Decades ago, when I was pondering a college major, I had an indepth discussion with a relative who was the head of a university department regarding getting a B.A. or B.S. degree.

He, well educated in the classics and several languages, advised a B.A. Why? Because a humanities degree teaches people to think, while the other teaches peple to do. His rational was that if you could think you could do, the reverse was not necessarily true.

Since the 1990s our universities have been turning out doers who don't think. Accountants, MBAs, Finance wizards, by the tens of thousands most of who had no idea or care about the consequences of their doings.

As our society was consumed by materialism we set aside thinking for accumulating. A bad bargain. We are now reaping that particular wind.

My hope is the intellectual acumen combined with a sincere understanding of real people and their problems exhibited by the president is the start of a new Age Of Reason.

Thank you, Lee.

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Amen. What's painful is knowing the capability of intellectuals to rationalize and understand complex ideas and then relay these ideas to the common man/woman in terms they will understand has temporarily flown the coop. Those that maintain levelheadedness through chaos, whether that chaos be economic, political, or any other, not only carry a seldom recognized and thankless characteristic all should strive for, but more importantly have an inherent responsibility to step up and instill calm over the masses. This fundamental aspect of intellectual leadership is part of what is allowing this country to continue through this difficult and trying economic time without clear cut answers. Until the time when this leadership becomes apparent to the regular man, society will continue to linger in this purgatorian-like state, unsure of what is right, but more importantly, unsure of when this will end. Food for thought. Great article.

It is too bad that Tina Brown goes on a show like Morning Joe who is dismissive of science and culture. She needs to bring back her own show.

The problem is that, unfortunately, perception is reality and Americans will buy into whatever pushes their buttons. Being able to offer an opinion these days means (somehow) you're relevant.

There are other paradigms, some of them very complete. However, the price of consilience and rigour is interdisciplinary complexity. In other words, you have to work pretty hard to understand what they're on about. Mancur Olson, for instance, would have seen this economic crisis as the vindication of many of his ideas, as laid out in the Logic of Collective Action and elsewhere. Joseph Schumpeter, similarly, would be nodding his head right now. Both of these scholars are sometimes mentioned (Schumpeter mainly, b/c Milton Friedman liked him). Sadly, few people read them. Read Olson's discussion of 'rational ignorance,' and you realise he predicted that, too. The trouble isn't the paradigms, the trouble is us - as in, our unwillingness to cope with anything that can't be smushed into a two-second soundbite (give yourself a pat on the back if you read this far).

As one of the "proverbial rocket scientists" I can attest that Siegel is correct, I do not fully understand the forces that are causing such a calamity. But that is just one of the many things I don't understand about our financial system as a whole. One of the other big things I don't understand how people can buy stock in a company and then sell it for a 10% profit 30 mins later after the CEO makes an address to the public touting his or her company.

Siegel is dead on in this article. Susan Jacoby brings up similar notions in her book "The Age of American Unreason," that intellectualism has been all but demonized in our culture. The issue of abortion was raised, another that could just as easily be brought out is illegal immigration. It seems that one can either be for "open borders" or "closed borders" but neither side gets to the root of the issue. Does Lou Dobbs (or anyone for that matter) really think that Americans and American jobs will be safer with a fence that runs the length of our southern border? Both sides would like the same end result (having the only immigrants in America being legal ones), but neither side, in the public discourse, appears to be looking at why scores are crossing the border in the first place.

In response to Mix, I agree with you that on the whole BS degrees are for doers and BAs are for thinkers, and that thinkers can be doers but the opposite is much more difficult. These stereotypes are not necessarily a bad thing when applied to a group of people, but we must not apply them to individuals in these groups. Similar comparisons could be made to physical sciences; we look at gases as a continuum and apply characteristics like pressure and temperature to the whole that don't necessisarily represent how individual molecules are behaving.

