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Actually, says Philosopher Sidney Hook, from his point of view, "there is no distinction between being an intellectual and being intelligent." And-it may be fortunate that the intellectuals of America do not form a distinct group. "In the past, resentment against intellectuals was sometimes harbored by ordinary people—directed against the social status of the intellectual, rather than against his function as an independent thinker. I would count lawyers as a class of intellectuals sometimes distrusted by the people. Physicians, on the other hand, were never distrusted because their function came before their social status." Even the intellectual's least controversial role, as custodian of the heritage, is taken lightly in America because, says Poet W. H. Auden, "American cul ture is committed to the future." The fact is, adds Historian Daniel Boorstin of the University of Chicago, that the U.S. has never produced intellectuals in the European sense. "A great deal of the wailing heard is derived from a European notion of the role of the intellectual. Those who attack U.S. culture are really saying: 'Why aren't we more like Western Europe?'' Quite Irrelevant. In the 1950s, the American intellectual began to face one additional problem. If in public affairs the intellectuals seem to have so little effect today, says Social Scientist David Riesman, it is "rather more by their own feelings of inadequacy and failure than by direct intimidation." In the '303, the intellectual had a politico-social program to offer. But the "discontented classes" have risen, and though still discontent, their wants, says Riesman, "are much less easily formulated . . . They must continually seek for reasons explaining their unrest—and the reasons developed by intellectuals for the benefit of previous proletariats are of course quite irrelevant."
To a large extent, therefore, the men of ideas have been merely cultivating their own gardens. Instead of one mission, they have many: they live as both a part of society and apart from it. The artist's fate, says Critic Edmund Wilson, is like that of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who was forced to live in isolation because of the stench of his wound, but whose comrades kept coming back to him because they needed his magic bow. So it has been with the intellectual to whom the nation goes for the expert's answer, and otherwise tends to leave alone. For what Poet Auden calls an "age of anxiety," the many-tongued intellectuals do not agree on panaceas.