The Intelligentsia Is Anti-Intellect : If Hollywood now represents ‘the elite’ of our culture, it’s because the traditional thinking class has sold out.

A nation’s “cultural elite,” before Dan Quayle redefined it as Hollywood producers, journalists and college professors, traditionally meant the minority of citizens who aspired to participate in the intellectual process that shapes the cultural and social framework of one’s time and place. Given the fact that the education needed to train and hone a person’s ability to think abstractly is laborious and limited to so few, anyone reaching this group is already, by virtue of numbers alone, a minority.

Set off from the trade and commercial world and from the blue-collar working class, the intellectual in the French tradition, for example, becomes a member of an “elite,” distanced from the bourgeoisie, by definition not middle class. The intellectual does not pursue status or money. The intellectual pursues ideas, opinions and views with a direct bearing on a given society. That person expresses these views, forms ideologies and is even capable of creating change, for better or for worse.

The Thomas Jeffersons, the John Kennedys, the Vaclav Havels, the Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachevs, the Octavio Pazes and the Benazir Bhuttos of the world are influential precisely because they have assumed the responsibility of functioning as intellectuals in society. They have challenged and questioned the precepts of their inherited societies and cultures. Like Hollywood myths, the new worlds that they shape come from the mind and the imagination. Unlike Hollywood sitcoms, these worlds function beyond a TV screen. They are abstractions that come alive to meet the needs and demands of a given society. They become worlds to be lived and experienced by real people, not escape valves for mindless hours of passive viewing.

Quayle’s motley lumping together of social elements from such divergent arenas would be funny if it weren’t so ominous, so symptomatic of a larger question. Academics by definition have traditionally formed the “elite” in most cultures, and journalists, at least since the 18th-Century Age of Enlightenment, have at least participated in shaping the ideas and intellectual climate of society. But Hollywood?

If the fantasy industry assumes the role of the intelligentsia in the United States, those of us who ought to have assumed that role are at fault. Granted, the frontier history of the United States glorified the cowboy more than the intellectual. But that’s not a blanket excuse. Academics as a whole are far too willing to slide into the gray security and obscurity of the middle class. The university becomes another corporation, and money in the form of grants, endowments and wages becomes its governing factor. A professor of distinction is that individual who manages to obtain the highest number of grants. The individual who voices a view, expresses an opinion or, worse yet, invites controversy is a maverick and often a pariah. I am referring, of course, to those audacious enough to raise questions about issues of the mind, beyond the internal world of university politics.

Instead of wrestling with abstract knowledge, our unwilling intellectuals emulate political leaders (for the most part, men) who speak in monosyllables and repeat sloganistic catch-phrases.

Intellectuals, like politicians, then become masters of the commonplace, priding themselves on their mediocre and simplistic self-presentation, which they pontifically and mistakenly view as a reflection of the “common” man. Comic-tragic parodies of Hollywood folk heroes, they condemn ultimately all of us to mental passivity. And finally, by allowing the reins of leadership to fall from their grasp they allow lesser minds to prevail. They and we empower the likes of Dan Quayle, minds that equate “Murphy Brown” with the real world.