It’s certainly not a novel idea, but I found this post on Bill Buckley and the decline of public intellectuals persuasive. Bill Buckley to Jonah Goldberg, you couldn’t have a better demonstration of the decline of American conservatism as an intellectual and cultural force:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/02/wfbs-passing-glory.html
This is more a comment on public intellectuals in general than on conservatives.
Basically, it’s a mistake to focus on popularity here - there’s a lot of specialization going on. There are plenty of intellectuals - and their audience is generally other intellectuals or wonks. And it’s not just intellectuals - it’s the populism of culture in general.
The same observation could be made about popular movies, art, books, TV, etc. - as more less sophisticated people can afford to consume such things, the producers produce for the bigger market
But at the same time, with the internet and other technology reducing the cost of production, true intellectual products are also more popular than ever - but they have niche audiences. How much classical music is sold today versus in the 1970s? I’d bet dollars to donuts, without using Google at the moment, that there is more, and higher quality, music available now, even if the focus of the popular culture is on the likes of Britney Spears rather than Leonard Bernstein. Same with books, food, movies - and intellectuals.
duh!
Well, I would agree that there has been a decline of Public Intellectuals in America, whether they be on the Left or Right.
The problems is electronic media and national Attention Deficit Disorder seems to be conducive to the rise of one-liners and oversimplifications. The world is becoming more complex but the media gives (and people seem to want) simple black and white answers.
Sophistry seems to rule at the present time. How can a public intellectual with complex on ideas fit his thoughts into a sound byte. Noam Chomsky has pretty much decided its futile. I am sure that there are intellectuals on the Center and Right who feel the same.
On the other hand, Americans who are very pragmatic, tend to be a bit sceptical of intellectuals. There are some bad reasons for this but there are also some good reasons. After all, intellectuals tend to fall in love with their theories and go into cognitive dissonance when their theories start to go sour in reality. I would contend that the NeoCons are one example of this.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
But at the same time, with the internet and other technology reducing the cost of production, true intellectual products are also more popular than ever - but they have niche audiences. [/quote]
Yes, and let’s talk about that niche audience. It seems to me that public discourse has degraded over the last 20 years. There are a number of reasons. However, it seems like with the Internet and Cable TV, people just gravitate towards their gang. Conservatives listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox. Liberals listen to Air America and read Al Franken. It comes down to reading “The Daily Me”.
Am I wrong? What do you think about this?
I was thinking more along the lines of economics blogs and websites for people interested in them, but I think you’re correct on this.
I think there’s somewhat of an inverted relationship implied w/r/t cause - I think people have always preferred to listen to those with whom they already agree. That is one strong theme of politics over the course of the millennia.
What we did have, for a relatively brief historical period, was a limited set of national choices w/r/t media - particularly broadcast media. Now that there are essentially limitless choices via cable (TV and radio) and the internet, people can follow those preferences (i.e., NP can spend his days immersed in Lew Rockwell.
I also think the sheer amount of choices out there makes it more difficult to sort through one’s choices - which may exacerbate the effect of staying with the familiar.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
But at the same time, with the internet and other technology reducing the cost of production, true intellectual products are also more popular than ever - but they have niche audiences.
entheogens wrote:
Yes, and let’s talk about that niche audience. It seems to me that public discourse has degraded over the last 20 years. There are a number of reasons. However, it seems like with the Internet and Cable TV, people just gravitate towards their gang. Conservatives listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox. Liberals listen to Air America and read Al Franklin. It comes down to reading “The Daily Me”.
Am I wrong? What do you think about this?
I was thinking more along the lines of economics blogs and websites for people interested in them, but I think you’re correct on this.
I think there’s somewhat of an inverted relationship implied w/r/t cause - I think people have always preferred to listen to those with whom they already agree. That is one strong theme of politics over the course of the millennia.
What we did have, for a relatively brief historical period, was a limited set of national choices w/r/t media - particularly broadcast media. Now that there are essentially limitless choices via cable (TV and radio) and the internet, people can follow those preferences (i.e., NP can spend his days immersed in Lew Rockwell.
I also think the sheer amount of choices out there makes it more difficult to sort through one’s choices - which may exacerbate the effect of staying with the familiar.[/quote]
Possibly, but I think you need to remember that the vast majority of people get their news and opinion from TV and print journalism. Libertarian and paleoconservative blogs are the preserve of a very small number of (mostly) affluent, well-educated people. If you don’t think the tone of the debate has dropped off dramatically, give Sean Hannitty and Keith Olbermann 30 minutes each some time.
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
If you don’t think the tone of the debate has dropped off dramatically, give Sean Hannitty and Keith Olbermann 30 minutes each some time.[/quote]
30 minutes is way too much time to waste. 5 minutes is more than enough to get a headache.
Worse than those two is that guy Glen Beck. How the hell did this guy make it onto radio, much less TV.
Unbelievable.
I get much better commentary reading T-Nation PWI.
I agree w/ TB though in that a few more respectable lefties would be nice to have around.
