive despair and revolutionary fervor. Today, many intellectuals are unsure of where they fit into U.S. life, unsure of how to apply their intelligence to rational reform --even unsure of just what an intellectual is, or ought to be.

Truth and Crime

Americans have used the word for only about 60 years. It is frequently applied on the basis of fashion, folklore and snobbery. An invisible admissions committee rules out most conservatives--except, perhaps, a William F. Buckley or a Milton Friedman. "Liberal" and "intellectual" are thought to meld nicely. Among scientists, for example, Liberal J. Robert Oppenheimer met the test, but Conservative Edward Teller did not. If nothing else, Viet Nam has provided a handy screening device. Opposition to the war has clinched the intellectual standing of Senator J. William Fulbright and perhaps even of Dr. Spock. War supporters who have been drummed out of the fraternity include Dean Rusk, John Roche and Eric Hoffer. As a crypto-opponent, Robert S. McNamara is slowly being reinstated, and the admissions committee is eyeing a most impressive candidate: General David M. Shoup, a Marine hero who calls the U.S. "a militaristic and aggressive nation."

Politics aside (if that is possible), Robert Hutchins defines an intellectual as "a person who lives by his wits, whose first object is to educate himself. You can win a Nobel prize and still not be an intellectual." Historian Richard Hofstadter describes the intellectual as a man who lives for ideas, while the professional man lives off ideas. Another historian, Christopher Lasch, calls him "a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play." Clearly, an intellectual's mind is not restricted to one discipline, but ranges widely in many areas, seeking larger patterns. No mere expert or operator, the true intellectual aims for synthesis, moral vision, a grand design.

Alienation has been the intellectual's occupational disease throughout history, the assumption being that he must be a critic of society and established values. Says M.I.T. Linguist Noam Chomsky: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies." Unfortunately, human affairs often yield a multiplicity of truths, a fact that some intellectuals find hard to tolerate. In her book, Vietnam, Mary McCarthy made a strong case for U.S. withdrawal, but she rejected any obligation to suggest how it might be achieved. The fate of the Vietnamese whose lives depend on U.S. protection--well, such human complexities seemed irrelevant. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse brilliantly analyzes flaws in U.S. society, but he prescribes, among other things, a corrective "intolerance" from the left that, some feel, smacks of fascism run by intellectuals. "Absolutized thought," says Columbia's Daniel Bell, "is the real crime of the intellectuals."

Two Cultures

According to Plato, a man is irresponsible not to aid society if he has the intelligence to do so. That formulation of the intellectual's responsibility has an unassailable simplicity, but the role acquires deep moral complexity when intellectuals join big organizations such as government. The very political activism that so cheered intellectuals in the first days of the New Frontier is now widely regarded as corruption and betrayal. Under John Kennedy and on into the Johnson Administration, the intellectual seemed ubiquitous --moving back and forth among the universities, government, business and industry. Harvard's Edwin O. Reischauer and John Kenneth Galbraith were dispatched as ambassadors to Japan and India. "Pragmatic" intellectuals like Economist Walt Rostow and the Bundy brothers, McGeorge and William, helped to formulate the war's policies and rationale. As they did so, the schism in the intellectual community widened.

One reason for the split is that there are really two kinds of intellectuals today: 1) the physical scientists and many (if not all) social scientists, who tend to be reasonably well satisfied with their inside roles in government, industry and the universities, and 2) the philosophers and literary intellectuals, who feel more or less like outsiders. This is basically the problem of the "two cultures" described by C. P. Snow. At the same time, many intellectuals are defecting from the first group and joining the second.

Both the outsiders and the defectors are concerned that technological society is headed for what John Gardner calls "the beehive model"--a world of faceless bureaucracies and powerless individuals. One target is today's "multiversity," with its fragmented specialists, the antithesis of Cardinal Newman's 19th century idea of the university as a seeker of wholeness. Many intellectuals are also dismayed by the style of much intellectual thought today: the narrow pragmatism of the physical and behavioral sciences. The charge is that specialization has robbed thought of moral vision. In Big Science, for example, team members work on such small segments of an overall project that they feel no ethical responsibility for the result--a minor concern if the goal is a cancer cure, for example, but a major one if they work on pesticides.

Worldly Roles

Above all, the antipragmatists have focused on the Viet Nam war as a classic case of myopic "crisis management." What seemed immediately workable, they say, was quickly done without regard to moral and political consequences. Noam Chomsky, a leading war dissenter, has lambasted such thinking in his acute if intemperate book, American Power and the New Mandarins. Chomsky cites one Far East expert who assured a congressional committee that the North Vietnamese "would be perfectly happy to be bombed to be free." Another scholar proposed that the U.S. tame China by buying up all surplus Canadian and Australian wheat. As he saw it, the resulting Chinese famine would be "only incidental" to the desired collapse of the Communists.

