And then there are the academics. Hearing many of them speak in the fraternal language of their discipline, usually at or over people not in their group, just reinforces the common charge today that they have become a society of pretentious parochialists, perfectly content to speak to each other rather than doing the work of education--namely, communicating with the world in a common, perhaps even tolerably robust, language. Even in universities today, many top intellectuals don't have to speak with students, at least all that much. They are hired as researchers in some highly specialized niche. Helping the world understand the value of this niche is wholly uninteresting to them, especially as long as the funding keeps flowing.
What ever happened to people like Lewis? Yes, he was obscure at times, but it seems to me that his ultimate aim was to be able to communicate the deep things of his discoveries in a way that most people could access, perhaps with a little work.
Education, as it was classically conceived, seems to me to have been an effort to train people to send them back to people. It was done as an act of service to people without the means or time to study various subjects. It has become an instrument of segregation of the elites from the great unwashed masses, or even worse a bully pulpit from which they cast down their judgments upon others rather than communicating with them.
I offer three interesting cases on this matter:
Case 1: Recently the internet satire site "The Onion" did a brilliant piece on Judith Butler. Butler is a Berkeley feminist scholar, who has written on the topic of gender performativity and other topics related to sexuality and gender. Her language can only be described as thoroughly confined to her discipline. The Onion piece didn't so much make fun of her as it made fun of the manner in which she communicates.
The way they did it was by putting the words of Butler into the mouth of an "everyman" iron worker, whose conscience was mock sensitized by reading 800 pages of Butler's gender theory. It's pretty funny if you haven't seen it.
"If I had known the foundational texts on intersectional theory I would have never chanted ‘lock her up, lock her up!’ We were told that Hillary Clinton was the enemy, but it’s clear now that the true enemy is a patriarchal capitalistic society that maintains its ascendance by making powerful and ambitious women appear threatening, only to protect my status in a system purposely designed to benefit cis-het white men like myself.”
He goes on to read a classic example of the genius opacity of Butler. He reads, "Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as prediscursive, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts." Well, obviously!
I recall one of my professors once critiquing Hegel along the lines of what I'm saying now. He pointed out that there were schools of thought around Hegel's work that interpreted his opacity in exactly contradictory terms. He was either so brilliant that he was opaque, or so opaque that he was opaque. The wonder of the man is that you can interpret him in any way you like. One thing you can't question is that Hegel and Butler are geniuses. And you know that because you don't know what the hell they are saying.
Case 3: Until he unfriended me, I had a friend on Facebook who was fond of promoting lectures on things like, "Liberation of Racial Tension Points in the Hegemony of Evangelical Sub-Structures through the Pan-Gendered Norms Leveraged by the Feminist Hermeneutic of Quine." Sounds like a rip-roaring good time! He was always speaking about "ecumenicism" and "inclusivity" and "missional creativity" and "intersectional theology:" he was a master of all the buzz words. What he stopped talking about was sin and redemption. It was clear that he, like so many other intellectuals, found himself more comfortable in the ever shrinking world of academia rather than studying in order to expand the world of others.
Case 4: A few years ago, I engaged in a discussion with a Stanford liberal studies MA grad on the question of feminism. I decided to turn the thing into a kind of Socratic dialogue, with me playing the role of Socrates. She insisted at the outset that I didn't know what feminism really is, and that I was not engaging true feminism. I asked for the source of true feminism. She said there were many. I asked for the series of claims that set forth what true feminism is. I was looking for propositional claims. She insisted that feminism is ever evolving and complex and involves various schools of thought. I asked if that meant that there is no defining truth of feminism, that it is merely dependent on the women defining it in a particular cultural niche. She said I was playing word games. I pressed that it is unfair to try to hold me accountable to some true feminism when she didn't know what it was, and that according to a group of Christians I might count as a feminist. In the end, I demanded that she define feminism for me and she said she could send me some book titles, so that I could "join the conversation." It was an utterly infuriating conversation.
In closing, let me say that there is clearly a place for intellectuals to remove themselves from others in order to study various highly specialized fields, but if these fields cannot be related to a larger world, if they cannot be harmonized with language that connects them to an interpretive framework, then they become background noise for most people. Perhaps that is enough for many people in the highly specialized postmodern university today, but it is not enough for me. I want to see how the pieces of the puzzle come together. I don't just want to study the pieces. The sad truth about the people I discussed here is that they could have been a resource to the end of finding the whole truth, but instead they lock up their discoveries either in elitist condescension, or they march about in a kind of oblivious academic solipsism, which uses special language to live on a tiny isolated island of ideas.
