Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline

Christian Century, April 10, 2002 by William Dean

Posner's main claim is that the arts and humanities should be kicked out of public intellectualdom. But it is he who singles them out for lengthy consideration--at least long enough to announce that they have no business being there.

Finally, Posner launches into an ill-fated and lengthy exercise in ranking the 571 public intellectuals who in the years 1995-2000 received the most media attention and Web-site hits. None of the great public intellectuals I cite above (from Addams to Lasch) makes Posner's top 100, and three fail to show up among his top 571. Not only is this ranking a ridiculous way to assess real public influence, it undermines Posner's own project; he himself would predict that the ranking would stimulate public intellectuals' vanity, causing them either to preen or be wounded and then to ignore the book's larger argument.

Nevertheless, Posner has named names, and has called logical inconsistencies and factual errors what they are. He properly criticizes "limousine liberals," who fret about oppression and live luxuriously, and "Grand Inquisitor Conservatives," who want others to be religious, but not themselves.

HOWEVER, POSNER misses the deeper dimension of the intellectual's vocation. From Aristotle to Aquinas, to Reinhold Niebuhr, to humorist Dave Barry, any theologian, ethicist, philosopher or social critic must presuppose a picture of the world, of the totality of things. John Dewey called this a "sense of an extensive and underlying whole." No one really knows, Dewey said, what to make of any particular activity unless he or she sees its role in a larger activity, the largest of which is the activity of the universe. Dewey tied this world-picture to generic religion and its claim to truth. While many may choke even on Dewey's modest metaphysical language, it explains why religion refuses to go away. "Religion" is the generic name for seeing the world through the widest possible lens, as that world is affected by a live, but not necessarily supernatural, presence that makes the world more than just so much matter in motion.

Posner, too, has a worldview, even if he hides it. It is implicit in his decision to use the epigraph from Lord Kelvin and in his urge to rank public intellectuals by counting citations and Web-site hits and then to graph and formularize his findings. Posner's professed intent is not to trash public intellectuals but to show--"through definition and description, the application of social scientific theory, and the use of statistics--that the public intellectual can be studied in a systematic and fruitful fashion." But Posner's predilection is not merely methodological. As theologian Henry Nelson Wieman once said, one's method for picking up a cat had better be informed by an understanding of what a cat is: it is aggressive and clawed and will attack those who lift it the wrong way.

When Posner uses social-scientific and even economic methods to study public intellectuals, he assumes that public intellectuals are creatures who can be grasped by such methods. He is a scientific (positivistic) empiricist, wanting only sensory evidence (how many Web hits?), not a subtle (radical) empiricist wanting qualitative evidence (what affections are stimulated?). For Posner, qualitative evidence is too fuzzy.