October 18, 2005

NOTES ON WORDSMITH INTELLECTUALS: THE CASE OF HARRIET MIERS

"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best."
--Robert Nozick

        In his famous essay, Why Do Intellectuals Hate Capitalism the late Robert Nozick tried to explain the widespread anti-capitalism of wordsmith intellectuals. He attributed it to the contrast between the praise for their verbal facility in school and the actual financial rewards granted them after their school days ended. The coin of the realm in school- high grades, summa cum laude diplomas, Rhodes scholarships and membership in self-flattering clubs like Phi Beta Kappa, produce expectations of similar welcome from the post-school world. Once out of school, however, our capitalist society doesn’t grant its greatest remuneration to wordsmiths, and so they become disaffected anti-capitalists. This is true as far as it goes, but Horsefeathers would add that there are many conservative wordsmith intellectuals, supporters of capitalism, who nonetheless share basic attitudes and assumptions with their liberal counterparts. Their wordsmith identity transcends mere economics. It's a matter of self definition. Nozick is correct to observe that outside the classroom, in the schoolyard, other things like athletic skill, leadership, physical prowess are rewarded. Horsefeathers recalls his own experience, assuming that classroom word skills would translate into schoolyard respect. It was a hard lesson to learn that instead willingness to take an elbow in the ribs without complaint on the basketball court counted for more than vocabulary. Horsefeathers also took note of the fact that the prettiest girls in high school seemed more impressed by baseball exploits than by insights into poetry.
        Nozick is certainly correct in emphasizing the resentment of wordsmiths at a system that doesn't usually accord them great financial rewards. After getting straight A’s and grad school fellowships, spending 2 years at Oxford, sipping tea and shivering through the winter at Balliol, while discussing A.J. Ayer, it comes as a narcissistic blow to discover that a tenured professorship in English may not provide the income of a skilled plumber.Many attempt to recover from that wound by becoming pundits, and by criticizing their less verbally adept, intellectual inferiors. It restores a sense of high mindedness to pontificate on matters that may be of limited interest to all but their fellow pundits. Harriet Miers, barely known to them, is the perfect ink blot onto which they can project their deepest anxieties and resentments.
        Horsefeathers naturally values words highly; after all we have plied the 'talking cure' for many years. Furthermore, we had an undergraduate education that included composing numerous essays for the likes of Lionel Trilling, F.W. Dupee and Mark Van Doren. Words were valued highly.When F.W. Dupee offered a spot in Partisan Review to a 20 yr. old undergraduate it constituted more flattery than he could handle at the time. The essay, on James Joyce never got revised and published. Amongst our fellow undergrads, pre-Meds were regarded with scorn, sort of like economics majors, as careerist philistines, uninterested in the higher pursuit of Truth and Beauty. How fortunate we were, to escape the prison of wordsmith pursuits to attend medical school! There it became quickly apparent that verbal skills were not nearly as important as we wanted to believe. Rather, skills reminiscent of the schoolyard appeared crucial. There were doctor-teachers, not noted for verbal glibness, who deftly wielded a life saving scalpel. This was immensely noteworthy to a bookish student. They often improvised and invented creative solutions to life and death problems. There were others who remained remarkably cool under pressure, and with a life hanging in the balance could quickly and skillfully insert a tube in a trachea, or thread a needle up a collapsing vein to deliver life saving medication. Horsefeathers remembers hesitating to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a suddenly collapsing, drug addicted, filthy and smelly man, but once doing so becoming part of a lifesaving moment. A wordless pat on the back was the sum total of praise received. This was very different from receiving Lionel Trilling’s encouraging words for an essay on Kafka, but it instantly became part of Horsefeathers’ sense of identity. A life saved can mean more in the long run, than kudos for one's intellectual astuteness. I learned I could be a doer, not just a word deploying idea man. All my literary strivings, my readings of symbolist poetry, my in depth assessments of Isaac Babel-- turned out to be of no importance when dealing with a post-op patient’s sudden bleed.
        Apart from medical school experience, (regrettably no longer necessary to become a psychotherapist) calling on various non-verbal skills, there was the closeup view of real scientists and their research. No matter what the field or how remote from practical experience it seemed, one became acquainted with non-verbal creative thinking at the highest level. In fact, it became apparent that these scientists possessed a creative intelligence at least equal to the verbal pyrotechnics of a Saul Bellow or a John Updike. Experiments were devised that our precious wordsmiths would find too gruesome and unacceptable. In some fundamental way, we came to understand that these scientists were, in fact, smarter than our admired Professors of Literature. And is it not true, at this point in the early 21st century that the achievements of modern science far outstrip those of modern literature? In addition, we noticed that scientists seemed less interested in transforming themselves into adored celebrities in the way of so many contemporary wordsmiths. They weren’t constantly shouting to the world: ‘see how smart I am’. Certainly they possessed normal human ambition, and delighted in recognition, but, unlike writers like Normal Mailer, or Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, their central goal was the acquisition of knowledge, not celebrity. Still they sometimes had their acolytes, devoted to truth and beauty and convinced that words they uttered were sacred objects
