Word: intellection
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Calling these constructive thinkers "anti-liberals" requires the self-absorbtion of a thorough ideological brainwash. A real intellect can appreciate (or at least recognize) a complexity of an opponent's argument and can accept the simple assertions...
...could stand in his country, gaze across the Channel at France and behold the world's two giants. These days one may behold the world's two giants from the moon or from the Bering Strait. But where, metaphorically, is our Dover Beach today? To Arnold, the divorce of intellect and feeling was the central ailment of his age. What is the central ailment...
...Dover Beach the same place as Arnold's? Certainly the disjuncture between feeling and intellect--or science and emotion--has only seemed to widen since the mid-19th century. The transition from the industrial society to what Daniel Bell called the post-industrial society, consisting of services rather than manufacturing, has resulted in a difference of occupations but not of attitude; people are more than ever the bewildered children of progress. The past year alone has produced enough scientific inventiveness to shake the spirit for a lifetime: the first baby from a frozen embryo, surrogate mothers, genetic transfers between animals...
...divorce of intellect and feeling is the wrong place to look for a modern Dover Beach, however, it may yet have bearing on the right one. The world does not look as unremittingly bleak as Arnold painted it in those final lines of Dover Beach (How could it?), but it often can feel that bleak--minus joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help for pain. As yet, no industry has disinvented poverty or starvation. And one advanced invention threatens to turn the earth into a polar waste. Even if most people learn to adjust to machines or the new science...
With disarming intellectual and political innocence, Lasch writes on the teleogical assumption that the intellect is naturally suited for the ends to which modernist in tellectuals most often put it. He translates the misguided American trust in the innocence and perfectibility of nature into the goodness and universal applicability of rationality. His faith in this faculty is so strong that he overlooks the disadvantages of his genre. Lasch cannot explore the questions he raises nearly as well as novelists can. Nor can he, in contrast to the religious or ethical writer, and to politicians of all varieties, even pretend...