Rod Dreher

A Reformation I Can Believe In

Intellectual Capital? Do We Have One?

By Rod Dreher • July 9, 2012, 6:54 PM

I just ran across a line in Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples (I know, not his best, but a fun read anyway) about Boston long being America’s intellectual capital. Do we have one today? It’s not a frivolous question. Given the massive problems facing us, isn’t it important to try and figure out where the solutions may come from? I’d vote for D.C., but you have to correct for the inertial drag of non-stop politics, where ideas get expropriated at birth for policy purposes, without the time to grow and develop. New York? A decaying crust of liberal opinion facing a daunting economic future that may take the best minds out of the city. Certainly not Boston anymore, or L.A. Nor can any university lay claim to being the intellectual heart of the country.

Auslin wants to know if America has such a place, or if such a place is even necessary.

I’d say the NYC-DC-Boston axis is the intellectual capital, but that’s cheating, isn’t it? Those are three cities, and they cover a wide area. NYC is the cultural capital and the financial capital, but Washington is not only the political capital, but the place where policy ideas come from. Most countries have their capitals concentrated in one city. Not us.

The more interesting question Auslin poses is whether we need physical proximity for creative interaction. It’s a great question, actually. I sit in my house in a tiny Louisiana river town and don’t blog all that differently than I would if I still lived in Philly.

Yet when I was at Templeton and had a blog, I wrote far more often about issues related to science and religion, simply because my physical proximity to smart people who thought about these things all the time brought to my attention stories, people, and ideas that I wouldn’t have been confronted with, normally.

On the other hand, I know from my (very enjoyable) years in NYC and DC that the effect of living in a bubble can be stultifying. Most people in this country do not think and talk about the things that the ideas-generating people concentrated in places like NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, and the Bay Area do. You might say, “Uh, yeah, that’s why they call those places ‘intellectual capitals.’” And you would be right. The point is, however, that with physical concentration of intellectually-minded people comes a certain insularity from everyday problems and everyday experiences.

When I was in my 20s and working in Washington, I would come home to visit my family in St. Francisville and be frustrated by how little interest anybody showed in the work I was doing. I was covering Capitol Hill during the Republican Revolution of 1994 and beyond. Speaker Gingrich, man! Nobody cared. Now, even today, at 45, I would say that they ought to have been paying more attention to what was happening. But I was more wrong than they were. I was caught up in the vanity of being in Washington, around all that power and celebrity, and reading everything through the lens of the politics-obsessed media (of which I was a part). It distorted my sense of what’s important.

Without question your average intellectual would be far more at home in a place like Washington, or New York, than in a small town somewhere. But the question is not whether intellectuals like to live in intellectual capitals; the question is, Does America need such places?

I would still have to say yes, if only because certain creative enterprises depend on collaboration and social engagement among creatives. But I would also say that we need them less than we think we do, and that the parochialism that is an inevitable effect of these places hurts the country more than people think. A lot goes on in America that intellectuals in the capitals can’t see, for the same reason that city dwellers don’t see all the stars in the sky until they get far out into the desert.

What do you think?

Posted in A Sense of Place, Ideas. Tagged intellectual capital, Michael Auslin.

29 Responses to Intellectual Capital? Do We Have One?

Geoff Guth says:

July 9, 2012 at 7:21 pm

It’s good that we have several. Heck, compared with a century or two ago, pretty much any city with a major state college and maybe some smaller private or community colleges is more than the equal of even Oxford or Cambridge back then. And distributing that intellectual capital widely around the country is far, far better for the country as a whole, rather than concentrating it in one or two intellectual capitals.

It’s funny reading your reaction to your home town when you came back from Washington. I was only in DC as a soldier, oddly enough not long after you arrived and celebrated the Republican revolution, so I had no illusions about having grand policy discussions, there or elsewhere. And that’s fine; for me that’s what the internet is for.

What I do miss is being around people who enjoy diverse intellectual discussions for their own sake. I had one or two fairly close friends in college (we had a New Testament translation group and a medieval Latin group for a bit). But no-one I know now is even remotely interested in that sort of thing, so my Homer gathers dust on my shelf. Unfortunately, the only people who seem to admire old things like I do operate in completely different cultural milieus, where we’d probably both be uncomfortable interacting.

I do find politics less and less important to me. But I genuinely miss having intelligent people to talk to. But even advanced degrees these days are no guarantee of intellectual curiosity and development.

But then again, that sense of isolation is really nothing new for people like me (and, I suspect, you Mr. Dreher), is it?
Geoff Guth says:

July 9, 2012 at 7:25 pm

My ideal evening: Robertson Davies described a dinner party in a college senior common room with academics from a wide range of disciplines in “The Rebel Angels”, IIRC. As I recall, the discussion in the book was nothing to write home about, but I’d really love the opportunity to take part in that kind of dinner now and then.
Church Lady says:

July 9, 2012 at 7:32 pm

It used to be New York, back in the days before television, and then the web, changed everything.

