The Empire of the Intellect   

            Part of my purpose in this book is to critique the use that has been made of "history" in the progression of power and knowledge that has driven atrocities. Much of what is called history resembles Jose Clemente Orozco's unique and often overlooked paintings of knowledge in the Dartmouth Library, in which a skeleton, watched over by scholars, who are also skeletons dressed in graduation robes, gives birth to another skeletal scholars, merely replicas of themselves.  The painting is a satire on the university and its role in the conquest of the Americas. With grim humor, Orozco is indicting what he sees as the imperial system of education and culture of the West.  These courageous paintings at Dartmouth College, one of the many colleges at the center of western imperial knowledge systems, express a deep irony.  They attempt to tell the history of the Americas from the point of view of its victims, on the very walls of the institutions that have most helped justify the victimizations.  This is extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented in the North American continent.[1]  Diego Rivera had painted a similar picture, in the 1930's, in the RCA building in New York, but the Rockefellers covered it up. Orozco's view of knowledge as an esoteric birth rite that delivers dead scholars into a world of books that help create injustice, conquest and torture is an accurate view of Western knowledge as seen from the colonized victims of Mexico, Peru, South Dakota, Vietnam, Africa or Nagasaki. Painting mostly in Mexico in the earlier part of the 20th century Orozco, like Rivera, tried to picture the conquest from the point of view of those that suffered from it, instead of those the benefited from it. His view of the university is a dark one, that does not flinch from indicting the complicity of Western scholars in the atrocities of the conquest.

            Orozco's painting raises the question of the degree to which scientific objectivity should be implicated in atrocities such as occurred in  the conquest, Hispanola, Mexico, Peru, Nagasaki and Vietnam?. Orozco's painting brings not only science but Western culture in general, its "great ideas" and "great books", here symbolized as skeleton's giving birth to ideological and historiographical lineages, symbolizing the imperial intellect. But the painting also has other meanings. Orozco makes the imperial scholars take on the image of the atrocities that they have contributed to producing, symbolized by the skeletons. This is historically quite "accurate" or "objective".  But the 'objectivity' of the painting brings into question the objectivity of western science and culture. The painting explores the paradox of knowledge/power. Like a scientist who studies science and finds it anything but 'neutral', or a historian who studies history and finds that most of it glorifies murderers, Orozco's painting opposes symbolic skeletons, representing western scholars, to "objective"  real skeletons lying in burned out villages in Hispanola, Wounded Knee, Cambodia, Honduras, Rwanda,  Guatemala, East Timor or a thousand other places. These skeletons[2] collectively indict the 'objectivity' of Western Science and the Institutions that profit from this knowledge.  'Objective history', in this case, is merely a complicitious aid in the destruction of innocent 'subjects'.

            In direct contrast to Orozco's view of the University it would be useful to consider  one of the books that defines the positive role of the University in the world. In  1992, the year of the quintcentennial 'celebration' of the brutal and bloody conquest of the New World by Columbus,  in a book celebrating the continuity of today's university with the universities of 19th century England, Jaroslav Pelikan "reexamines" John Henry Newman's  The Idea of the University. Pelikan, in a barely veiled attack on multiculturalism and relativism in the schools, believes that Newman's book is a "eloquent defense of liberal education" whose "timelessness" explains the function of the university today. The "Idea" of the university, it turns out, is a "timeless', platonic archetype, which from an essential matrix, buried deep in the substratum of Creation itself, has somehow given birth, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, to the amazing array of subjects progressing ever forward though university study, expanding ever closer to an almost divine objective standard hovering near god and the limit of total knowledge. The university, as the "Alma Mater" somehow mixes Athena, goddess of war, and the Virgin Mary, goddess and mother of the intellect, in an amalgam that gives birth to all research, like Orozco's painting of a skeleton  giving birth to skeleton-scholars.

            This Platonist notion at the basis of the university assumes that a divine and already completed knowledge exists supernaturally and mysteriously behind the fabric of things, and that it is the function of the teacher and the university to help the student draw out, what, in his or her deepest recesses, the student already knows,  The word 'education' has a similar meaning, deriving from the root 'to lead out of', into the light, with all the associations with Plato and his Parable of the Cave and the educator leading the ignorant into the light. The Platonic theory of education is racist, elitist and hierarchical, and depends on the fasely modest of the image of Socratic spiritual "midwife", as if giving birth to knowledge were equivalent to giving birth to life. This ideology, which is at the basis of the university and the ethic of 'disinterestedness' is a romantic ideal which assumes the university has a quasi-divine function to dictate doctrine, form perceptions of reality and instruct students to learn to participate in, rather than question, the reigning social hierarchy. Spiritual midwifery of the Socratic kind gives birth to empires and their injustices, not to equality of rights.

