I get that this is--to a certain extent--just more book advertising, but I appreciate Brooke's fairly consistent attempts to instigate public philosophical discussion.
Intellectuals are given less authority and are more specialized. They write more for each other and are less likely to volley moral systems onto the public stage.
-I doubt this was any different in the past, at least regarding who intellectuals were writing for. Can we credit it a victory that intellectuals aren't volleying moral systems on to the public stage? The last thing I need is a bunch of moral systems flying at my head. I think its enough that "intellectuals" put forth ideas and let us decide how to take those ideas and construct our own moral code. I think Brooks is nostalgic for a time that never existed. I think that's conservatism in a nutshell.
Perhaps. But I don't think Brooks is arguing here for a return to this time; it seems to me that he recognizes the decentralization of intellectual authority, and, rather than bemoan it, suggests that we ought to develop new methods of encouraging public discourse about 'morality' (which he seems to define, broadly, as roughly equivalent with philosophy or Weltanschauung). That is to say, we don't need intellectuals throwing morals in our faces; I, for one, am glad that they no longer do. But what we do need is sustainable public dialogue about what motivates us. (Emph mine)Mostly the idea is to use a community of conversation as a way to get somewhere: to revive old vocabularies, modernize old moral traditions, come up with new schools and labels so that people have more concrete building blocks and handholds as they try to figure out what life is all about.