        Nozick’s analysis, as we have said, is incomplete, because there are many wordsmith intellectuals who do admire capitalism. Many of them write for National Review and The Weekly Standard. They are up in arms about the nomination of Harriet Miers. Horsefeathers would argue that what wordsmith intellectuals possess in abundance is a defensive disdain for those who do not share their overvaluation of words. In the Harriet Miers kerfuffle, we see wordsmith pundits, many whom we admire, going absolutely off the deep end because they don’t see, in Miers, one of their own. Horror of horrors, they don't recognize this SMU grad, this Texan who chose to attend non-Ivy schools. To David Brooks her prose is stodgy and lifeless. Brooks is utterly unaware of his own condescension, as is Frum. After all is said and done, Miers didn’t go to Harvard. She must be incapable of subtleties of thought. Yet has anyone produced more banality than Brooks in his superficial sociological disquisitions on American life? We’d say he produces approximately 1 out of 8 columns that can hold our interest until we’ve consumed our second cup of coffee. David Frum, an ex-speech writer has organized a petition to stop Ms. Miers even before she has had a chance to appear before the judiciary committee. Why? One suspects that Ms. Miers, in her duties at the White House, may have dared to correct or question something Mr. Frum wrote. Yet what deathless prose, or profound insights has Mr. Frum given us over the years? “Axis of evil”. Okay, and after specifying that we frequently agree with him, Mr. Frum has coasted pretty far on that particular banality. That plus his Ivy League, wordsmith credentials.
        Let us be clear: we yield to no one in our wish that our President possessed the eloquence of Winston Churchill. However, it’s not his eloquence that ultimately determined Churchill’s place in history. After all, who knows whether Churchill’s pseudo Shakespearian prose style will stand the test of time. But his willingness to wage war until the end is a fact of history that cannot be effaced. Besides, if eloquence were all, Adlai Stevenson would occupy a role in the pantheon of political greats. Churchill is renowned for what he did, not for what he said. Mr. Bush will be remembered for what he did: going on the offensive against our Islamo-Nazis foes.
        Horsefeathers is not especially concerned with the quality of Harriet Miers’s prose. In our life experience, skilled wordsmiths often turn out to be immature, the kids who ran to teacher when the schoolyard fight broke out. They readily panic under fire. It’s so easy to be a pundit, discoursing on the mistakes made by the doers. Further, while Horsefeathers recognizes the importance of the Supreme Court, the incredible significance wordsmith intellectuals give to its every utterance seems, to us non-lawyers, exceedingly parochial. Technology and science continue to change our lives far more than the verdicts of the supreme court. There ARE other institutions governing the workings of Democracy in the U.S. It is not highest on our list of priorities to see the poor legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade confronted and overturned. We know all the slippery slope arguments about the dangers of permitting social agendas to govern the court, but we have more faith in the common sense of the people to eventually prevail. And it's time to let go of it and get on with life in a world where technology will soon render debates about embryonic life meaningless. Roe V. Wade may have constituted poor reasoning, but it happened, and what are the results? We are physicians, and we do know that, since Roe V. Wade the days of women dying from infected abortions taking place under dreadfully unsafe conditions are over. Is that entirely bad? Furthermore, as Steven Levitt points out in Freakonomics, fewer unwanted children has meant less crime and lower social costs, thus more benefits to the rest of society. Whether the “Roe effect” has benefited conservatives electorally is also a question, since there are indications that liberal women have more abortions, thereby reducing the number of likely liberal voters 18 years later. In any case, though, the very same conservatives who argue that the Supreme Court has too much power over our lives, themselves grant it such power by making it appear that the appointment of one or another judge outweighs all other matters, including the prosecution of World War IV.
        It comes down to this: wordsmith intellectuals, whether liberal or conservative, share a defensive disdain bordering on condescension to non-wordsmiths. They elevate their own importance, even in the intellectual realm. After all, how much do such pundits as Brooks, Frum, Lopez, et.al.understand of the greatest intellectual achievement of modernity: science? We see no evidence that they do. Instead, their grasp of the arcana of law, and of modes of legal argumentation is evident. Where is the understanding of the imperfect nature of human knowledge that would lead to a certain degree of modesty in describing someone like Harriet Miers whom they know so little about? Evidently wordsmith intellectuals, of left and right share an affection for utopian schemes of human improvement. They exalt the written and spoken word, and disdain the likes of Miers, for whom words are merely one among a number of means for mastering reality. At times our conservative pundits sound as though 8 justices all voting in lockstep with Antonin Scalia would bring Paradise on earth. Do they really think claims and counterclaims would not occur, and that arguments on all sides of issues would not have to be sorted out? Don’t they understand that even the finest mind can shift positions as facts change and new circumstances emerge? They are absolutists, dogmatic in their certitude and they risk alienating those allies who think life is complex, with often equally valid competing claims. It’s strange to see conservatives lacking the tragic awareness that life is full of complexity and that the law can never provide absolute certainty. The preference for great ideological battles, is a manifestation of the immaturity that is a built in inevitability for wordsmith intellectuals. Perhaps, after all, they should re-read the great classics of Western literature and relearn the lesson of flawed human nature. In these circumstances, we hope Harriet Miers prevails.