pursuit of perishable things | brooke bryan

Jo Guldi writing for Absent Magazine, Issue 3: The Surprising Death of the Public Intellectual and a Manifesto for its Restoration:

The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked differently, and that the present may have looked very different itself. Experts like Krugman and Nesse are, by definition and training, not participants in the humanities game of memory, comparison and synthesis: rather, they are experts. Experts, like the fox of Isaiah Berlin, track down the single series of facts towards knowledge. They come out of laboratories, where they have performed minute studies of a single experiment where terms like “promiscuous” and “chaste” are fixed as a supposition of the game. Experts judge the workings of the brain by the newest findings, not by comparison with Aristotle or Machiavelli. Hedgehog intellectuals, by contrast, agglomerate and compare: this definition of good behavior with those five more relative or strict versions that societies have enforced at different times; the perspective of gender studies with that of sociology. Their training in the humanities acquaints them with thinkers classical and modern; it teaches the keen eye for other cultures, the rapid absorption of information about pamphlet and canvases in everyday time. Hedgehogs generally are made not in laboratories but in libraries, where they have learned to compare dictators and democracies across time and space, dealing with the primary texts of alien societies – learning, that is, from the natives on their own terms. Hedgehogs are assimilators, and they’re friendly with the locals. Lately they do not come out of the libraries so much, and the forum is brimming with foxes.

The disappearance of the humanities from the public signals the evacuation of historical perspective from the age of expert rule. It is a sorrowful trend. Intelligent persons, who value both foxes and hedgehogs, will want to know why. They will, it is hoped, also mourn the passing of the public intellectual, inquire as to the conditions of his return, and demand related changes of themselves.

Read More… you really, simply must.