Now it doesn’t actually have a physical location, which is perhaps a good thing, perhaps a bad thing. Media, the internet, and the economics of publishing have changed our intellectual life so much, that there’s no real center anymore. Newspapers don’t command any intellectual heft anymore, except the Times, and even that’s debatable. Magazines are a joke. The whole publishing industry based in New York is just a corporate nightmare that doesn’t support an intellectual or literary culture.

So what we have left are people who are loosely connected by various forms of media and only vaguely representative of a social class, not an actual social culture.

The internet is what’s left. Like people coming here to chat and argue and throw the occasion shoe.

It’s a new world.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deist says:

July 9, 2012 at 7:52 pm

Frankly, a lot goes on in the country that can’t be meaningfully written about. Maybe it’s because there are experiences, patterns and occurences that “writer-types” just simply can’t see. That could apply to any country, of course.

No books can prepare you for most of the stuff you will learn and experience in life. I’ve never read a book that I thought actually captured “real life” in New Mexico (where I live), and VOLUMES have been written about the place, from every possible viewpoint. Every possible WRITERLY viewpoint, that is.
SusanKG says:

July 9, 2012 at 8:07 pm

The tech world sees Silicon Valley/Bay Area/Seattle as the intellectual capital(s). There is a reason Zuckerberg left Harvard to go to the Left Coast.
bbarker says:

July 9, 2012 at 8:19 pm

Silicon Valley?
Beyng says:

July 9, 2012 at 8:54 pm

Down with the cities!
Tyro says:

July 9, 2012 at 8:55 pm

We definitely have several. But I would say that DC is a “second hand” intellectual capital. They only pretend to create ideas here. What they try to do is publicize ideas in DC and give them a sheen of public legitimacy.

Most people in this country do not think and talk about the things that the ideas-generating people concentrated in places like NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, and the Bay Area do.

Count me in among the “du-uh” respondents. I’m in science, and my interests, while technological rather than theoretical, are still kind of abstract, and are only of interest to people in other intellectual capitals. The reason people move to intellectual capitals is that they’re not getting the intellectual/professional satisfaction that they wanted wherever they were living.

If you want to go back to your hometown and have everyone be impressed with what you’re doing, be a doctor. Everyone understands what they do and why they’re important. Plus, you make lots of money, so people instantly regard you a “respectable” and “successful.”

No one understands what I do or takes much interest in it, though it has a difficult-sounding title, and I drive a German sports car, so they figure I must be doing something right.
Cannoneo says:

July 9, 2012 at 9:00 pm

I would not take the young-adult media-politics D.C. bubble as very analogous to intellectual life.

Most academics and working creatives are well over the age of 30, and live on middle-class salaries. Their “problems and experiences” are just as “everyday” as anyone else’s. They live not only in cities, but in small campus towns spread out across the country. Louisiana has dozens of colleges – where do their faculties live and how isolated are they from their neighbors? They are quite representative of America’s intellectual class.
Liam says:

July 9, 2012 at 9:30 pm

Boston was English-speaking America’s intellectual capital from about 1640 to about the second quarter of the 18th century, briefly dovetailed and then quickly supplanted by Philadelphia until the Jacksonian era, at which time the greater Boston area resumed some important measures of leadership while NY took others through the Civil War, upon which NY took primary leadership (even with the great reform of Harvard under Eliot). Eventually, that fractured over time, as intellectual fields fractured by increased specialisation.

DC may be a policy center, but that’s not properly speaking the same thing as an intellectual center.
lasorda says:

July 9, 2012 at 10:00 pm

I am a native Angeleno who lived in New York for years. I don’t like saying this, but if I am honest with myself, Los Angeles generates far more “culture” than New York. Of course a journalist wouldn’t see it that way, but if you looked objectively at the culture in which most Americans live, it originates in television and movie studios, not the media coming out of New York. When I lived in New York, I was convinced that the whole country was hanging on Graydon Carter and David Remnick’s every editorial decision, but when I moved home, the massive power of Hollywood really hit me in way it never did when I was a kid growing up here. Los Angeles–God help us–is our cultural capital.
alcogito says:

July 9, 2012 at 10:21 pm

Better go read Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”. From the description, ” One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.”
L617 says:

July 10, 2012 at 6:26 am

I think it’s a strength that, unlike European countries, we have a number of intellectual centers of gravity. Without question, the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor (Megalopolis) is the intellectual, financial, artistic, scientific, creative, corporate and political center of gravity for not only the US, but the western hemisphere. Washington is the weakest and contributes the least of the three.
Sam M says:

July 10, 2012 at 7:21 am

“Without question your average intellectual would be far more at home in a place like Washington, or New York, than in a small town somewhere.”

