Word: intellects
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...House of Intellect, by Jacques Barzun. A thin, well-read line of intellectual heroes, says Columbia University's Barzun, must hold the past against artiness, scientism and coddled incompetents...
...House of Intellect, by Jacques Barzun. Intellectual Panjandrum Barzun rallies his peers to rout the termites of egalitarianism, mass education, artiness, science worship and similar pests that are destroying, as he sees it, the pillars of civilization...
Barzun takes a proud position as defender of a castle called Intellect, which is being attacked while "the dissemination of its products has become a planetary frenzy." Barzun's House of Intellect is an austere conception, of which the unfashionable practices of logic, authority, discipline and learning are the pillars. The enemies of the house that Jacques built are three popular idols-art, science, and something he calls philanthropy...
Barzun cites the exurbanite foible of Sunday painting to illustrate the prevalence of artiness and to point to the decline of judgment. In a democratic society, a do-it-yourself canvas proves sincerity, if not taste. But sincerity is no substitute for Intellect. Thus, Tough Teacher Barzun records that a sweet girl graduate student burst into tears when he gave her a failing grade because she did not write good like a girl graduate should. It had never happened to her before...
Fantasy & Fog. As for science, Barzun insists that scientists cannot communicate with each other-the increasing "fantasy" of their symbolic language prohibits communication. But his sharpest nips at contemporary American are in his attack on togetherness. Barzun charges America with "hostility to intellect," of personality "coddling." His particular enemy is the "adjustment curriculum" by which rigorous studies are submerged in a queasy tide of "social" projects and group activity in the hands of "soul probers" who were once teachers...