In my profession, I see the doer mentality all the time. The clearest example is during conferences where groups from all different flavors of aerospace engineering are presenting research work they have done. Some people go to these places and only go to presentations that they think will help them to do their job better. Others, myself included, go to a variety of different topics, mostly out of a thirst for knowledge.

My hope is the same, that we can start a new Age of Reason, but there are plenty of loud people that do not want that to happen. It must happen if this world is to prosper.

Indeed we are ideas impoverished. One can draw many comparisons between the ideas vs. issues and the financial crisis as it is. Right now the Coultiers and Limbaughs of the world are the equivalent of the derivatives traders. They are simply peddling weak percentages of recycled "ideas" coming of the financial markets and the industry gurus, and much like the wealth of the burned out industry giants, these ideas are being "fabricated" not created.

The truth is this is just the very embodiment of the defunct "Two Cultures" argument that C.P. Snow made, except now it's the humanities area that is clearly demonstrating a lack of cohesion. Intellect has been pushed out of the picture simply because intellectuals and thinkers were always involved with government in way or another, and the past several decades have clearly been steered to allow unfettered markets and invisible hands to the run the show with any regulation or government intervention being the worst of all taboos...Thus the current crisis.

Balderdash!

Age of Reason? 3.5 trillion dollar budget is reasonable?

With my speakers on mute, Ann Coulter is easy on the eyes.

I may be guilty of Fukuyama-like triumphalism, but the reason that there is a dirth of ideas, in the way you chracterize them, is that there is large scale agreement on fundamental questions.

Where there isn't this type of agreement, like in the abortion debate ideas are bounce around. In the case of abortion the ideas debate hasn't surrounded "the social limits of sexual pleasure, not merely about reproductive rights", because that isn't the fundamental issue at play. Rather, the debate has surrounded the moment at which a fetus gains the status of personhood and is entitled to human rights, and once it is entitled to rights, how those rights compare / interact with a women's sovereignty over her own body, a pretty serious debate of ideas indeed.

While I agree that idea-based debate has given way to management style dialogue, I think this is more a result of success of the ideas developed over the last hundred years (in spite of the current crisis) such as the effectiveness and efficiency of markets, establishing a baseline of social welfare, and the consistent expansion of human rights.

Great article, well-written, well-argued.

I wonder if there are limits to intellect. I see no mass dissemination of insights into our present economic crisis. I see attempts, but they seem to fall short. In any case, get seven intellectuals in a room and ask them to describe the solution to our financial crisis and they will come out with seven different solutions. In that sense, they are a bunch of schmucks like the pundits that appear on cable. So, we got to go with what we got -- a very smart President giving it his best shot, with intellectuals on the sidelines, begging to differ.

Actually, I've found lately my friends on the right are eager to retreat into the basic ideas of Rand or Hayek or Friedman, because those who attempted to put those ideas into practice have proved them abject failures.

sadly, they're still reluctant to reconsider those ideas or even retool the practices.

To all of you budding and flowering intellectuals I offer you my favorite epigram:

95. Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
- Alan J. Perlis

This would be more persuasive if the author hadn't used Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Jim Cramer as examples of anti-intellectual boobery, while praising Jon Stewart as an intellectual. Newt Gingrich (and Rush too), for all their bloviating and self-importance, actually do propagate some very interesting ideas. As a lawyer, however, I tend to think that while ideas and creativity are important, an ounce of doing is often worth a pound of "thinking." It is the doers who really change the world. When you combine a thinker with a doer, these rare people revolutionize the world for the greater good (See, e.g. Edison, Gates, etc.).

Right on.

But I do think that this failure of intellectualism the author diagnoses has much to do with the MEDIUM that intellectual exchange now takes place in. Blog entries. News articles. Sound bites on TV programs. In all of these media, ideas are reduced down to simplistic slogans. True intellectual discourse requires time, thought - long conversations, book-length works, back-and-forth. Perhaps, it is wrong then to expect intellectualism from the sort of celeb-rotten, infotainment that dominates the current media environment. If you want intellectualism, read an academic article.