Does this really go without question? I think it depends on the intellectual pursuit. Research-based fields like medicine need labs and things like that, and some people prefer to write plays and novels in the context of a university program… but not always. Or even most often.

Also, what of places like, say, Iowa City? It’s not NYC, but if you were to select a “capital” of fiction writing, it would probaby rank ahead. The Mayo Clinic is in Rochester, Minnesota. Etc.
Tyro says:

July 10, 2012 at 7:30 am

if I am honest with myself, Los Angeles generates far more “culture” than New York. Of course a journalist wouldn’t see it that way, but if you looked objectively at the culture in which most Americans live, it originates in television and movie studios, not the media coming out of New York

And, to be fair, there is no shortage of LA-based authors. It’s a literary city that simply doesn’t get enough attention for that side of it.

Why are some places intellectual capitals and other places not? Part of it is because the economies of cities that become intellectual capitals depend on some form of creative output/technological development and/or trade rather than resource extraction.

That said, America is very large, and the big benefit of our land-grant universities and National Laboratory system is that we have major intellectual centers spread all over the country.

Better go read Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”. From the description, ” One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.”

It is a fairly consistent phenomenon that conservative intellectuals are always located in the precise “intellectual capitals” that they despise. William Buckley wasn’t writing from Macon. The conservative think-tank-industrial-complex exists in the NY-DC axis.
Mister Pickwick says:

July 10, 2012 at 8:41 am

The intellectual capital of our nation is Port Royal, Kentucky. And I’m not joking. Wendell Berry has, over the past 40 years, put to shame the urban elites in terms of intellectual inquiry, poetry, fiction and essays on a wide variety of subjects.

His example has fostered intellectual rebirths in other areas outside the urban East Coast/California elitist axis. I’m writing from Montana, and we have a vibrant community of writers and thinkers in Missoula and Bozeman. Colorado has a similar situation in Boulder. Portland also taps into this strain. And just about everyone in this movement looks to Berry for inspiration.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 10, 2012 at 9:21 am

Milwaukee, of course.

It is securely located in America’s heartland, on the third coast, escaped the history of truly refined corruption of Chicago, which makes it perhaps the only city where one can think outside the box, following the fetishes of neither the Left Coast nor the Right Coast, close to the “real America” of the midwest, while immersed in first class libraries, theater, architecture. The advanced thinking that will shatter America’s sterile paralysis, culturally as well as politically, can only come from Milwaukee.
Charlieford says:

July 10, 2012 at 9:45 am

Intellectual capital? Of America?

Branson.

Definitely Branson.
Uncle Vanya says:

July 10, 2012 at 10:58 am

With the internet and mass communications now almost instantaneous, is it really possible to say with credibility any longer where the intellectual capital of America is?
Matt says:

July 10, 2012 at 11:07 am

These conversations always seem to have as a starting assumption that living in a small town or on a mountain top somewhere is always and to everyone preferable to living in a city. I remember back in the mid-’90′s hearing oodles of prognostication that, with the rise of the Internet, cities would depopulate as people would be empowered to move to mountains in Tennessee and still be able to do the same things they previously needed to live in a major metropolitan area to do.

But what these oracles of wisdom failed to understand was, to a great many people, cities are the most desirable places to live. While undoubtedly there are many people who would adore being able to live on that mountain top in Tennessee, it would not be an overstatement to say that I would regard living in such a place as absolute, living hell. When I went to college in West Lafayette, Indiana, living in this tiny town – even though it was a major college town – was, to me, absolute hell.

Having cultural institutions readily available is important to many – probably most – who fall under the category of “intellectual”. Small towns are simply incapable of supporting such institutions. Thus, cities as centers of intellectual capital are necessary so as to provide the stimulation necessary to keep many or most intellectuals from committing suicide out of sheer boredom.
Mister Pickwick says:

July 10, 2012 at 12:24 pm

“Thus, cities as centers of intellectual capital are necessary so as to provide the stimulation necessary to keep many or most intellectuals from committing suicide out of sheer boredom.”

Well, I guess someone forgot to tell Wendell Berry.

Also, Matt, you seem to assume that a “city” capable of supporting cultural institutions has to be a megalopolis (NYC, DC, Bay Area, etc). But small cities (especially university towns) can not only support such institutions, they can also make those institutions much more accessible.

