In the past few years,
the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional
intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud,
Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in
the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense,
increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of
many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their
culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon
and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments,
the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real
world gets lost.