I realize there are a multitude of good books out there I’ll never so much as open but sometimes I feel an urge to re-read a particularly good book. So it is that I’ve picked up The House of Intellect copyrighted by Jacques Barzun in 1959. In the first essay, he makes a nice distinction between intelligence and intellect. He draws his specific examples from the United States but is speaking of the entire modern West when he says, on page 4: “Intellect is despised and neglected.” But he’ll tell us on that same page:
We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine. [page 4]
Professor Barzun has his take on a problem similar to one I’ve discussed in some essays, though my terms are different, being those of a Thomism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge. Barzun is perhaps the prime example of a well-educated and highly cultured academic who was born at the end of a period of creative ferment which is hard to even grasp and who lived through a period of consolidation of that creativity which seems to have prematurely turned to a period of decay and increasing moral disorder.
Near the bottom of that same page 4 so dense in insight, Barzun tells us:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
Ah, now we see. Barzun is in the tradition of the mainstream of Christian thought in the West. He would probably agree with Quigley’s claim that “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” He might disagree with some of the terms because Christian thought, despite the misunderstanding of most historians and most philosophers, theologians, etc., isn’t a specific metaphysical viewpoint in the sense of having a pre-existing schema to used to understand what’s out there. It’s an empirical viewpoint, a baby metaphysics of sorts which can grow so long as we don’t deform it with the oddly shaped clothing of Platonism or Neoplatonism or Kantianism or British Empiricism or Liberalism (in political and economic domains). Creation is the word of a God who works with power and wisdom and freedom. He created what He wished to create and He can bring us along so that this Creation unfolds to our viewpoint in a variety of ways. To have any chance of understanding reality, we need to suspend unconfirmed aspects of our personal or inherited beliefs in the nature of the being which we observe in the pretty little girl growing toward womanhood or the star imploding into a black hole. We need to study what is, to contemplate its meaning, and to make sense of it in terms available to us, terms developed by prior generations supplemented by our discoveries and insights. In theory, past generations could have headed in the wrong direction and we’d then likely be in a position where it would take some number of generations to make it back to the proper path, the proper understanding of God’s work which is Creation.
The understanding of Creation which we start out with is that intellect of which Barzun speaks, “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence.” I think that there are diseases which can affect intellect, the capitalized intelligence of some significant community, which are similar to diseases of the individual and his intelligence, such as schizophrenia and various sorts of distortions to perceptions. A healthy intellect, however imperfect it proves to be in some ways, however incomplete it necessarily is, gives us an understanding of our world and a corresponding understanding of the meaning of the created all. An immature intellect can leave us with a distorted understanding of Creation and the corresponding lives not meaningful beyond the animal level. We could then say that we would have diseased intellects.
As Barzun has noted, there is plenty of active intelligence in the modern world. It’s pretty common for me to be in strange conversations with men and sometimes women who have shown good moral order in the ways they’ve led their lives, holding down responsible jobs and maybe responsible positions in a parish or a town government or other public organization. They reason pretty well, I must admit, but they come to strange conclusions about the various messes in southwestern Asia or in our relationships with Russia or the current problems between church (or Church) and state (or Union in Lincoln’s idolatrous terms). I sneaked in that last parenthetical expression to exhibit an idea which may or may not be partially or fully true but it isn’t likely to come to anyone who hasn’t read any works in some particularly important lines of dissident thought in these United States of America.
I’ve read revisionist historians of various sorts, the Southern Agrarian viewpoint being a bit raw but still my favorite but I’ve also done some reading in the Old-Right tradition and the more straightforward libertarian tradition, various leftist traditions and some thinkers who draw from various specific traditions. What’s important is the fact that all of these thinkers were serious and morally well-ordered men and women, drawing themselves upon the traditions of (mostly) the West. Works of historical and cultural criticism are one good food for building up intellect, as are works of poetry and fictional narratives, of science and mathematics, of philosophy and gardening. Good books, good apprenticeship programs — even if just in the form of going into the fields as a friend of a master birdwatcher, provide the stuff of intellect but also the habits and customary usages of that stuff. It teaches us how to identify good wood but also how to make a roll-top desk from it.
As I said, I also often find myself in strange conversations with my fellow-Americans where they pronounce, as if experts on the topic, and then draw conclusions which would be reasonable if what they think they knew were true. The Internet, and maybe a good history or even travel book from the local library would raise the level of their intellects to a level more appropriate to the high level of their intelligence. It would take serious effort for even most Americans with higher degrees to raise their intellects to a level appropriate to the decisions we’ve already made by allowing self-serving scoundrels to control our government and the tremendous firepower of our military.
There are a number of military and intelligence professionals, some are both, who will testify to the rationality and even reasonableness of the Iranians and some will testify to the corruption of American foreign policy to suit the purposes of American domestic politics. American political operatives have made many collateral corpses in Iraq to win elections and now threaten to make Iran glow in the dark because those Iranians can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons, but those American political operators also seem intelligent enough, sometimes even giving some hints of moral intelligence, but only in a very limited sphere, the sphere of individual actors.
As a country, we’ve utterly failed to develop an intellect, that is a morally well-ordered understanding of our world. We don’t really even seem to have done much to take the small, educational steps of developing a rational understanding of our relationships to Mexico or Cuba or even Canada. We’re too smart and too proud to admit we’re poorly educated adolescents — at best. In the sense of individual intelligence, we’re as smart as we think we are, but we’re pretty dumb and very ignorant in the sense of that intellect, that capitalized and communal intelligence, so important to being morally responsible members of these modern communities, so large and complex.
We’ve created those large and complex communities in various realms of human life, political and economic and cultural, but those communities are poorly founded — which is, at least for this discussion, the same as saying we haven’t developed any understanding, any intellect or communal and capitalized intelligence adequate to the tasks of running such complex communities.