"Free-Floating Intellectuals" and Their Enemies: Scattershot Take

One thing the relatively unattached free-floating intellectual (FFUI) is not is a specialist "expert." There now exists an entire shelf of books on Expertology (my current favorite is titled The Experts Speak), and I find them funny, then lamentable (not the books, the so-called "experts"), then galling. Galling because our culture is still so authoritarian that anyone with a modicum of knowledge and some chutzpah or maybe some sociopathy going on...can call themselves an "expert" and be paraded on TV "news" shows, interviewed by a failed actor/actress who was assured by the producers they themselves are "journalists" who aren't supposed to have an informed opinion anyway. And these "experts" get asked all the questions I would not have asked...and then, apparently, no one in the TV news media bothers to keep a track record of these so-called "experts." Because often, you and I could have prognosticated as well as the "experts."

Rather than "experts" it's more like "Here's someone to fill space in our broadcast, and the graphics you read right there on your screen and the books behind the space-filler say 'You can trust me to know something you're too lazy to have tried to find out for yourself. Trust me. I know.' Now relax and calmly tell yourself over and over, repeat after me: I am being informed...I am being informed...I am being informed.'"

Yea, apparently the TV "news" (nuzak?) -watching crowd needs to be told what to think by an "expert." I find this embarrassing. For one, their expertise usually isn't worth much, but worse: what's wrong with trying to figure things out for yourself? Hey all you citizens who watch Face The Nation: have you ever spent a few days trying to figure out, from the ground up, how the Finance Capital system really works?


Naw, didn't think so. Relax. Breathe deeply, exhale slowly, the serious white men will inform you.

Recently Daniel Bell died. He was a Man of Knowledge who was thought of as an expert and who didn't go out of his way to dispel the idea. In 1960 he published a book called The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties;with "The Resumption of History in the New Century", this linked book being his way of covering for himself. (Anytime you see a book called "The End of an abstract word," you can be sure you're looking at a book that will be an embarrassment to the author in ten years. Hello, Francis Fukuyama! How are your Neo-Con pals? Oh? They won't have you because you disagreed with them on some tenet? Sounds Stalinist to me...Oh? Oh! I see: you quit them.)


Get a load of Daniel Bell in an article in Commentary in 1964. He claimed - in 1964! - we had achieved, "The egalitarian and socially mobile society which the 'free-floating intellectuals' associated with the Marxist tradition have been calling for during the last hundred years."


First off, thanks for the longer pedigree. And what made you think we had achieved such a thing? And that it would apparently remain? Your reading of Hegel? (Here's an interview with Bell, probably his last before his death; it gives the flavor, in my opinion, of someone who was brilliant but too cozy with institutions - Bell was nothing close to free-floating - that supported him, and he seems incapable of saying, "Boy, did I get that wrong!" This is one of the reasons the 40-50 year reign of the New York Intellectuals as self-appointed Philosopher Kings was a world well-lost. Still, of all the New York Intellectuals, Bell was probably the best generalist and maybe the smartest of them all. Still: Welcome, Third Culture.)
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But even more welcome: the FFUIs and polymaths, synthesizers, flaneurs, multi-interdisciplinarians, systems thinkers, holistic versatile divergently-thinking cultural creatives, diligent magpie researchers, promiscuous and inveterate readers of fiction/ non-fiction/and everything else and your practiced syntopicalist methods of thought and writing, you brilliant cranky autodidacts with compendious minds, you historically-informed poets. Welcome, you homo ludens erudites and organic intellectuals with nonviolent stealthy methods for community, creativity, liberty, and love!
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I end with a sermon for the FFUI, from one Friedrich Nietzsche. The FFUI and any free-thinker's mind must contend with the mind-deadening act of the priest in an organized religion. (I realize there seem to be some very interesting exceptions.) He is a shepherd of his flock of sheep. He spreads his oral pox via the Word from on high...or so his act goes. Gosh, Father...thanks a lot! videlicet:


"I have been understood. The beginning of the Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest. The priest knows only one great danger: that is science, the sound conception of cause and effect. But on the whole science prospers only under happy circumstances - there must be a surplus of time, of spirit, to make 'knowledge' possible. 'Consequently man must be made unhappy' - that was the logic of the priest in every age.

