Religious Function of Intellectuals: A Jabber

I was talking to a friend last night and talking too much, as I often do.

I get excited about ideas and they begin to multiply exponentially in my mind as I'm trying to deliver sentences, the excitement combines with adrenaline and its popular accomplices, my pulse quickens, and I continue to speak, evermore quickly. I begin to question in my mind what I just said while I'm suddenly veering off on a tangent, my speech becomes quicker and, as a psychoanalyst might say, "pressured," and soon: a 93 idea pile-up occurs inside my mind.

I halt, take a breath and look upwards and to the right, suddenly.

"Whoa! Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?," my friend asks, no doubt half-exasperated at yet another of my spiels.

"A really nasty-sounding idea trainwreck just happened on the outskirts of Frontal-Lobe-ville," as I point to my noggin.

"I see."

I apologize and ask him to continue with his previous line of reasoning. On Unity and God, I think it was. Probably. Quantum mechanics and the Whorf Hypothesis were shoehorned in there, too, and I certainly appreciated the attempt, another of our forays, our essais. (Much of it is a blur the day after, so infused with ideas were we. I may has well have been speaking "in tongues" just before my Crash. What sort of madness is this?)

Moments later I cite a book's title in yet another ramble and he interrupts me and asks, "How many books do you think you've read in your life? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand?"

This rapidly becomes uncomfortable, I'm not sure why, but I'll hazard this: I feel like a book-idiot more and more as I get older. Leary and Wilson cited this as a problem with "Third Circuit" types. NB: While I noted endogenous chemicals in my nervous system that act as stimulants - adrenaline, etc - I was also on two very rich pints of craft beer; the sort that's over 8% alcohol by volume, so I may have had a bit of 2nd circuit territoriality going on there, although I would swear I was just trying to be "interesting." Back to the Book Idiocy: I confessed aloud I thought I'd made myself stupid through too much reading. I'm drunk on books. As Philip Seymour Hoffman may have thought for a few moments last week before he died, "I wonder if I'm letting this heroin stuff get a little out of hand? Maybe I should dial it back a bit. Something about this seems a little crazy. Yea: tomorrow I'll start to move toward more integrity..."

There's a long history of quotes by famous writers about this. I fear I fit the sort of chap Milton's writing about here:

Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and a judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.
-Paradise Regained 

(Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot? The OG quotes friggin' Milton now? Apparently: yes! Oy...)

Indeed, I enjoy re-rehearsing one of my many Favorite Bits when the opportunity presents itself (Oh! Such True Confessions of what a bore you're reading now!): that Gutenberg Man is strung out in the narcosis of books, deeply brainwashed into believing that 26 letters, arranged appropriately, seasoned with punctuations here and there, when properly trained, can be deciphered by the Reader, eyes moving in silence left to right, left to right, left to right, left to right - a tad overly Euclidean, eh? - left to right, left to right, silently, left to right, left to right, look up what time is it?, left to right, left to right, you may be doing this now as we "speak," left to right, left to right. Pause new paragraph...

That this (please move your head back the normal six inches and look at this page of text, characters in a white field)...that these symbols are supposed to map very accurately some sort of "reality"? The very idea! It's absurd.

[You read it here, first!]

Or so says the Book-Stupid Dude.

What's with the "religious function of intellectuals," you ask, wondering why I repeatedly, insipidly bury the lede? Just this: it may be some sort of lifelong Lotus-Eating narcosis book-trip I've been on, but it occurs to me there may be a religious function to it all, and I am not exactly a religious character in any conventional sense. As Isaiah Berlin defined the character of the intellectual (or one aspect of It), "Intellectuals are people who want ideas to be as interesting as possible."

