Miller's foresight: Death of the Intellectual in America

[question everything]

The Daily Breeze

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Miller's foresight: Death of the Intellectual in America

Nation barely acknowledges the loss of a giant as media focuses on celebrity for the sake of celebrity.
By Bob Herbert

Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, Timebends, quoted the great physicist Hans Bethe as saying, "Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to think."

It's a notion that appears to have gone the way of the rotary phone. Americans not only seem to be doing less serious thinking lately, they seem to have less and less tolerance for those who spend their time wrestling with important and complex matters.

If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on. God made man, and the godless evolutionists are on the run. Donald Trump ("You're fired!") and Paris Hilton ("That's hot!") are cultural icons. Ignorance is in. The nation is at war, and its appetite for torture may be undermining the very essence of the American character, but the public seems much more interested in what Martha will do when she gets out of prison and what Jacko will do if he has to go in.

Miller's death last week meant more than the loss of an outstanding playwright. It was the loss of a great public thinker who believed strongly, as Archibald MacLeish had written, that the essence of America -- its greatness -- was in its promises. Miller knew what ignorance and fear and the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by sinister leadership, could do to those promises.

More..

Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1264092.html

[deutsey]

1. Thank you for posting this.

I'm going to look for Miller's book, now.

I also agree with the column's critique of what passes for thought in America today. If you can't reduce your views down to the size of a bumpersticker, people tune you out.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

2. Where we went wrong

"and this burst of imaginative action created the sense of a government that for all its blunders and waste was on the side of the people."

And this is where the problem really began. The founders were very clear in their opinions about government, that on its best day it should never be viewed as anything better than a necessary evil.

[question everything]

3. Not true

From the Declaration of Independence:

"That to secure these rights (Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness), governments are instituted among Men.."

This does not strike me as "necessary evil," but as a positive force.

Difference between a liberal and a conservative interpretation? Or, what used to be a pre-Bush conservative interpretation?

[Freedom_from_Chains]

5. It is no kind of force at all

But simply a fact.

[bemildred]

4. The government is, properly, an instrument of the people.

To hate the government is therefore to hate the rule of the people.
And it has been my observation that it is precisely those citizens that
fear rule by the people that also fear the government and obstruct it's
effective function.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

6. However that is only true

when the people maintain control over their government. As to weather the people have meet that obligation is a very debatable point at this time in our history.

[bemildred]

7. The national parties have never been fond of grass-roots involvement

in politics. And that has a good deal to do with the situation here.
Nevertheless, as the nominal rulers of the place, we cannot duck our
responsibility for the situation. So, you make a good point, T.
Jefferson would agree. One of the reasons I support Mr. Dean is that
he seems intent of getting the people back in politics, and I see little
hope for the US without that sort of change.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

8. I would have to agree with that

"he seems intent of getting the people back in politics, and I see little hope for the US without that sort of change."

Because in the final analysis we are the ones who supposedly are reasonable.

[Old and In the Way]

17. Bush has made it into an unnecessary evil.

What these criminals have done to our government will set us back decades.

[libertypirate]

9. Some still think... but no one is going to listen unless you yell...

It is what they are used to.

[Old Mouse]

10. We have only begun to understand the biology of human consciousness

but the research has been corrupted by misused by our marketing driven capitalistic system.

Our technologically distracted society is destroying our capacity for critical thought at a terrifying pace.

[EFerrari]

11. Say more, Old Mouse. Think you're right but not sure I understand.

[Old Mouse]

15. Neurosciene is making leaps and bounds

discovering the mechanics of how our brain makes decisions, forms opinions and tastes. It doesn't end the argument of nature versus nurture, but does show the internal mechanism of how we think, and how our exposure to stimuli physically changes that mechanism. The understanding of how language forms in the brain shows consciousness to be a sliding scale, and the - for lack of a better term - critical thought we believe to be self-directed awareness is not present by default. It requires willful concentration to come into being. It requires simulation to maintain. Without it, we are animals acting out massively complex instinctive and coping behaviors.

Unfortunately, neuroscience and social science do not have the vast resources for exploration and exploitation that modern marketing and public relations do. Advanced study in technologies like mood control through color and invasive research in pupil tracking and keystroke logging are supplying marketing with keys to directing instinctive reactions to stimuli. Cohort analysis leveraged against life stage biology is being very effectively applied today to influence shopping preference.

