“The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent”
By Lionel Trilling
(2008, Northwestern University Press)
Last week, wondering if George Orwell’s essay, “Notes on
Nationalism” was in the Orwell Reader
we’ve had for years, I went hunting in the nook. A couple of summers ago, Ben and Denise lined
up book cases in a “U” in our basement, put a lamp and a nice chair in it and
migrated hundred of our books onto the shelves.
The books are sort of ordered and Ben remembers where he shelved most of
them… but Ben had just gone back to school and I didn’t want to bother him.
I did not find the Orwell
Reader because I was arrested in my search when I spotted The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
by Lionel Trilling. I had gotten this as
a gift awhile back and it must have been swept off to the nook without my
realizing it. Which is great because now
I have the happy surprise of rediscovery.
Trilling attended Columbia University in the 1920s and later
taught English at Columbia his whole career. (He was the first Jew in the
department and mentioning this gives me opportunity to digress and mention that
my parents gave no example of racial or ethnic prejudice that I can
remember. I went for years in my teens
reading Isaac Asimov without twigging that he was Jewish. It was for some friends in high school to
disbelievingly say, “You know, Jews,
with names like Goldstein!” for me to get an incredulous clue.)
I read his collection of literary essays, The Liberal Imagination, somewhere in
the mid-80’s and again five or six years ago.
His long essay on The Princess Casamassima
by Henry James eventually proved my entrée to the works of James. What I think brought me back to Trilling was
his being a colleague of my man, Jacques Barzun.
The title, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” stops
one in one’s tracks. It might be
patronizing: I’m intelligent, are you pulling your weight? But I don’t
take it that way. I take it that we all
really do have an obligation to educate ourselves and think unceasingly in
whatever sphere we work.[1]
“Trilling never encountered a good reason to postpone
thinking,” writes Leon Wieseltier in his introduction to this volume.[2] In times like ours – which are really like
all times – we cannot take the truths we are handed without critically
examining them. That sense, which has
accreted in my own awareness through reading science, testing software and
studying history, tells me that we must study things from many angles. It leads me to make most of my judgments very
provisional – something I suspect my family finds maddening. Wieseltier on Trilling again: “The
intellectual life, if it is genuine, is a life of strain.”
To return to Orwell (I’m still keeping an eye out for that Reader), or rather to Trilling on
Orwell. I think this explains Trilling’s
point and the title and the need:
[What any of us]
could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of
the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the
little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance
on being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly,
having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the
prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political
and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the
inside dope. He implies that our job is
not to be intellectual, certainly not intellectual in this fashion or that, but
merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of
the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work
only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that
we may become full members of the society of thinking men.[3]
[1]
The title “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” came from a lecture and then
an essay by one of Trilling’s professors, John Erskine.
[2] This
book was published in 2008, before Wieseltier was swept off the stage by the
#MeToo movement – which demonstrates that intelligence is not one’s only moral
obligation.
[3] P264
in the present volume, in the essay, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth”,
1952
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