World's top intellectuals: old men

Huh. What times we live in, eh? The magic of progress. It just gives me shivers.


Home

Quote of the day: "counter-hegemonic discourse"

Quit yer intellectual bellyachin' and get your brainiac ass out there.

Is he suggesting, then, that scholars should remain cloistered in academia, holding conversations only with each other? "No," he insists. "I'm a great believer in reaching out. We should be challenging ourselves, our students and the wider world. Instead we're giving out more and more degrees while flattering the public, as if they were children, instead of drawing them into challenging dialogues."
...
"It is the burden of an intellectual to make his or her ideas matter. He or she should be out there in the public domain, fighting their corner and rebutting argument. That's the stuff of intellectual life. You're not throwing it out like a message in a bottle."


Home

Quick and savvy (or "Quavvy") is new smart

Haha! He landed on brown again! Just don't call him stupid.

Those of us who've grown up in the Internet age, have -- at least in our own minds -- reinterpreted the meaning of intelligence. We've largely replaced our parents' traditional knowledge-based book smarts with resourcefulness -- the ability to navigate through reams of information quickly and effectively, and isolate what's important.



Home

I'm sure I've mentioned this elsewhere, but for anyone interested in evolution, paleontology, baseball, the relationship between the arts and sciences, and so much more, Stephen Jay Gould's yer man.

One Night Only! Sunday! Sunday! SUNDAY! The Polymaths vs. the Popularisers! Smell the Carnage, Hear the Thunder! Thunder! THUNDER!

Don't you dare miss it!



Home

One problem might be, if you don't take sides, then you are defaulted onto a side; those not for the war are seen to be against it, for example, especially in a hyper-patriotic environment.

I thought it was interesting, though, how many people turned to poems like Auden's "Spetember 9, 1939", which seemed to capture better than just about anything else that feeling of shock and fear in the days immediately after 9/11 that seemed to drown out all but the faintest hope.

It's interesting to look back on past major global conflicts to see how "the intelligencia" (ug, do we need to use that term?) responded. Auden was obviously ambivalent about WWII. Orwell was ambivalent, too, but decided it was better (nay, obligatory) to join the side of the British Imperialists he'd previous spent a lot of energy undermining because a Nazi (or Communist) victory was unfathomable. Though he did fathom it later in 1984, where he described the future as a human face with a boot forever stomping on it.

Yes, the Bushies have been good at pushing their monologue about what's happening, why it's happening, and what should be done about it -- but that monologue is coming under increasing pressure. From intellectuals? No. Or not only. It's coming from Democratic Party Presidential hopefuls, among others.

Yeah yeah, I think I think.

Ya think?

Maybe one of the nasty, lingering effects of the terror attacks that day is that anyone who challenges the U.S. government, its policies or its leaders, can be attacked by the government and its supports by being labelled anti-patriotic. Perhaps this had made the literary intelligentsia somewhat sheepish of late. It will be interesting to see how this will change when Bush doesn't win another term.

It was raining that day.

Where were they on Sept. 10th?

Why Do Writers Have to Take Sides?

Has the "literary-academic intelligent- sia disappeared morally in the ashes of ground zero?"




Home