The world has become complicated—everybody has nuances, and even the simplest man conceals emotions, desires, and obsessions of terrifying complexity. All of our ideas have been entangled, and it’s become impossible to write about “intellectualism”—or anything else, for that matter—without getting into politics, psychology, and lots of trouble. All over the world, people yearn to live simpler, less complicated lives—they want to be children again. Just think of how many adults have lived out their deepest fantasies while watching Shrek. It seems, in fact, that Shrek has given American men more pleasure than Baywatch.
Since the world is so complex, it’s hard to write about intellectuals without at the same time sticking one’s nose into a host of other subjects. With this in mind, I trust I’ll be forgiven for jumping from topic to topic. In any case, let me start by saying something about school-aged intellectuals.
Young intellectuals love to admire their favorite authors. When a young person enjoys a particular writer, he does everything in his power to convince himself of that author’s moral purity. Very few young people can enjoy the work of an author unless they can believe that he’s a good and decent man.
Every once in a while, though, young intellectuals run into trouble. Spurred on by some noxious “will to knowledge,” young readers often decide to learn about the lives of their favorite writers. And when they do this, they often learn something they’d rather not know—they learn that their favorite author is a racist, a cretin, or a sexual maniac. What’s interesting, of course, is that many young people refuse to read their beloved author after they learn these terrible secrets. No matter how beautiful his prose, the prized author gets discarded as soon as his moral credentials come into question. Our children have come to prefer morality over art.
At some point, of course, our children grow up and become sophisticated—they start college, they develop an interest in politics, and they learn to tolerate immoral authors. Yet even as they get older, our children retain the belief that art ought to have a moral dimension. No matter how old they get, our children never stop believing that an artist’s character affects the quality of his art. Like an intestinal parasite, this belief stays with them for life.
Some will claim that my argument isn’t true: they’ll claim that no one actually takes morality as seriously as I suggest. But let me tell you something. In our society, morality is taken very seriously, even by the post-structuralists who claim that it doesn’t exist. Morality always finds a way to contaminate art, and one has to be an Old Testament magician if one wants to stop ethics from invading the realm of aesthetics. Morality is everywhere. But, in polite society, we don’t call it by its name. When we need to refer to morality, we use the word “politics.” Let me explain how this subterfuge works.
America’s progressive intellectuals have shunned “objective morality”—they’ve announced that all moral systems are inventions of man. But the very intellectuals who reject morality tend to be quite interested in politics. And what do these intellectuals do? They grapple with moral questions, they separate right from wrong, they condemn evil men, and they do all this under the guise of “political engagement.” Morality is thus hidden inside politics, the way a baby kangaroo is hidden inside his mother’s pouch.
To create the illusion that they don’t care about “objective morality,” our intellectuals have simply repackaged morality as politic. Look, for instance, at the latest protestors at New York University. They demanded fairness, accountability, dignity—in short, all the old moral concepts—while pretending to be too political to care about ethics. But enough of this—let’s talk some more about art.
College students have a tendency to look at art with a political eye. Most of us are unwilling to divorce art from politics, and we honestly believe that an artist’s ideology affects the merit of his work. As a result, we underrate the work of artists whose politics we dislike, and we somehow expect our artists to have serious political commitments. But what if there are artists who need to ignore politics in order to produce meaningful work?
Some artists work best when they close their eyes to the political world, peer deep into themselves, and discover all kinds of inner riches. It’s easy, of course, to accuse these artists of escapism and irrelevance. Yet perhaps the intellectuals who make these accusations—the intellectuals who demand that artists be political—suffer from a lack of imagination. Maybe our intellectuals are jealous that, when they peer into themselves, they find nothing attractive to look at.
Certain intellectuals simply can’t tolerate artists who don’t care much for ideology or politics. They want to bring artistic imagination within the limits of political orthodoxy—they want the artist’s creative impulses to smell of justice, democracy, and rights. Perhaps our intellectuals just want to taint everyone with their anxiety, the way a coward invents fears to scare brave men. “Intellectualism” is used to hide all kinds of anxieties—it’s the most effective kangaroo pouch yet invented.