Example: I am sure that NYC offers a lot of stimulating lectures. But for a middle class guy like me, they’re hardly accessible. Getting to them would require a lot of effort (traffic), cost (transit fare or gas plus parking. And often an admission fee), risk (crime) and hassle. By contrast, if I live in (say) Boulder, Missoula or Bozeman getting to such a lecture would require much less effort (I’d walk or cycle), be less costly (no transit or gas cost, no parking fee, no admission fee), be very safe and involve almost no hassle. As a result, these small-city intellectual centers in the West attract a lot of folks (like me) who end up getting far more intellectual nourishment than we would actually get in big cities. Living in Boulder, my daughter attended lectures by Nobel laureates. When I lived in Missoula, I attended a very intimate lecture by a Pulitzer prize winning poet. The life of the mind thrives in these Western small cities.
Matt says:

July 10, 2012 at 3:23 pm

Also, Matt, you seem to assume that a “city” capable of supporting cultural institutions has to be a megalopolis (NYC, DC, Bay Area, etc).

No, I didn’t say that. I said I find anything less than a major metropolitan area completely inadequate and that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way – though it’s not universal. My comparison is mostly with mountaintop hamlets or, say, Rod’s small town in Louisiana; places which, let’s be honest, are totally incapable of providing any kind of significant life of the mind beyond books the resident imports through Amazon, because they lack the critical mass of population necessary to support the underlying infrastructure. (For obvious reasons, college towns are able to “punch above their weight” in this regard.) The underlying assumption behind the post seems to be the common assumption of small-town partisans that the superiority of living in a small town should be universally self-evident. It’s self-evidently not. It works for some people and not others.

I went to Purdue, student body about 35,000, so I’m familiar with a major college town; and while the life of the mind certainly thrives there, I, a Chicago native found the smallness of Lafayette and West Lafayette absolutely stifling. Of course it’s a matter of perspective – I’m in Chicago today because I found Houston (the 4th largest city in the United States) to be too small-town for my taste, so there you go. On the other hand, were I to be forcibly exiled from any major metropolitan area, I can tell you without hesitation that I would take up residence in your college town long, long before I’d move to that mountaintop hamlet in the Appalachians.
Sands says:

July 10, 2012 at 5:09 pm

If we need an intellectual capital, it should be my neighborhood bar in suburban Houston. Oh sure, we regulars ain’t never gonna (that’s how we talk) write a book or anything. But we are all deep thinkers who, after a few drinks, develop all kinds of thought-provoking solutions to the world’s problems.
Art Deco says:

July 10, 2012 at 5:39 pm

It is a fairly consistent phenomenon that conservative intellectuals are always located in the precise “intellectual capitals” that they despise.

The referent was to Thomas Sowell, who has lived in and around San Francisco since 1980. He lived in Los Angeles for about eight years prior to that. He was itinerant between 1949 and 1974, never staying any one place longer than about four years. His upbringing was split between small town North Carolina and Manhattan. I have been reading him for thirty years and cannot recall him saying he despised any place he had lived.

Buckley’s principal residence was in Stamford, Ct. and his confederates lived various places, including rural Maryland (Whittaker Chambers), New Haven and Dallas (Willmore Kendall), Upstate New York (Frank Meyer), and small town New Hampshire (Jeffrey Hart). Russell Kirk lived in Michigan the last four decades of his life. Milton Friedman lived in Chicago more than any other place. Joseph Epstein lives in Chicago, and has for all but a few of his 74 years. Kenneth Lynn lived in Baltimore. Norman Podhoretz has lived in New York, but he grew up there. James Jackson Kilpatrick lived in Virginia throughout his adult life. Robert P. George lives outside of Trenton, N.J. James Dobson lives in Colorado Springs etc.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 10, 2012 at 6:26 pm

Sands has the right idea. I don’t hang out in the bars in Milwaukee, but rumor has it they offer the same deep thinking as his hang-outs in Houston.
stef says:

July 10, 2012 at 6:30 pm

In a sense we have two cultural capitals, New York City and Southern California. Both influence the country greatly – the ‘high culture’ coming from NYC and the ‘low culture’ (including pop architecture styles like Googie) coming from LA.
Thehova83 says:

July 10, 2012 at 8:38 pm

I would say either Boston or NYC. Definitely not DC.
Hector_St_Clare says:

July 11, 2012 at 10:24 am

I like the decentralized system we have in this country, where the flagship state universities (and a number of smaller private, public, and religious colleges) are scattered out across the country. You can find plenty of intellectual life and academic expertise in places like Bloomington, Amherst, Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Austin, Davis, Syracuse, Fort Collins, and plenty of other places, depending on what you’re looking for.
E says:

July 11, 2012 at 12:36 pm

DC’s where serious analysis and policy creativity go to die. LA’s doubtlessly the cultural capital – and, yes, God help us.

The real intellectual capital? How about the place that best reflects the intellectual state of of the union: Las Vegas. Craven gamblers and the ultra rich who exploit them in exchange for a dose of crass, false glamour and a mathematically rigged shot at the big time. Bet everything on red, America!