The vast majority of this accumulated marketing knowledge has combined with the evolved formulas of passive entertainment on television with devastating results. We form deep emotional attachments to fictional characters, and have a distorted sense of the cycle of birth and death when they neither age nor die. Our natural inclination to watch for predators and hunt for food, an unease that is natural and constant, have been transformed into extreme stress and rampant consumerism. The false promise to alleviate this unease sells beer and soda and cosmetics and stairmasters. Ands now it sells presidents.

The staging, the photo-ops, they work. The repeated meme backgrounds, the conflicting messages and the promise of a simple answer to complex problems. Dismissive tones and shaped paranoia against intellectual thought. The camera angles, the color combinations, the accidentally open fly, all work to control and distract. A lifetime of television and marketing did the set up for Bush.

Consciousness is not what we believed it to be. It requires effort.

[EFerrari]

18. Okay. So, reactivity is being funding, cognition is not.

Is that in the ballpark?


If so, I'd like to offer this. We're too reactive to simply be reactive. If faced with enough evidence of our reactivity, we oppose the agent.

:)

/add spelling

[Old Mouse]

19. Wow

very good summation. Nothing wrong with your cognition.

The biggest problem I see is that people resist the notion they have limited critical thought. Western civilization has a religious belief in the natural sense of self.

"I'm not saying you're stupid, I'm saying you have no critical ability"

[EFerrari]

20. Oh, that limitation thing. Smells of mortality.

The American ethos seems rampantly and in the most concerted manner opposed to looking at natural boundaries.

Or, how would we be manipulated?

Thanks. It's good to read thoughtfulness every now and then.

[OrwellwasRight]

23. "Consciousness is not what we believed it to be."

Ever read Galapagos?

I was having a conversation tonight with someone who said no credible scientist thinks that global climate change will ever threaten human existence (except to people who live in Bangladesh or on island nations). I disagree, but I started to think that if we do nothing about it and the planet goes to hell in a handbasket, maybe he will comeback when humans has de-volved into something less manipulative and less capable of evil, like Vonnegut's swimming blobs, and then maybe he'll rethink the "pose no threat" theory.

[Old Mouse]

24. LOL

That's a bitch of an "I told you so"

I don't think I read Galapagos, but I have read most of his work. With MY memory I might have read it and forgotten. My favorite Vonnegut quote ( well, actually it's Kilgore Trout):

"To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the creator of the Universe, you fool."

[PATRICK]

12. The husband of Marilyn Monroe

OK how many media bios have opined at greater length on that personal glamor bit without giving more than a cursory glance at any of the meat of Miller's plays?

It has been an open display of the great unwashed with thoroughly washed minds. the media has never gone to intellectuals since that they always seem to gravitate to searing mirrors of instruction like "The Crucible".

As in the collapse of any civilization, first the intellectuals are sequestered and persecuted, then the social system ruined form permitting them to gather or be educated. Of course, the best way this is accomplished is by tanking the entire civilization.

The people running things have zero intellectual stature or flexibility or imagination or any higher function compared to the loose confederation of gentleman plantation owners at the founding of America. The Right Wing for all its phony "new ideas" is completely bankrupt right down to the vestigial credentials. They can't even go to the "best" schools without majoring in keg parties and buying C's. Corporate heads are not far behind and the single minded functionality of some scientists is ill served by laboring at the Pentagon/Drug company trough. The banality/venality of any thinking or arts is overwhelmed by popular culture that really isn't all that popular as much as it is a money machine for dull gatekeepers.

The good stuff is kept under bushel basket and away from the game board. So does the light even exist, like Schroedinger's cat?

[Old Mouse]

16. It didn't used to mention it at all

I remember the shock when I fist found out the man who wrote "Death of a Salesman" had been married...

wait, what's that... GOD, BOOBIES!!!

I'm sorry, were you saying something about one of Marilyn's husbands?

[sandnsea]

13. Civilized Society, Cooperative Society

"..It was not that people were more altruistic," he wrote in Timebends, "but that a point arrived -- perhaps around 1936 -- when for the first time unpolitical people began thinking of common action as a way out of their impossible conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of mass trade unionism and the federal government's first systematic relief programs, the resurgent farm cooperative movement..."