            This profoundly undemocratic notion of education is inherent in the university structure itself, however individual professors may of may not reflect this. Indeed the very notion of the 'ivory tower' recalls the anti-natural idealization of the crystal, jeweled and ivory city of the New Jerusalem, with it obsessively hierarchical arrangement of buildings and streets. The university has an apocalyptic function, in the sense that it services the will to power in the society around it, and seeks to destroy 'ignorance' even as its exalts those who claim to know. The university is a vehicle of social transformation. The transformative function of the university naturally allies itself with the most powerful segments of the society outside the university.

            I will try to explain why this is so in the next chapter. For now I return to John Henry Newman defining the nature of the university. What, then, does Newman actually say about the university?

            Newman, writing from Oxford, says that the University is the embodiment of "the philosophy of the imperial intellect". This is an important and far reaching definition. He defines the university as the place of the "teaching of universal knowledge" and that its method and its "object is intellectual- not moral".[3] The role of the amoral university in the world is clearly defined: "what the empire is in political history such is a University in the sphere of philosophy and research". This important statement defines clearly, all too clearly- the Empire of the Intellect . Moreover, how curiously like Aquinas' definition of the Christian 'great chain of being'.  Aquinas wrote that "reason is to man what god is to the world" and when one compares Newman's statement, paraphrased to say 'empire is to history what research is to the university', what is being defined, in both cases, is a system of hierarchies of knowledge and power.

            The University is the modern church, the secular monastery. It is a timeless, objective, amoral arena whose purpose is to increase the power of knowledge and its applications for imperialism. The university is the "high, protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and  principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation. It maps out the territory of the intellect and sees that the boundaries of each province are religiously respected", Newman writes.[4]

            The function of the university is to protect the vast empire of the "territory of the intellect", and to be the amoral watchdog of the universal ambitions of the empire. No one may question it without punishment. It hovers up close to heaven and is beyond blame or criticism. No one has the right or  business of ever circumscribing or judging the competence of those who build, profit from and maintain the empire. The business of scholars is only to further the power and knowledge of those whose domain extends so far that upon it, the sun never sets. But however easily these views can be satired, Newman has defined well the nature of the Empire of the Intellect, which is that Empire whose borders need to be crossed; whose sovereignty must be questioned; whose alliances must be accounted: whose rule must be resisted and whose victims should be compensated.

             Newman believed, probably accurately, that the modern university has its origin in the Ptolemaic school of Alexandria in the first centuries C.E. Medieval Cosmology dictated that man existed to serve god or those who represented him; the Pope, King, Court, landowners, and peasants in descending order. The hierarchy of the social order was reflected in the order of the heavens, the planets, the faculties of the body, the elements, musical scales and educational disciplines.  The vehicle and organ of understanding and interpretation that made this universal hierarchy possible was the Intellect, considered the supreme faculty of the human organism which inwardly allied man with god, and was, indeed, thought the microcosmic image of god and his power, the spark of the divine in man. This is reflected in the basic structure of Medieval education, where, according to Thierry of Chartres, "philosophy has two instruments, namely, intellect and its expression. Intellect is illumined by the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy). Its expression is the concern of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric)". [5] In other words there is order, and number and the means of expressing it. One can see in this arrangement both the order of the Roman Empire and the Christian ideology of the Logos combined.

            One can intuit or begin to understand, also, how the scientific ethic of disinterestedness grew from the medieval university. The universe described on the doors of Chartres Cathedral is a symbolic universe that combines Christian and Greek symbolism and rationalism. With the  rise of  scientific rationalism in the 17th century, the deification of the intellect became concrete, not merely symbolic.  God starts the universe going as a great clock and the rest remain for man to exploit to his advantage: the universe is merely a machine of production, thought Descartes, from which man can profit. In Descartes view only man has access to the objective truth, through the god inspired "Pineal Gland' placed by Providence in his brain. This gives man the right to turn the universe into a machine for his own use.

            The empire of the intellect develops from ideas such as these. The placement of the goddess of Reason in Notre Dame after 1789, the self crowning of Napoleon, Hegel's self deification of his own consciousness as the complete and total truth of the Logos, Marx's belief that man is god for man, or August Comte's belief in sociology as the 'religion of man' represent events in the history of this change. The drive to total explanation is the drive to total power whether this drive is conceived of as the intellect made in the image of god, consciousness as the ultimate truth of history, or the brain as the ultimate exemplar and model of IBM, who called themselves "the Knowledge Business" in advertisements in the 1980's, which pictured IBM as the final fruit of history.  The difference between the image of Christ as the symbol of the knowledge and power of the Church  and of IBM's perception of itself as the great salesman of the means of accessing and attaining useful knowledge is not as great as might seem on the surface.

