...flowers of the intellect that is. Provocative Derbyshire column:
The irresistible Paul Johnson wrote a piece in the London Spectator the other week about intellectuals. P.J. is the author of a book on this subject, titled Intellectuals, in which he cheerfully eviscerates several of the big names in 19th- and 20th-century deep-browdom: Emerson, Marx, Hemingway, Sartre, and so on...PJ's essay got me thinking...
Novelists? Well, there is of course Tom Wolfe, who says interesting things about matters of public consequence, and weaves big ideas into his novels. I don't know that I'm quite ready to call Tom an intellectual, though. He is a superb observer of humanity, and a skillful entertainer, and for that unusual combination we should be grateful; but the big ideas are borrowed from other people. A U.S. Grade-A intellectual? I don't think so, and I doubt Tom would claim the title for himself. Who else have we got? Jane Smiley? Barbara Kingsolver? Don DeLillo? Let us pass on...quickly.
We are hardly any better served by philosophers and theologians than we are by poets and novelists. It's even hard to come up with candidate names. The only active philosopher I can think of is John Searle; but if you were to ask me whether I have read any of his books, I would have to say what Dr. Johnson used to say when similarly cornered: "I have looked into them." Richard John Neuhaus is, it seems to me, as good a theologian as we have any right to expect in this age, but how many Americans — even educated Americans — have heard of him? And what of Tom Kreitzberg? [Okay, I added that last sentence].
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