The Contempt felt by Left Intellectuals towards their peers (Re: A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back by Judith Butler)

[Carl Remick]

> >You're splitting hairs,  Catherine.  The critic helps to catalyze the
> >public understanding of rights and responsibilities that art 
> promotes.
> 
> If these are hairs, they're fairly substantial hairs.
> I do not think you have at all explained why lit critics or cultural
> critics are responsible for this more than any other group 
> invested with
> comparable 'intellectual authority'.

In a modern secular society, cultural critics are heirs to the role of
moral explicator that priests held in traditional religious societies.
If chemists or physicists or anyone else with "intellectual authority"
wants to chime in with moral lessons of their own, fine -- but I don't
think the *primary* duty of scientists et al. is to provide moral
instruction.  Not everyone can understand particle physics, and there is
no social necessity that everyone be able to achieve such understanding.
However, society is badly crippled if there aren't intellectuals whose
primary task is to examine moral issues in a way that people in general
can grasp ; that job logically belongs to cultural critics.

Carl Remick