Actually, it wasn't the first time. The first time was back during the Revolution when craftsmen got together and formed unions, etc., and revolted. It happened again in the late 1800's when farmers got together and created the grange and co-ops against the railroads. And again in the 30's. And again in the 80's, when employees got together to create co-ops and buy out businesses when the owners couldn't compete against the mergers, etc. And it's beginning again now, with what we're calling grassroots, but is really the same cooperative movement that always happens in this country when our backs are against the wall.

Democrats are for a Cooperative Society because that's the way of civilized people.

[Dudley_DUright]

14. I like the Hans Bethe quote

Hans Bethe (pronounced like the Greek letter Beta) definitely did some good thinking over the years since he managed to explain how stars work (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1967). Thankfully, Hans is still with us, but he is getting up there in years (born 1906).

http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1967/bethe-bio.html

[CHIMO]

21. Death Of A Salesman

'He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a fine person'

AS I returned home on Friday morning from my job at Los Angeles airport, where I load and unload baggage, empty lavatories, and walk alongside the plane making hand signals to the pilot, news came over the radio: Arthur Miller was dead. Arthur Miller, the man who wrote what is arguably the greatest play in the history of the American theatre, Death Of A Salesman, was dead. Dead, dead, dead … I sighed, lit a smoke and turned to a jazz station and started to remember …1968. I’m 10 years old. My mother, actress and divorcée, Rita Gam, decides to get her rambunctious son Mike out of the stifling New York summer for a weekend. Where to go? Ah, the invitation to Connecticut tendered by Arthur Miller’s wife . So off we go to the country – a foreign land of green hills and fields and dusty roads.

Arthur Miller was tall, Arthur Miller was handsome, Arthur Miller was not happy to see us. I remember feeling his annoyance as only a child can feel the annoyance of adults. A very palpable, seething annoyance. He wanted his peace, he wanted his quiet, he wanted his family – he didn’t want an actress and her son on his property. He didn’t like the fact that I was about the same age as his daughter, and when Inge Morath, his photographer wife – so very nice and kind with eyes blue as a Norwegian fjord – suggested the three of take a walk, pretty little Rebecca, Arthur, and me … he sighed.

I still dream, Arthur Miller. Because of you, we all still dream. Hail and farewell, brave man.

http://www.sundayherald.com/47647

[Pikku]

22. Anti-intellectualism in American Life ... another goodie

By Richard Hofstadter. (Still in print)



It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.

...

"Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range... Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them."

"... Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines."

...

"Observers of American academia have often asked with some bitterness why athletic distinction is almost universally admired and encouraged whereas intellectual distinction is resented. I think the resentment is in fact a kind of backhanded tribute democracy plays to the importance of intellect in our affairs. Athletic skill is recognized as being transient, special, and for most of us unimportant in the serious business of life; and the tribute given the athlete is considered to be earned because he entertains. Intellect, on the other hand, is neither entertaining (to most men) nor innocent; since everyone sees that it can be an important and permanent advantage in life, it creates against itself a kind of universal fraternity of commonplace minds."


Richard Hofstadter: Anti~Intellectualism in American Life, 1963

[malaise]

25. I read Death of a Salesman

as a first year undergrad student. I fell in love with Miller and read everything I could find. Death of a Salesman and The Crucible left lasting impressions about the US.

Miller was a class act - two words define him for me -integrity and depth. Not only has the salesman been replaced by the corporation, but schools and many universities have also been transformed into hollow, spineless corporate institutions devoid of their primary role - making young people and faculty think. Today the salesman is the corporation backed by a lying dishonest media and their financiers. Their collective raison d'etre is to avoid thought at all costs.

The good news is that reality is forcing people to start thinking again. I think that an updated movie version of the Crucible with Dumbya and his corrupt judges as the witch hunters will wake up a few more. After all this bunch has certainly succeeded in whipping up a blood-lust frenzy.

[question everything]

27. This is why I was so happy about Clinton and Gore

Two intellectuals who were proud of it.

But this was a short period in parenthesis between the shallowness and anti-intellectuals of Reagan and Quayle (and papa Bush who tried to dumb himself) and now, the ultimate in anti-intellectuals - Bush.

[scarletlib]

26. The Crucilble

Brilliant play--all about the destruction caused by public hysteria/fear and power. Written and produced during the MCCarthy times.

Again relevant to what is happening in this country today.

I was surprised (but not really) that his death received so little comment in the public sector.