myself when young did eagerly frequent....

In my early days of aspiring to academic life I was fond of reading Jacques Barzun. He was to me the gold standard: Profound. Polished. Perspicuous. Perspicacious.So I had a bit of a shock when I looked into the recent re-issue of his House of Intellect. He came over as such a dinosaur. Of course he is ancient: it has been nearly a century since his birth. And I was in college when he wrote the book nearly half a century ago.What shocked was that it was me and my ilk that he was warning against. Intellect, he said, was under challenge by three great forces--art, science and philanthropy. Not that these as such are harmful, but as infected by an anti-intellectual mood compounded of psychiatry and popular orientalism they were undermining what he terms a Western tradition "of explicitness and energy, of inquiry and debate, of public, secular tests and social accountability."For Barzun this "prevalent desire to embrace the whole world in some benevolent imperium of love, science, or art expresses chiefly a rooted aversion toward the immediate and actual."Ouch! Maybe so. I hadn’t seen it that way. I’d been so busy thinking for myself that I didn’t notice I was thinking with the herd, following the zeitgeist, and so on.Not that I want to repent of my errors and get back in Barzun’s good graces. But he does represent a constant, like a stone by which we can gauge the flow of the river. This is of interest to me because he was sensitive to changes in the culture that would later sweep me away.It is of more interest because the first specific target of his discontent with the direction of the modern mind was an artifact of popular imagination that I particularly enjoyed at the same time he was writing. This was the catalogue for the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibit of photographs called The Family of Man. I remember enjoying and being inspired by the paperback edition whcih was in wide circulation in the 50s. Even in that narrow and pietistic phase of my life I found nothing in it to take exception to. Certainly it did not occcur to me to find in it, as Barzun did, evidence of "a worldwide concentration on the helplessness of man, and on its excuse and anodyne--his animal needs and sensual pleasures."Barzun quickly supplies evidence. "The book opens," he says, "with a rather tendentious female nude, prone amid the ferns of a forest glade." I remember this, and I remember that even by my late adolescent sensibility in the very repressed climate of the times this was a chaste figure of obviously asthetic rather than pruirient significance. Tendentious is not a word it would occur to me to apply to any nude, especially not this one. But in the sense that it is there for a purpose, Barzun is right. It sets the tone for what is in retrospect a subversive book. Barzun is quite perceptive to see this.What he does not see so well is that some stuff needed subverting. Social and cultural forces were building in this period. They had no outlet. It would not be long before the dam burst. I will not dwell on why I thought that a good thing, or on why Barzun’s defence of the West was born quaint, except to point out how interesting it is that his defence of Intellect seems to have such an anti-erotic impetus. On the whole Barzun reads rather like somone who dislikes Modernism enough to see in it the seeds of Post-Modernism. This is what makes him interesting and useful.For one thing, he was writing in a period of reaction against intellectuals, then described as "eggheads" and viewed as potentially disloyal. It was not long since J. Robert Oppenheimer, architect of the atomic bomb, had been disgraced for opposing the building of the more powerful hydrogen bomb.But Barzun goes farther. He sees the danger to Intellect as lying deeper than Cold War politics in a retreat from certain classical values of reason on which ciivilization depends. Indeed, the storm that shattered Cold War consensus was hardly rational, but tended to celebrate sexuality, intuition and personal experience. Whether Barzun saw the outcome of this in both heightened consumerism and in the rise of religious fundamentalism is another matter (I’m not that far in the book yet).But it is true that the triumph in the 60s of the civil rights and anti-war movements left progressivism high and dry with no way to get back in the swim. The heirs to that old passion belong to a new generation that gets its kicks in charismatic churches and rejects the validity of science.I think that Barzun’s problem may be a static view of Intellect as the detached arbiter of eternal values. It is also a view that isolates Mind from Body. In one place he laments the danger posed by Zen practice which invites to knower to use other ways than conscious rationality in order to grasp truth. All I can say is that he shouldn’t knock it if he hasn’t tried it, especially as he is so fond of the "immediate and actual."Indeed Barzun reminds me that the task of Intellect becomes more urgent precisely as we move beyond the territory it has mapped. But he also invites me to reflect on they ways in which my own subservience to the culture impelled me to rebel against it. To this end I’m also dipping into Camus’ The Rebel.More on this later.-30-