by Lee Siegel
Of course, no one should blame the intellectuals for not being able to grasp our fathomless economic mess. An old joke went that only two people in history understood Hegel, and even they misunderstood him. Well, the only people who understand the present crisis are economists and tax lawyers, and even they misunderstand it. I have seen award-winning poets and novelists nearly reduced to tears trying to comprehend the relationship between mortgage-backed securities and recession.
Still, the question remains whether we are really the worse off because of the superannuation of ideas and of the people who have them. Not necessarily.
Ideas drove the various responses to the economic calamities of the 1920s—the result was totalitarian ideologies on the left and the right and the annihilation of tens of millions of people, all in the name of one idea or another. The Cold War provoked an incredible intellectual ferment, not just in political rumination, but in every area of culture, from the postwar novel to abstract expressionism, yet that conceptually heated atmosphere also created paranoia across the political spectrum, as well as an endless cycle of payback and score-settling. And the rifts produced by the idea-besotted '60s continue to bedevil us.
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