We started class by opening the discussion back up on readings from last week (8/24). We did a lengthy examination of Collins’ introductory definition of intellectuals as “people who produce decontextualized ideas.”
Most ideas most people, including intellectuals, have are contextualized, that is, they are closely connected to whatever is happening to us in a given situation or moment. The idea “The cat is hungry” is generally motivated by e.g., hearing the cat meow in a certain way.
Decontextualized ideas are disconnected from immediate situations and contexts and have to do with more abstract and generalized phenomena. A decontextualized idea about hungry cats is “Cats are carnivores that, in the wild, hunt prey.” Intellectuals are, far more often than non-intellectuals, concerned with such decontextualized ideas.
Another piece of this decontextualization is the intellectual search for ideas that are true regardless of context and situation. This gets to Collins’ argument (which is also made by Gouldner and Molnar) that Truth is often a central intellectual concern that motivates their efforts.
Collins also notes that Truth is viewed as a “sacred object” in such intellectual communities that is pursued in the same way that religious faithful pursue God. We talked a bit about what makes something sacred and how intellectuals can be understood as engaged in relationships with sacred objects. The sacred is defined by Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology who wrote near the end of his life a monumental study of the origins of religious life, as that which is seen as transcendent of everyday life, which stands outside of and above the mundane, and which is recognized as having a certain power that can cause us to feel reverence and/or fear in its presence. Sacred things have to be secluded and protected from pollution by the profane or mundane, as they can lose their power if they are soiled by those everyday things. This is why sacred objects are surrounded by rituals of purification and taboos.
We talked about how sacredness can be seen in intellectual life in the way e.g., some figures are recognized almost as saints or holy figures. I gave the example of a talk in Berkeley by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Hundreds of people crammed into a smallish auditorium to hear him talk about his latest research and the attitude was of hushed reverence. When he appeared on the podium, he was applauded vigorously. In France, a saying humorously referred to his elevated status: “Après Dieu, Bourdieu/After God, Bourdieu.” People came up to him after the talk seeking his autograph on copies of his books, just as you would expect to see at a celebrity book-signing.
Sacredness was seen by Durkheim as a generalizable concept that can be found in numerous fields outside religion and intellectual life. We talked a bit about sports examples. I mentioned the example of the baseball player Reggie Jackson in my youth. He was widely recognized as a great player from early in his career, but perhaps the moment that raised him to sacred status was his hitting three home runs on three pitches in a World Series game in 1977.
We then moved to discussing the readings on the schedule for this week.
We spent most of our time on the Shils chapter “The Intellectuals and the Powers.” Shils, like Collins, begins by emphasizing the intellectual relationship to the sacred: “In every society, there are some persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe and the rules which govern their society…more than the ordinary run of their fellow men, [they] are inquiring, and desirous of being in frequent communion with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life and remote in their reference in both time and space [i.e., decontextualized ideas]. In this minority, there is a need to externalize this quest in oral and written discourse, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship.”
Intellectuals are thus scholars, artists and performers of all sorts, and public figures who dedicate themselves to writing and reporting on decontextualized ideas. Their unique relationship to the sacred is better understood if we recognize that, historically, the intellectual class grew out of the priestly class. That is, the first intellectuals in all societies were religious intellectuals, who spent their time thinking about God/the gods and theorizing the relationship between the supernatural world and our world. Even when the modern intellectual class arose and some intellectuals separated themselves from religious institutions, that close relationship to sacredness remained. We can see the history of the relationship in the fact that the institution in which many (but not all) intellectuals operate–the university or college–was created in the West by the Christian church.
Shils argues that certain functions that intellectuals fill need to be met in any society, so there will always need to be intellectuals.
We then talked a bit about some of the “intellectual traditions” Shils presents, which give us neat ways of understanding how many intellectuals conceive of their identities and their relationship to the larger society.
The tradition of scientism rejects tradition as such as irrational and it embraces the pursuit of objective knowledge through rigorous testing and experimentation. Intellectuals in this tradition are often found among Gouldner’s technical intelligentsia and in universities.
The romantic tradition values originality, spontaneity, and creative individualism above all else. Not rigorous testing but the authentic expression of impulse and passion are important here for intellectual self-identification. Artists and performers are more common in this tradition.
We ended class by briefly introducing the revolutionary/apocalyptic tradition. This begins in religious intellectuals who reject the established faiths in which they were educated to embrace a morally binary vision of the world as it is as fallen and to anticipate the coming of a great cataclysm that will burn away all the fallenness of this world to create a perfect Utopia. Later, in modern secular intellectuals, this tradition lives on in forms of political Utopianism such as communism and Wokeism. We will have much more to say about this tradition in weeks to come, as it is of central importance for our investigation of Wokeism.