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of their thinking and were anti-Semitic to boot, or the more recent
support of Hitler and Stalin by a number of intellectuals.
How do we resolve this contradiction? Arthur Koestler, in a
piece on the intelligentsia, cites the 1934 Edition of the
Oxford
English Dictionary's
definition of the intelligentsia as being those
who aspire to think objectively. Koestler approved of this defini–
tion, but went on to call attention to its violation by intellectuals,
particularly in recent history. In other words, they aspire to think
~
independently but do not always succeed.
Perhaps the only resolution of the problem is that they are
influenced by the major social forces of their time , and hence
they absorb some of the most retrograde as well as the most co–
gent and advanced ideas. As Orwell once said that there is a cer–
tain kind of nonsense one can learn only in college, we might
conclude that there are certain mistakes only intellectuals can
make. Let us say that their mistakes are on a higher level. But
then who is to decide that mistakes have been made? Perhaps
only the best of the intellectuals, the superintellectuals.
* * *
It was a shock to see in
Critical Inquiry
(Spring 1989), that
journal of staid, abstruse literary criticism, Edward A. Said's
rough attacks on Israel and on three professors who argued with
him which sounded more like the work of a street fighter than a
scholar. I have not agreed with Said 's deconstructionist and
Marxist thinking, but to my knowledge, in his literary and cul–
tural criticism Said usually has followed the rules and courtesies
of academic discourse. Yet apparently here he is acting in his
other, political role, that of a Palestinian spokesman-indeed, as I
understand, a member of the PLO Central Committee. As for the
content of Said's comments, most of it is the familiar anti-Israel
position, but it is argued with more subtlety and adroitness than
usual. The gist of his argument is: that Israel has no historical
claim to its territory; that the Holocaust is no justification for op–
pressing the Palestinians; that the occupation is brutally enforced;
that Israel is a colonial power; that the Palestinians are fighting a
just anticolonial struggle, and so on.