[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
Possibly, but I think you need to remember that the vast majority of people get their news and opinion from TV and print journalism. Libertarian and paleoconservative blogs are the preserve of a very small number of (mostly) affluent, well-educated people. If you don’t think the tone of the debate has dropped off dramatically, give Sean Hannitty and Keith Olbermann 30 minutes each some time.[/quote]
I don’t know - it’s not that I don’t think the tone of the debate is highly confrontational - it’s that I think people have a tendency to idealize the level of discourse in the past. Just because these guys wouldn’t have been on the big 3 networks in the past doesn’t mean that the overall debate was more civil. Like I said above, I think the rise of these folks was because there was a large market segment whose desires weren’t being met by Walter Cronkite et al, so when the marginal cost of producing alternatives dropped markedly because of cable TV, stronger AM radio, satellite radio, the internet, etc., those alternatives had a waiting market to exploit.
I see Dan Drezner has addressed this issue:
[i]Thursday, February 28, 2008
Spare me the public intellectual nostalgia
I see that Ezra Klein thinks that William F. Buckley’s passing is symptomatic of an entire generation of public intellectuals leaving the stage ( http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=rip_william_f_buckley ):
Now I know I’ve picked on Klein in the past ( http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003406.html ), and I know that Megan McArdle has picked on him today ( The cult of the CEO - The Atlantic ) – but give me a f#$%ing break. Comparing Galbraith/Friedman to O’Reilly/Coulter is like comparing apples to worms – they both grow out of the dirt but are otherwise of a different species.
There are plenty of economists, historians, lawyers, and general-interest writers alive today who can claim the mantle of discourse that the departed once held:
Economists: Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Collier, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen, Steve Leavitt, myriad Leavitt-clones.
Historians: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Ron Chernow, John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy
Lawyers: Cass Sunstein, Richard Posner, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Laurence Tribe, Ruth Wedgwood
General Interest: Samantha Power, Andrew Sullivan, Fareed Zakaria, Martha Nussbaum, Theda Skocpol
Readers can think of other names to post in the comments. Hell, all you have to do is click over to bloggingheads.tv ( http://bloggingheads.tv/ ) and you’ll get perfectly civil and discourse from a welter of interesting critics and thinkers – including Ezra Klein.
Some of these people are more partisan than others – but I suspect they would all tend to get along as well as the people on Klein’s list. They’re just more likely to do it via short e-mails rather than long letters.
The O’Reillys and Coulters of the world also existed back in the heyday of Buckley and Galbraith: Walter Winchell comes to mind, for example.
Cable television and the Internet enhance the attention directed at hacks ( http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003406.html )-- but I seriously doubt that the state of discourse – or emnity among those producing the discourse – among the best and the brightest today is any worse than it was forty or fifty years ago.
UPDATE: James Harkin has an essay in today’s Financial Times that underscores the strength and vitality of American thinkers – compared to Europe ( http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/977faf3a-e667-11dc-8398-0000779fd2ac.html ):
[quote] Ideas are all the rage. Good ideas have always been contagious, but thanks to the internet and the increasingly globalised media, they are now making their way around the world almost as soon as they are invented. As this new market for ideas begins to settle, something else has become clear too - America is way out in front. If distinctively European thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and émigrés from Europe to America such as Hannah Arendt had dominated the battleground of ideas during the age of ideology (defined, by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, as the years between the first world war and the fall of the Berlin Wall), one of the oddities of this new landscape of ideas is that Americans seem to be much better at generating them. There are still some heavyweights around in Europe with novel things to say - Jürgen Habermas in Germany and Slavoj Zizek in Slovenia, for example - but they are few and far between. When France’s Jean Baudrillard died in March last year, at the age of 77, it seemed to signify the close of an intellectual era. In any case, Baudrillard was canny enough to know which way the intellectual wind blew. For all his criticism of American culture, he was enchanted by this place he called “the original version of modernity”. France, he pointed out, was nothing more than “a copy with subtitles”…
America's dominance in the new global landscape of ideas is not only a matter of resources. Americans have also become expert packagers of ideas. American writers and thinkers seem to have acquired the knack of explaining complex ideas in accessible ways for popular audiences. The success of idea books such as The Tipping Point and Freakonomics and a rather depressing glut of books about happiness has signified to cultural commissars a thirst for good ideas clearly expressed. It helps that journalism in America is taken more seriously than it is in most other countries; its newspapers and magazines have been happy to whet the public appetite for interesting ideas, clearly articulated. The New Yorker, buoyed by staff writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki and Louis Menand, has developed a reputation for helping to explain complex ideas to a lay audience. In 2000, The New York Times even inaugurated an annual "ideas of the year" supplement, handing out gongs to the best new ideas around the world.
Assaulted by this battery of sometimes flaky new ideas, it would be easy for European thinkers to sit back and sniff. Some of it is mere gimmickry - zappy headline titles that seem to capture the essence of a complicated idea while intriguing the reader enough to read more. Unlike many European philosophers and social scientists, however, the new idea-makers lack verbosity or obscurantism and do not retreat into jargon. A country that controls the market for ideas, remember, has its levers on a great deal else besides. Europeans thinkers, who were so formidable at producing practical ideas during the age of ideology, need to think about catching up.[/quote]
Harkin raises a point worth stressing again. Part of the vitality of American thinkers is that demand seems to be higher. In terms of books, historical narratives are more popular than ever. Publishers are killing each other trying to find the next Freakonomics. We don’t lack for tomes about grand strategy.
Let’s face it – it’s a great time to earn a living through the power of ideas. [/i]