Ideas can define and transform society, but how healthy is intellectual life today? In recent decades, many observers have expressed concern about the ‘dumbing down’ of culture, noting an increasing tendency toward specialisation within academia, and a resulting demise of ‘public intellectuals’ capable of writing for and engaging with a non-specialist audience. All of these claims are disputed, and the ensuing debates reveal much about contemporary society. The question, however, is not merely academic. The state of intellectual life is inextricably linked to cultural and political life more generally. For ideas to be more than just commodities, there must be a dynamic relationship between intellectuals and the public, and a degree of political room for maneouvre, so that ideas can make a difference to society.

Culture Wars takes a broad definition of public intellectuals: rather than seeing intellectuals as an exotic priesthood, we are interested in all serious thinkers who concern themselves with public life. Here, we review books, talks and television programmes that address the public as citizens as well as scholars and consumers. We are also interested in discussions about public intellectuals and related issues, from the role of popular philosophy to the meaning of academic freedom.

You won’t fool the children of the ‘revolution’

Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy, by William Dinan and David Miller (editors)

Dismissing political opponents’ ideas on the basis of ‘guilt by association’ means adopting a less critical approach than if one actually sets out to argue against them.

Zombies-in-waiting

What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by András Szántó

Szántó believes that the power of PR and imaging ensures that citizens’ emotions and opinions are shaped without them being able to react. It is a kind of Soma, that we are not aware we are digesting. The goal, he concludes, is not control the public by political means, but rather to ‘seduce them’.

Reading public critical

Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, by Stefan Collini

Yes, these essays are sometimes difficult and sometimes the subject matter may be unfamiliar, so all the more reason to take up the challenge and learn something new from a real authority.

Grey skies thinking

Creativity: Unconventional Wisdom from 20 Accomplished Minds, edited by Herbert Meyers and Richard Gertsman

The editors’ strange view of creativity, to be fair, is not entirely their fault. We live in a society obsessed with cultivating the creative mind: on this view, the mental attitude is all that matters, regardless of what end product it actually creates.

Guilding the craft

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett

Sennett argues that part of our uncertainty over technology comes from our estrangement from material culture. We tend to see material things as obscure ‘because most of us use things like computers and automobiles that we did not make and do not understand’. But to overcome our fear of technology, we must reinvent our relationship with it rather than retreat altogether.

Submit to the human touch

The Human Touch, by Michael Frayn

Frayn shows how the human ability to see a similarity in things that are different has resulted in the great technological and theoretical leaps. For instance, counting began when early man perceived a non-physical resemblance between his sheep and his fingers.

Say no to counterknowledge

Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, by Damian Thompson

It is not that people are ignorant and lack discernment; nor are they beguiled by the power of the internet; rather there is an attraction, sometimes cynical, sometimes desperate, but an attraction nonetheless to dogmatic points of view at a time when the power of human reason and our ability to make history are both seen as discredited.

What ever happened to the liberal dream?

Half Nelson (2006), directed by Ryan Fleck

This isn’t the film to rage at the dying of the light or to offer simple moral paradigms. Dunne may be a teacher, he may even be inspirational, but he’s also a soiled anti-hero, part Coupland part Dostoyevsky – sleazy, violent and alone. Dunne is in a hinterland, submerged in a haze of drugs and failed hope - caught in a headlock.

The truth is not enough

The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind

Hind’s argument is made with admirable clarity, but I’m not sure how many of the ‘clowns and anarchists’ he invokes see themselves as champions of Enlightenment as he suggests. Hind claims a clash between two ideas of Enlightenment, rather than the phoney war between faith and reason, is the ‘great divide’ in contemporary politics, but he makes rash assumptions about the people he thinks are on his side, who include many avowed antagonists of Enlightenment.

Yes, Socrates, Indeed

Socrates in Love: philosophy for a passionate heart, by Christopher Philips (WW Norton)

Fetishising the figure of Socrates serves only to feed the very cultural problem it is supposed to solve.

Bad taste aesthetic - The trash trilogy

Pink Flamingos (1972), directed by John Waters / Female Trouble (1974), directed by John Waters / Desperate Living (1977), directed by John Waters

In his ‘mondo trasho’, replete with bodily fluids, drag queens, incest and bestiality, low replaces high and the trashoisie replaces the bourgeoisie. And over the mess and the noise and the reek and the wrong, Waters reigns supreme.

The artist and his vision

Klimt (2006), directed by Raoul Ruiz

This self-proclaimed ‘phantasmagoria’ of Ruiz’s cinema does not work as a literary narrative, but rather as an intrinsically visual one. Malkovich, as Klimt, is always in focus. The cinematography almost always sets him in the best light, continuously eclipsing his background or foreground.

The wrong kind of freedom

The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?, by Adam Curtis (first shown on BBC2, March 2007)

The conclusion of Adam Curtis’ three-part BBC series is that liberal democracies have diminished our humanity, not by deliberately setting out as the Communists did to make a perfect society, but simply by organising around an impoverished notion of freedom.

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

Stefan Collini

The largely unnoticed elephant on the carpet in the contemporary debate about intellectuals, which is left undisturbed by Collini, is the end of the Cold War and the demise of ideological politics.

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

Francis Wheen

Wheen is not at pains to justify his faith in the Enlightenment; he presents this book as a catalogue of modern errors, not as popular philosophy.