I would think the intellectuals are being belittled by comments related to their bottom.

I would also think that anyone speaking about the financial crisis, who was an intellectual, would be heckled by people who had no idea what they were talking about.

The Rick the brick type Jethros I thought were the thought police, who destroy intellectuals by either demeaning them, belittling them, or by isolating them socially as crazies.

So why be surprised if all you get are Jethros going you betcha, you betcha, you betcha, like a parrot would.

@jackbutler5555

Who's to say that if you get seven "intellectuals" in the room you'll get seven different answers? I know that's the common consensus, but that doesn't make it true. That's really what Obama seems to be doing in regards to a lot of his topics of interest. He has held fiscal and heath care summits so far at the White House with "intellectuals" (save T. Boone Pickens, the jury is still out on his credentials in my book). I will agree, however, that we do have a very intelligent president giving it his best shot and he deserves to be given a chance to succeed.

Coulter is never speechless. She always has something stupid to say.

It's like somebody
Took a good argument
And threw it
In a blender.
The words are
All there
But they don't
hang together
In any intelligible way.

This Emperor
Doesn't
Have a damned thing on.

I completely agree with your post. As someone who got a B.A. and is now pursuing a professional master's degree, I can completely see the difference between the "do-er" and the "thinker" mentality. We are given realistic work experience in the master's program but there is no room here for intellectual discussion. The work here is intense in the amount of time it takes, but most of the time, it seems like busy work.

The problem with having a "thinker" degree is that it doesn't get you very far as far as a career goes, unless you want to pursue higher education as far as a doctorate degree, which is financially difficult for most people. It boils down to the wanting to live comfortably versus being a "thinker."

You people want one line slogans, look at the comments these morons send when I post.

Your comedians go on about Canada being stupid, but you people have a war, in the middle east when you are dependent on oil.

You have banks and insurance companies that were making bundles on oil derivatives, what did you think was going to happen to the price of oil, the need to buy more derivatives to hedge against the risk and then the price collapses. What did you think was going to happen.

What did you think Madoff was doing? It would have been impossible to make the returns he was making on split strike conversion schemes, only a moron trying to be an intellectual would have thought Madoff's story was possible.

So out comes Rick the Brick types, who are pretending to understand what they don't understand, when an auditor doesn't even have to understand he has to validate that assets exist, that wasn't even done.

Now your seniours, your investors, are too scared to invest.

Now you wonder where the intellectuals are, probably you have have driven them to drink and in search for mindless orgasms like you appear to have done to your children, the ones you haven't charged with child abuse for sexting pics of themselves, because they have such a need to be validated, not like intellectuals. I already got 100 on my assignment, I don't need your validation. Morons.

You let people on an airplane with box cutters, and lighters, and once you stopped doing that, we haven't had another 911, but the fear of another 911, possibly has done more damage than 911 has.

The problem with problem solving, and mind storming, is ideas are presented in their infancy, only when they are developed, and are given a chance to actualize, they become Nobel enough to believe in.

Usually, not always, but the conceptual artist is shunned, partly because the ideas do sound crazy, the ideas are going to be wordy, pages long, you can't have it both ways, even in America, where everything is possible, because everyone believes it is possible.

You start criminalizing your children, when they play high tec doctor, then don't wonder why you don't have enough high tec doctors.

How many other countries would even think of criminalizing their young people over sexting, without making an effort to educate them first. An anti intellectual country. Not everyone is like that, the ones who are like that, can get ahead, because they are like that, and the ones who are more thoughtful, and question madoff schemes way before everyone else does, are often treated like crazies themselves.

This crisis has so many similarities of the one in 1974, you would think the connections would be made, that war in oil counties causes problems for oil dependent nations.

Probably ending the war will make a huge difference to the global economy. Ok now shoot me, my eyes are closed in prayer.

You should have looked at the reader responses to Brooks' column. Several people challenged him on the point about class conflict you mentioned, and did so intelligently. The reader comments in the New York Times are often as interesting as the original articles.