From the introduction to Peter Shaw's The War Against the Intellect:
"The intellectual climate of our time has undergone a subtle alteration in the past twenty years. Starting in the 1960s a change came over the rules of discourse whereby the marshaling of logic and evidence gradually lost its prestige. In its place right feeling and good intentions came to reign as the highest intellectual values and the most persuasive earnests of high seriousness. It became common, for example, for writers to reassure their readers that they were particularly sensitive to the problems of ethnicity or poverty or disease or any other lamentable status or condition. The spirit of the 1960s, which favored the heart over the head, was making itself felt across the spectrum of argumentative writing and scholarship. This was the war against the intellect.
The war was never explicitly declared, nor was it perceived to be under way by the guardians of culture, scholars, and intellectuals. My own realization that something had changed came after my return to teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1970, following a year away from higher education. In response to resolutions against the Vietnam War and racism drawn up by the Black Panther Party and approved by the Yale University faculty, a faculty meeting was called at Stony Brook. The meeting took place immediately after the shootings of students at Kent State University, at a time when it was not yet clear exactly what had happened there. The overriding feeling, though, was that the Stony Brook faculty ought to issue some kind of resolution. To my surprise, with little discussion its members adopted the Black Panther resolutions despite their limited relevance to the situation at hand.
Only six or seven faculty members besides myself out of some fifteen hundred present voted against. I attempted to speak but was Page xii prevented from doing so by parliamentary maneuvering. Yet what, I have often wondered, would I have said if recognized by the chair? It would have been insulting to the intelligence of my colleagues to point out the obvious inappropriateness of the resolutions. Something unspoken in the air was leading to a positive vote, but what it might be my year away from the university had rendered me incapable of grasping. The next day when I asked a colleague to give me his view of the Panther resolutions, he frankly described them as irrelevant to our situation. He had voted for them because he shared the general feeling that something had to be done.
The thinking to which I was not yet privy appears in retrospect to have been the product of long-suffered distress over the Vietnam War, brought to a head by the shocking deaths of the Kent State students. In the circumstances it was taken as self-evident by all but six or seven faculty members that reason should be set aside. Henceforth, as it developed, the willed suspension of the critical faculty in the service of a perceived cause or higher principle would come to be regarded as a mark of intellectual distinction. As this attitude seeped into the intellectual process, scholarship and intellectual discourse were invaded by what might be called theories of feeling and personal experience. It was first asserted by a few and eventually accepted by many that the capacity to reason on a subject was less valuable than the bringing to bear of one's political convictions, one's gender experience, or one's social status (or, rather, an attitude toward social status).
A virtually automatic suspension of the rules of proof, reason, and logic was now accorded to certain privileged kinds of discourse: the championing of artistic works by those newly designated as minorities or the oppressed; accusations of Western historical guilt toward the working class, minorities, or the Third World; assaults on established reputations or the elevation of obscure ones. Afterward, the latitude vouchsafed these special subjects was extended wherever ideas claimed a hearing on the basis of their author's generous concern for humanity. Eventually it became accepted that a writer's speculations and prejudices, rather than being subject to skepticism on account of their subjectivity, should be honored for their intentions. The war against the intellect had brought about a decline of discourse, a slackening in the process of critical evaluation.
With traditional constraints on discourse suspendable, the way Page xiii was open in the course of the 1970s and 1980s for untrammeled expression of the oppositionist ideology that had fueled the original assault on values in the 1960s. This ideology in fact grew into an accepted orthodoxy. Guilt and recrimination toward history, culture, government, and institutions became accepted scholarly attitudes. In the typical manner of orthodoxies, these attitudes ceased being put forth as arguments: they had become unstated assumptions, grown so familiar as hardly to merit comment. The result was that, whether out of fear or dulled perceptions, reviewers whose business it was to define and evaluate the arguments that came before them no longer so much as mentioned, let alone challenged, the new orthodoxies. In the universities especially, an atmosphere of intimidation came to prevail. Those who continued to uphold the standards of objectivity were regarded as insensitive and reactionary. Eventually there took place an institutionalization of resistance to authority of all kinds. Literary critics rejected traditional interpretations, scholars found the formal limitations of their disciplines stifling, and humanists objected to the established canon of great works.
A striking symptom of the new state of mind was the dramatic valedictory to the historical profession made in 1971 by the historian Martin Duberman. Accusing himself of wasting ten years as a conventional, uninspired academic biographer, he vowed in future to avoid the disciplined, scholarly approach. In its place he proposed to employ an unspecified psychological subjectivism to depend, as far as one could make out, on hunches rather than conventional historical explanation. The latter presumably rested on a cold, rigid formality for which genuine feeling would be substituted. But Duberman's illustration of the difference between the two was hardly convincing. As I wrote at the time:
In his book on Charles Francis Adams, Duberman recalls, "I had little difficulty describing why he decided to become a lawyer." Now [i.e., in 1971] he suspects that it may not have been the "prestige and income" of the law that influenced his subject but rather "the hope of duplicating the achievements of his father, John Quincy Adams," tempered by a ''fear that he would not measure up to his father." The new speculation reflects Duberman's new interest in the impalpables of psychology, which, he implies, the canons of scholarship prevented him from employing. In fact, his original explanation was un-historical, since the attractions of money and prestige always may be motives for going into the law. The new explanation, on the other hand, could easily have been arrived at within the traditional discipline of history, and indeed has been arrived at by traditional scholarship.
Given the palpable inadequacy of the case against traditional intellectual standards, the silence of most scholars and intellectuals in the face of the war against the intellect stands out as a phenomenon of equal interest and importance to the war itself. At Stony Brook, for example, the importance of the faculty meeting I attended had to do not so much with the campus radicals and their aims as with the acquiescent majority. It was their willingness to suspend critical judgment that would have the most lasting consequences. That they were seized by strong feelings is not to be denied. But another element had come into play as well, one that was made clear in a report on the Yale meeting from which the Panther resolutions derived.
Writing in the New Republic shortly after that meeting, the Yale Law School professor Alexander Bickel described the circumstances surrounding it. On their way to deliberate, the faculty members had passed along a gauntlet of students. The students' intimidating presence, Bickel reported, strongly influenced the conduct of the meeting and the vote in favor of the Black Panther resolutions. At Stony Brook, as it happened, the students were actually allowed in the lecture hall where the meeting convened. The faculty's first act was to approve their unprecedented attendance: seated on the lecture stage and in the balconies overlooking and overseeing the proceedings. Intimidation had become respectable. Henceforward it would prove to be one of the driving forces of the war against the intellect."
