The Scholar Is an Institution by Jacques Barzun in 1947

From "A Jacques Barzun Reader." Copyright © 2002 by Jacques Barzun. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.

p. 424: The Scholar Is an Institution

What is scholarship? Scholarship is simply the unceasing effort to bring order into the confusion of Tradition. By searching out, by comparing and weighing, by organizing facts, the scholar tries to hold in check the perpetual tendency of mankind to get things wrong, to mix up names and facts and ideas, to blur the outlines of its own active beliefs. The history of the human mind is the history of deviation from accurate meaning and memory. The history of scholarship is one long fulfillment of the formula: "Look! It is not as you think."

The scholar teaches us our language and our literature, interprets our history, compels us to recognize that other  peoples inhabit the earth, lays open to our view their ways and wills, corrects at every turn the first false impressions that we form of the heavens, the fields, and the workings of our human frame; tells us how we should walk, sleep, eat, dance, and think; and tries against heavy odds to light up the dark chamber of our brains with the artistic and religious visions of the great spirits of humanity.

This, then, is the scholar; he or she is a transmitter, a publisher of what it is good for us to know. As such he has always existed, whether as priest, poet, or garrulous elder of the tribe. He is an institution as old as society itself. In high civilizations his task is so huge that it is split up into specialties, which we now call by classical names ending in -culture or -ology. If some of these nowadays receive a kind of public worship as science, and are invidiously compared with scholarship, the distinction is here meaningless. For I am speaking of the scholar or scientist as the regulator of the people's mind; I am not speaking of the applied scientist or applied scholar who temporarily serves as ambassador or makes bombs.

When we complain that the behavior of mankind has not kept pace with its inventions, we recognize that mechanical appliances, though patent, are ultimately less influential than the intangible results of thought, which take the form of common beliefs and common practices.  Lord Keynes once pointed out that the economic ideas of any generation of businessmen were the cast-off notions of the great theorists of fifty years before. This process illustrates a generality. The handing down of ideas is what we mean by a tradition, what we mean by a culture, and it has the force of any natural presence. Just as we assume that the existence of a bridge implies solid engineering, so the public assumes that the presence of a common opinion implies solid scholarship. "Everybody knows," they will say, "that all German philosophers have been Fascists"; or "It stands to reason that an alliance with a European state is bad for America"; or "Of course, Shakespeare is the greatest poet and Beethoven the greatest musician the world has ever seen."

Where do these dogmas come from? From the newspaper, the schoolbook, the broadcast, the popular encyclopedia---all of which ultimately lead back to the scholar, who is supposed to know what he is talking about, and who is supposed to talk in a responsible manner about what he knows. Think of the number of firm convictions which go to make up a national culture, think of the number of souls who act from day to day on the strength of these convictions, and you begin to gauge the immense amount of potential energy that the scholar circuitously directs. You begin to see the scholar as manning the controls of a huge hydraulic press, slow in action, but irresistible in its multiplication of the pressure of a single hand.