"It will now be clear what was introduced into the world for the first time, in accordance with this logic: 'sin.' The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole 'moral world order,' was invented against science, against the emancipation of man from the priest. Man shall not look outside; he shall look into himself; he shall not look into things cleverly and cautiously, like a learner, he shall not look at all - he shall suffer. And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all times. Away with physicians! A Savior is needed. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of 'grace,' of 'redemption,' of 'forgiveness' - lies through and through, and without any psychological reality - were invented to destroy man's causal sense: they are an attempt to assassinate cause and effect. And not an attempt to assassinate with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hatred and love! But born of the most cowardly, most cunning, lowest instincts. A priestly attempt! A parasite's attempt! A vampirism of pale, subterranean bloodsuckers!

"When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer 'natural," but thought of as caused by the conceptual specters of superstition, by 'God,' by 'spirits,' by 'souls,' as if they were merely 'moral' consequences, as reward, punishment, hint, means of education, then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed - then the greatest crime against humanity has been committed. Sin, to repeat it once more, this form of man's self-violation par excellence, was invented to make science, culture, every elevation and nobility of man, impossible. The priest rules through the invention of sin."
-section #49 of The Antichrist. 
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Wow! You don't get to hear a firebrand like that every day, do ya? I have some qualms with Fred's points here, but reading stuff like this is a tonic for the FFUI: sometimes we're just glad that someone said that, in that way, with that...style... even if maybe we don't go along with it 100%. (Or maybe you do? Really? Forgiveness is part of the priest's con? How "free-floating" are we?)

Threats of Intellectuals and Perceived Thinkers and Other Potential Dangerous Types: Another Angle

For our purposes, from the time Arnold Toynbee wrote about this very-real "problem" for the State in his magisterial and multivolume A Study of History (12 vols written between 1934-61, a stupendous work), there have been warnings about unemployed intellectuals and other types of resentful thinker-types from other writers as well, ever since.


Well, come to think, there were a few warnings before Toynbee...(Actually, they go very far back, but I will stick with the Roaring 20th Century...)


Walter Kotschnig published Unemployment In The Learned Professions in 1937, arguing, among other things, that the rise of Nazism was due to the expansion of German university enrollment after what is commonly referred to as "World War I." The enrollment expansion - according to Kotschnig - was a short-term solution to post-war unemployment (sort of like the G.I. Bill in the U.S. after 1945). The problem? The Germans created a "mob" of well-educated volk with no jobs to turn to after matriculation, and what they did and said and wrote about the State when they were out of work led to a rapid fall of the Weimar Republic, and a vacuum was created for the guy with the funny little mustache. Things did not turn out well.


Daniel Bell, one of the New York intellectuals who rose to national prominence as a public thinker as the Cold War got up to speed, wrote about a similar problem for The New Republic in the U.S. in 1953 here, and he cites Kotschnig and Karl Mannheim in an interesting context.


Interestingly, the ox-dumb stupidity of the Republican party plays a similar cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-the-country's-face role as it did during the Reign of King Boy George W: under Dumya, if a translator of Arabic or Pashto was found to be homosexual, he got the boot, right at the moment the U.S. needed as many good translators as possible. In the early Eisenhower administration, just the fact you had the scarlet letter "D" (for Democrat) after your name and had studied the Russians meant you were going to be canned, despite your experience. And then they added on top of that the inquisition period led by an alcoholic jingo from Wisconsin named McCarthy. And J. Edgar Hoover and his boy-friend Roy Cohn... and OY VEY! how do so many mean, sick and outright psychopathic people perennially rise to power in the U.S? (No, seriously: gimme your take on this. I have my theories.)


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1961: Harvard prof Robert Ulrich publishes a book with a snooze-worthy title, Philosophy of Education. To nudge us awake, though: "We are producing more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling arose in them hopes which society cannot fulfill...These men and women will form the avant-garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say [people like these] were responsible for World War II." (Thanks here to the maverick writer on Education and one of my intellectual heroes, John Taylor Gatto, who points out that the idea of universal education would be always be a potential sword pointed at the State [or current Ruling Class/Families] existed from the time of the Tudors!)