Actually, it verges on caricature to blame pragmatic intellectuals for so much of the war. Both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson relied heavily on other kinds of advisers, notably the military, with its enthusiastic contingency plans. Moreover, it was primarily intellectuals who inspired a national dissidence sufficient to drive Lyndon Johnson from office. Still, the war does demonstrate that many scientists and scholars have not yet learned to handle their worldly roles. Some have been blinded by government research, which has transformed the nature of American universities. Yet few modern intellectuals can retreat to ivory-tower isolation. How, then, should intellectuals conduct themselves in what Physicist Max Born calls a "post-ethical" society?

For one thing, the academics had better get involved pretty soon in reforming their own universities, not only by governing them after years of neglect but by giving campuses the kind of intellectual soul that creates moral authority. "There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools," argues Robert Hutchins. "They must be centers of criticism. If you turn the university into a trade school or a branch of the knowledge industry, there is no real possibility of maintaining it as a center. The parts of a multiversity have no center." To help broaden specialists' minds, Hutchins proposes to halt university expansion whenever enrollment exceeds a few thousand. Instead, he would build smaller universities in which all major disciplines would be in touch, giving both scholars and students badly needed interdisciplinary studies. Many campuses have weighed a curb on secret war research, and last week M.I.T. began turning away new contracts. It seems undesirable to transfer such work entirely to the military, but much of it could well be shifted to independent research centers such as the Rand Corp. The secret work that some scholars perform for the CIA in a university setting is also due for rethinking.

Dissent and Power

Many intellectuals obviously must be involved in government. It is not enough to argue that such work risks intellectual compromise. Of course it does, but the greater risk is a government without intellectuals. Who wants, for example, a CIA run entirely by soldiers and policemen? In 1965 Robert Wood, head of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, considered the problem that such involvement means for intellectuals: "Given the uncertainties of actual influence possessed, its effectiveness and appropriateness, and the welter of motivations that compel the intellectual, it is not surprising that his present role is tentative and tormented." Now that he is back in Cambridge after three years as Under Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Wood says: "It was a sobering but not a corrupting experience. The alternative in a big, complex society is to let the programs and policies be formulated by intuition, by interest groups, by the feelings of politicians who are too busy to focus much attention on the problems."

Intellectuals should learn to master the art of dissent within government, a problem that has greatly changed since the days of Thomas More and Machiavelli. James C. Thomson Jr., a former East Asia specialist at the State Department and White House, writes that in the internal Government debate over Viet Nam, "doubters and dissenters were effectively neutralized by a subtle dynamic: the domestication of dissenters." As soon as former Under Secretary of State George Ball began to express doubts, he was "warmly institutionalized." At each stage of the war's escalation, he was invited to express his dissent. Concludes Thomson: "Ball felt good, I assume (he had fought for righteousness); the others felt good (they had given a full hearing to the dovish opposition), and there was minimal unpleasantness." Historian Eric Goldman, who left the White House in 1966 after nearly three unhappy years as President Johnson's "intellectual-in-residence," feels that the intellectual must go further than token dissent: "If you disagree with a basic policy of a President and you are working for him, you have two choices: 1) try to change his policy but go on working for him; 2) quit."

A New Vision

Wherever he works, in fact, the intellectual's responsibilities are the same. "You must dedicate yourself," says Hutchins, "to trying to understand things, and you must do this without regard for your source of financing." Clearly, this means that intellectuals should not keep quiet. Are they also obliged to propose alternatives to policies that they condemn? Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti believes that "the foremost contribution of intellectuals is dissent. To be opposed to the atomic bomb is not exactly negative thinking." It is also easy. The harder task is to be constructive about problems that are tougher because they may be soluble.

To that end, the country's intellectuals are hardly as powerless as many claim to be. The U.S. still heeds the individual social critic who builds a powerful case. Michael Harrington's The Other America, for instance, was a key impetus for the poverty program. Other effective reformers abound--James Bryant Conant, John Gardner, Ralph Nader, Saul Alinsky and Daniel Moynihan, to cite a few. And who ever dreamed that Eugene McCarthy would do so well in the New Hampshire primary?

For many unhappy intellectuals, the quick answer is that McCarthy failed in the end, that reformers just nibble at things, and that America needs a good revolution to save itself. In fact, such pessimism may be rather premature. Today, important thinking about moral synthesis is coming from the very scientific intellectuals whom literary intellectuals decry. It was morally sensitive scientists who helped inspire the nuclear-test-ban treaty, and they also lead the most informed debate on the ABM program. In addition, an entire new generation of scientific intellectuals is deeply concerned about ecology and environment--preoccupations that far transcend the borders of narrow pragmatic thinking.

Such men inspire hope that the next stage in intellectual history will be a renewed sense of wholeness and the unity of knowledge. The time has come for intellectuals to study and teach that vision. What they should remember, though, is their own tendency to hope more innocently and despair more deeply than others. Flaubert had some good advice for intellectuals of every stripe: "By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself." That risk is unusually high among today's divided intellectuals; perhaps if they lowered their own idiocy level, the rest of society would follow.

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