December 28, 2004
On TNR's literary reviews
n+1 magazine has a brief sketch of The New Republic's recent transition from bastion of heavyweight literary criticism to host of "shit-smearer" Dale Peck. It doesn't quite merit the summing-up title of "The Intellectual Situation," but it's humorous in parts and (from what little I know of the back of the TNR book) fairly accurate. A choice excerpt for those who don't want to read the whole thing:
Leon Wieseltier’s choice of a title for a book of essays by Lionel Trilling, The Moral Responsibility to be Intelligent, summed up the outlook. (The quotation belongs originally to John Erskine, but Trilling used it and it could very well have been his own—do recall, in your nostalgia for the fifties intellectuals, that lugubrious funereal tone.) The moral responsibility is not to be intelligent. It’s to think. An attribute, self-satisfied and fixed, gets confused with an action, thinking, which revalues old ideas as well as defends them. Thought adds something new to the world; simple intelligence wields hardened truth like a bludgeon. Thinking is tiring, we commiserate.
(Link via Rake's Progress.)