Ahhhh...sooo....not only do Great Thinkers throughout history get the Platonic Complex (wanting to seize State power for themselves as Philosopher Kings), but the State seems in (rarely openly stated) perpetual fear of its own disaffected intellectuals, or people who earned their degrees and can only wait tables or drive cabs...


Noam Chomsky in particular has done yeoman work in revealing this under-employed and under-utilized Class as "enemy territory" in declassified State Department Baldspeak. Yes, its own citizens are thought of as "enemy territory." I would cite my sources, but would rather, as Ring Lardner said, "You could look it up."
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One wonders, with the economy as bad as its been since The Depression and scads of stories like this, what is in store for the Americans who owe $40K in student loans and work at Best Buy or McDonald's now? Has the order of things - including our nervous systems by dazzling electronic gadgetry - changed enough to keep this educated rabble mollified with their couch surfing, involvement in The Spectacle, and drugs? We shall see...

This issue of "problem" intellectuals and other educated people has by no means been confined to the U.S. or the West. Let's revisit Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, mid-1970s, shall we? (I know, I know: must we? It'll only take a few seconds of your time, I promise!)

Pol Pot was educated at the Sorbonne (!), but, like other revolutionary leaders, he had a Platonic Complex: "communism" would only work, he believed, if you purged the other smarty-pants as a good start. They just cause problems, because they have been educated to question authority. And so, to quote a basic article on that time and place:

"The Khmer Rouge believed that their biggest threats were intellectuals because they had the intelligence to question authority and possibly overthrow the regime. Thus, teachers, doctors, lawyers and even members of the army were immediately killed. Even wearing glasses was enough reason for the Khmer Rouge to murder civilians. They took eliminating intellectuals so seriously that even extended families were killed; for example, the second cousin of a doctor could be killed for his relations." (entire short article here.) 


One further wonders how many lives would have been saved had the Cambodians had access to Lasik. Or even: contact lenses? (Gallows humor has its place, friends!)


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In the early 1950s, the Chinese regime - steeped in at least a thousand years of cultural suspicion toward egg-heads - began a massive "registry" of intellectuals. The People's Republic of China in particular were suspicious of smart people (never mind that Mao was trained as a teacher!), and the "problem" was too many potential troublemakers concentrated in urban areas. There was going to be tension between the smart people and the new commisars of the PRC. 


So, on with the registration of shiye zhishifenzi, or "unemployed intellectuals." The problem: just about anyone who could read was a problem: former Kuomintang agents, state employees who had previously been fired, smart people who were seen as "non-specialists," housewives (!), "legally unqualified individuals," (whatever that means), and my favorite, "social deviants." This last group hits home for me...


The amazing thing, the take-away message: the Elite PRC had included all of these as "intellectuals" of the wrong sort, housewives and social deviants alike, as some class of competition (then-designated as "mental workers") that must be vanquished if the One True Best State were to be achieved! (For further insight into this broad historical problem, see Popper, Karl: The Open Society and Its Enemies) 


So anyway, I find these endless stories of people like the shiye zhishifenzi of morbid fascination. Don't mind me; maybe I'm just "weird" that way. 


But let no one mistake the clear message: "intellectuals" (however broadly you define them) are almost always seen as the "dangerous class" by those who have seized State power, and with very few exceptions, State power is run on the neural networks of intellectuals themselves. 


(A crucial exception to "intellectuals" as used the first time in the above paragraph, in the broad sense: the State actively courts technical intelligentsia: social "scientists" who know how to handle mob psychology, and the physicists/chemists/biologist "geeks" who stoke the technical imperatives of the Military-Industrial-Academic-Entertainment Complex. Must we have an increasingly hi-tech Bread and Circus world? I guess so...)


Anyway, what I guess I was trying to say is; go out and have some FUN this weekend! (Or what the hell: right now?)