I get high off ideas. Even bad ones. Like quarter-baked conspiracy theories, or imagining phrenology in its heyday. Or some mind-bending thinker's model of the major and minor parts of social reality, as it boils down to the phenomenology of face-to-face social interaction rituals up to what constitutes the Superstructure. And when I choose to believe it, I'm aware I'm choosing to "believe" this model, knowing it's only a model, knowing I chose to believe it, making it ironic, knowing I will entertain quite different competing models manana, knowing that I know all of this seems all-too-true because of...wait for it...: books.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant. - Voltaire

I read this Voltaire quote while amongst my books of quotes; there are too many apt ones for my purposes here, so why not Voltaire? It's legit: I'm not only quoting him to seem "smart" (although I hope you don't take the "book stupid" stuff too seriously!); for I have read Candide. Twice. I've read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary piecemeal many times over. I read the Voltaire quote after a consultation in Edward Shils's The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays. Shils - contra M. Chomsky - sees intellectuals as a priestly class, and he oughtta know with his drenched-in-Max-Weber extrapolations. Shils - one of the most accomplished intellectuals of the 20th c. who didn't have a PhD and never wrote a Fat Book - saw his class as providing ideas about the sacred to the highly educated who are Modernists, and so can't take God all that seriously. Where Chomsky has chosen to concentrate on members of his fellow intellectuals who act as legitimators of State power - "mandarins" or "the commissar class" - Shils saw his fellow intellectuals as legitimators of the rational, bureaucratic state and other forms of Authority...but they don't like it. They sorta pretend to like it, because it's a good job (or was), but with all of their book knowledge they were steeped in Utopian visions, always thwarted by their bosses the oligarchs.

                          Edward Shils, most important to me because he, with Louis Wirth,
                          translated Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, which appeared
                          in English in 1936.

I like what Alvin Gouldner wrote about Shils, that he was "exceptionally emphatic in stressing the alienative disposition of intellectuals which he derives from their special culture. He sees his culture as differing from the others - the 'laity' he calls them - for they are not limited to the at-hand immediacies of everyday life. Intellectuals are more concerned than the 'laity' with the remote, with ultimate values, being disposed to go beyond direct, first-hand experience with the concrete and to live in a 'wider universe.' They are also more rule, value, pattern-oriented, or have more theoreticity than others who are more person-oriented, more situationally-sensitive, and more responsive to differences in contexts."
-p.32, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class

Now: how better to describe the role of the modern intellectual class as a sort of secular priesthood than that?

I recently caught the 2013 documentary, Hawking, directed by Stephen Finnigan. At around the 60-65 minute mark Hawking talks about the totally surprising Guinness-book success of his A Brief History of Time. It sold over 10 million copies. This seems like a very good example of a religious work to have around the household of steeped-in-rationality educated classes. A totem, a talisman, a book. A book that was probably mostly incomprehensible to most of its owners, but that wasn't the point: it's filled with our sorts of awesome mystery, not your Bronze Age-to-first century of the Common Era stuff that now functions as a prop for plutocrats.

Hey, I gave it a pretty good shot, but yea: I own it. (I know, I know: the recent black hole thing. Feel free to weigh in in the comments.)

                                    Here's a half-selfie half-"shelfie" of D. Hofstadter!

Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach seemed to serve a similar function with younger, cooler intellectuals for the first ten years after it came out. You go to a party, everyone's smart, you (meaning I) steal away to peruse their bookshelves: Yep, there's GEB. It's my Tribe! But: why did I feel like I needed to confirm that? Anyway...GEB: Another book I've read mostly piecemeal and over and over. I read in it. I once read it cover-to-cover, with faith that it's okay to not know what's going on now, because...that's what these books do. The mere grapple will re-wire the circuitry and you'll come out smarter and with more ideas to talk about, so it's gotta be worth all this...impenetrability. I can always come back to that last part once I've put in some effort to understand Peano arithmetic...Oh! and look now! He's back to the dialogues like Bertrand Russell on acid trying to outdo Lewis Carroll, the iteration of fractal forms in Escher and Bach, and...wow! Intellectual rapture?

And isn't that the point? Wow?

We will take our religion in its most fine forms, abstruse, elegant, always filled with wonderment, especially the parts that we don't...quite... "get." And then: let's talk about this sacred object of wonder: the Truth. Yes, let us talk.