The Case for Intellectualism
And why we're dead without it
Last week, I wrote an essay about Antipodean anti-intellectualism that resonated with lots of people. I diagnosed a problem without offering a solution, though, so I’d like to make the case for intellectualism. I think it’s essential to resisting manipulation that leads us to war, and that without it, we’re susceptible to anyone who can pluck the strings of our unconscious. Conscious thought is the beginning of free will, and without it, we’re screwed.
I think most people suffer from subterranean aches they struggle to name, and that they can be led like a bull by the ring in its nose by anyone who can soothe those aches. Anyone who’s ever made a bad decision when they’re horny, or divulged something they shouldn’t in an hour of need, is familiar with this. Good art, literature, music, plays, and films help us put words to otherwise unnameable feelings. That’s especially important when revealing certain experiences incurs ostracism or punishment, as often happens in cases of rape, familial abuse, or treason. The first thing a society does when it wants to erase an event is scrub the language that exists to describe it. On an international level, that looks like capitalist papers calling Gaza a “conflict” rather than a “genocide,” because “genocide” carries an imperative to stop, and on an interpersonal level, that censorship is quieter. It looks like the defunding of art that lets us talk about complex experiences in favor of superhero movies, military films, and endless advertisements.
A few months ago, I re-read Alison Bechdel’s comic book memoir Fun Home on the bus ride back from hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. For those unfamiliar with it, Fun Home is one of the greatest graphic novels ever written, and it’s a good example of how the graphic novel form can bear complex experience like few other mediums. In Fun Home, Bechdel writes about her discovery that her English teacher father was gay, that he preyed on his students, and that he killed himself when her mother decided to leave him. She discovered her own lesbianism around the same time as her father’s secret, and she uses the work of Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others to examine their twin closeted lives. She turns an immensely complicated inheritance that might’ve driven others to harm themselves or others into a discrete work of art to discuss. Fun Home indicted compulsory heterosexuality and the capitalist nuclear family as forces that deform queer life, and gave lots of people language to talk about that for the first time. Christian schools and universities have been trying to ban it for 20 years as a result.
Good art can do similar things for stories of sexual abuse. In her anti-censorship essay “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You),” Gretchen Felker-Martin writes about Debbie Dreschler’s Daddy’s Girl, which is a semi-autobiographical comic about Dreschler’s experience being sexually abused by her father. Rape by a parent is one of the most taboo subjects there is, and is traditionally something families punish children for speaking about. “How many people would never have seen their own experiences with parental incest reflected in her work, and thus felt able to finally break themselves open and process their deep pain?” Felker-Martin writes about Daddy’s Girl. Comic book movies can’t help anyone untangle the trepidation, rage, love, and agony that kind of abuse often instigates, and without art and intellectual work, the people who suffer those feelings would suffer them in silence. I’ve seen people turn to harming themselves or others because they don’t know they’re not alone in those experiences, a loneliness that work like Daddy’s Girl helps alleviate.
People need art and intellectual work to put names to these feelings or else they go insane. Commodified and profit-seeking work can’t do that. In Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to Tales from Earthsea, she writes that “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes… The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.” The capitalist push towards profit requires eliminating any discomfort that might threaten sales. It leaves you with only the simplest stories to soothe your subterranean aches, which can lead people down violent roads.
In Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, he shows what happens when a construction worker raised only on adolescent fantasies tries to use them to soothe his adult dissatisfactions. In the film, everyman Douglas Quaid sublimates his existential unhappiness into a desire for a life of adventure that necessitates killing his wife. He can’t articulate what he needs, but knows he needs it more than air itself. Having been raised, like many American men, on the equivalent of Star Wars and The Goonies, the only way he can imagine satisfying that urge is to eliminate his family and race towards foreign adventure. Total Recall is a masterpiece of a film, and like Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, I think it flew over many Americans’ heads.
Verhoeven, a Dutch Nazi occupation survivor, is particularly good at indicting American moviegoers with poisonous flourishes. Most studios won’t let directors do that anymore. Instead we get sequels to Top Gun, a military recruitment film that will age as well as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation once more American war crimes are revealed, and endless military-financed superhero knockoffs. Literature is intellectually freer, but fewer people read now because they have phones. It’s a dangerous environment for a nation that’s growing ever-more insane. At a time when we should be demanding art that reflects our violent, contradictory, and conflicting experiences, we’re instead getting propaganda to make us buy plastic junk or go to war with Iran. We need intellectualism and complex art, however discomforting they may be, because without them the enemies of human life will lead us like lemmings off a cliff.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
I really liked the film Promised Sky, about three Ivorian women trying to get by in a hostile Tunisia, and strongly recommend seeing it at The Lido this Saturday at 1:15pm as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
"Let people enjoy things" (as well as "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism") has done more to dampen the revolutionary impulse than any CIA operative could ever hope to. Don't get me wrong, I entertain myself with dumb shit, too, but a diet of nothing but dumb shit will truly rot your brain