Power and the Intellectuals

Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once defined intellectuals as simply the more articulate members of the community. It is a rather good definition, for Niebuhr’s deliberate confusion of the life of the mind with the life of the mouth captures so perfectly the failure of conventional usage to distinguish between thinkers and talkers. It is also broad enough to include many different types of intellectualism, such as those that exercise authors Lapp and Lasch. Both are highly articulate men, and both are concerned with the badly synchronized relations between intellectuals and American society. Yet they are concerned with very different types of intellectuals from very different intellectual viewpoints.

Lapp is a nuclear scientist and speaks for the Aristotelian tradition of intellectual-as-knower. This is an intellectualism of knowledge, of having the facts. It values, say, free speech as much as any other intellectualism, but it seems much more natural to this tradition to insist with Lapp that “free speech becomes vacuous when the speaker is not knowledgeable” (Can you picture Norman Mailer saying something like that?)

EW

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E. H. Wall

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Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once defined intellectuals as simply the more articulate members of the community. It is a rather good definition, for Niebuhr’s deliberate confusion of the life of the mind with the life of the mouth captures so perfectly the failure of conventional usage to distinguish between thinkers and talkers. It is also broad enough to include many different types of intellectualism, such as those that exercise authors Lapp and Lasch. Both are highly articulate men, and both are concerned with the badly synchronized relations between intellectuals and American society. Yet they are concerned with very different types of intellectuals from very different intellectual viewpoints.

Lapp is a nuclear scientist and speaks for the Aristotelian tradition of intellectual-as-knower. This is an intellectualism of knowledge, of having the facts. It values, say, free speech as much as any other intellectualism, but it seems much more natural to this tradition to insist with Lapp that “free speech becomes vacuous when the speaker is not knowledgeable” (Can you picture Norman Mailer saying something like that?)