The Intellectual Crash of 2009: Where Have All the Smart People Gone?

Of all the types of work affected by the recession, we haven't heard anything about an industry that has been entirely wiped out by recent events. The economic crisis has forced a massive layoff of the intellectuals.

Indeed, when the New York Times Magazine describes Newt Gingrich as "a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking -- floating ideas throughout his career," you know the word "idea" has wandered, as if in a drunken stupor, from its original connotation. (CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger struggled to adapt to the new meaning, whatever it is: "The problem with Gingrich is that he has fabulous ideas.")

It used to be that when intellectuals heard the word "derivative," they thought about what Marx took from Hegel. Now they clutch their heads in confusion and despair. Arguments about small versus big government used to entail reflections on the nature of man and society, the question of balancing the highest good against the greatest number of people who might benefit from that good, the meaning of power and of authority. Not anymore.

Now just about every political debate comes down to one phrase: economic policy. Occasionally, things grow more specialized, and just as intellectual disputes over class conflict once spilled over into philosophical differences over "dialectical" change, the issues of taxes and spending branch out into the exciting topic of "earmarks." Sometimes things get fancy: You might hear the term "moral hazard." But just when the intellectual wheels start to turn--Aristotle's Ethics! William James' pragmatism! Sartre's existentialism!--you realize that you've eavesdropped on a conversation between an insurance broker and a management consultant about the proper way to structure a transaction.

What we never hear about in the popular media--where intellectual discussion once took place--is debate over fundamental meanings, or essential definitions, or connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Those are the elements of an idea, which is the challenge consciousness makes to concrete reality. When Archimedes said, "Give me a lever that is long enough, and I will move the world," he was talking about how you can think your way into a new actuality.

Instead of ideas, we have "issues," which are the way the world tricks consciousness into believing that things never really change. Because an issue has two sides to it, both sides will still be there whichever one prevails. The "issue"--consider abortion--never goes away. But an idea--e.g. the issue of abortion is more fundamentally about the social limits of sexual pleasure, not merely about reproductive rights--leaps beyond the two sides of an issue into the essential condition from which they spring. It makes you stop to think, instead of provoking you to start to argue. An issue is the place where ideas run out of steam.

As a result of our yapping, endlessly banal, issue-dominated culture, the intellectuals, who work with ideas the way a Realtor works with property, are out of work. No wonder we are surrounded by the Limbaughs, and the Coulters, and the Jim Cramers, the buffoon-priests who preside over the ongoing national game of issue ping-pong. Lacking ideas to grab our attention and make us focus, the intellectuals have given way to ranters, abusers, and screamers, who have the effect of both grabbing our attention and freeing us from having to pay attention.

Of course, no one should blame the intellectuals for not being able to grasp our fathomless economic mess. An old joke went that only two people in history understood Hegel, and even they misunderstood him. Well, the only people who understand the present crisis are economists and tax lawyers, and even they misunderstand it. I have seen award-winning poets and novelists nearly reduced to tears trying to comprehend the relationship between mortgage-backed securities and recession.