            No doubt there are many differences that need to be analyzed in the development of the supremacy of the intellect from Plato to Marx to IBM. But it is the similarities that I wish to stress here: all of them represent a means of giving ascendancy to the belief that knowledge is the ultimate justification of power. The university is not only descended from Catholic/Greek institutions, it acts in a similar way, although the ideologies of the Middle ages have been adapted to newer cultural justifications, such as the  virtual sanctity of science and the virtual religion of Manifest Destiny and Western or American exceptionalism and imperialism. As Aristotle was to the Empire of Alexander, or Augustine, Aquinas and the Monastic system were to the Christian Empire of Medieval and early modern Europe, the university and corporate funding are to  the project of global imperialism.  There are many exceptions to this, because of the protections accorded by tenure and academic freedom; but these exceptions do not negate the imperial  and anti-democratic, hierarchical structure of the university system itself.  This is not a conspiracy theory, but merely an brief analysis of how Academic institutions actually operate in the world; profits are put before people, knowledge serves power and not human rights.[6] The bureaucratic structure of the University militates against democracy and favors elite powers, even if  some few within the university resist this.  I not not here questioning science itself, but rather the use of it. I am not questioning history itself, but only the use of it for unjust powers.

            The result of the hierarchical structure of the university system is that "intellectuals" are encouraged to support the maintenance and improvement of powers and empires. Those who dissent are labeled 'anti-intellectual' in some cases, or pejoritively called "intellectuals" in other cases, as in Paul's Johnson's The Intellectuals, Johnson's is a book that  seeks to defend orthodox powers and attack dissenters, from Rousseau to Chomsky. The argument about who are the real intellectuals is thus really an argument about who supports or is against power.

            The anti-intellectuals of the right, who are 'bona-fide" intellectuals in their own eyes, are quite useful to dominant powers and the corporate state, and thus they are everywhere in evidence in the corporate dominated media. William F. Buckley, Henry Kissinger or a plethora of cultural 'commissars" in Chomsky's phrase, from the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute or the Heritage Foundation, regularly appear on the media to justify milking the poor to feed the rich. Both the right and centrist intellectuals hate  the "intellectuals", or anti-intellectual "radicals" on the left because they criticize the system itself.  The latter barely manage to enter the increasingly  controlled media.  Chomsky, Zinn, and Said are three of the better known "intellectuals" of this kind. Said defines their intentions very well:           

The role of the intellectual is that of testifying: he/she testifies against the misuses of history or against the injustices that befall the oppressed.  He/she must be a rebel against power and against prevailing ideas. The intellectual must raise doubts about the status quo, all that is tyrannical in society, especially for the sake of the deprived and the oppressed.[7] 

            Said follows this statement with the observation that the "trap" that intellectuals tend to fall into is the professional trap of seeking to acquire power within his or her domain. Perhaps it would be better to abandon the term intellectual all together and recognize that intellectual "domains" are already traps of knowledge/power and one resists the trap only by seeking to become a human being before becoming an intellectual.  The historical record appears to indicate that a principle cause of injustice in the world is the erection of the intellect, in one or another of its many belief systems, into an agent of social tyranny and mind control. Human rights should take precedence over any Empire of the Intellect, whatever the empire might be called: science: Marxism: free market capitalism, Christianity.

            The argument over the nature and function of the intellect is so rife that one can only conclude that enormous power is at stake. The struggle over power produces positioning and arrogance, deference and bravura, rather as in a wolf pack when the Alpha male has grown old. On each side bristles some variation of a philosophy of 'Them versus Us"; each side branding the other with being anti-intellectual or non-objective. The only way out of this morass, it would seem,  is to recognize that intellectual strife is most intense around those areas  where the control of a system of knowledge/power is at stake. Questioning knowledge/power and the ideologues of hegemony and legitimacy, rather than adopting one of the competing strategies to gain knowledge/power, would appear to be the position that is most just and concerned not with power, but with human rights against regimes of knowledge and power. Humanism is what matters, not power, concern with humans and nature, with individuals and not states or institutions. History is the most appropriate area to do this questioning because history is the most obvious battle ground over which the various factions seek to impose their will to power via contradictory systems of interpretation, each one differing from the others. The essential concern expressed in Said's definition of the role of the intellectual above is precisely the attempt to defend the rights of human beings and, I would add, nature, against power and knowledge. This activity has to be done with science obviously, not with Medieval dogmatisms, but it must be a science that is not serving unjust power. Perhaps one no longer needs the term intellectual to describe one who is involved in this activity; perhaps the intellectuals need to be replaced by human beings.

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