Academicization is a two-edged sword. The material base that schools
provide for intellectual life can be positive or negative in supporting creativity.
The tendencies toward rote learning, narrow technique, and a routine of
exercises and exams are always present. When they are overlaid by the energies
of building new career paths and reorganizing intellectual space, the result is
creative breakthroughs in the realm of higher abstractions. It is only when a
fine balance holds among intersecting factions at a focus of attention that
creativity exists. Disturbing the balance or removing the focus, one may be left
with the material institutions and large numbers of intellectuals, but settled
into scholastic routine. With this comes the stagnation of classics and techni-
calities, and eventually an atmosphere in which the more creative high points
may even be forgotten. Stagnation in all its forms is a danger of academic
success.
Coda: The Intellectual Demoralization of the Late Twentieth Century
De te fabula narratur. What we see around ourselves in recent decades has
been an enormous expansion of cultural production. There are over 1 million
publications annually in the natural sciences, over 100,000 in the social sci-
ences, and comparable numbers in the humanities (Price, 1986: 266). To
perceive the world as a text is not too inaccurate a description, perhaps not of
the world itself, but of the life position of intellectuals: we are almost literally
buried in papers. As the raw size of intellectual production goes up, the reward
to the average individual goes down—at least the pure intellectual rewards of
being recognized for one’s ideas and of seeing their impact on others. The
pessimism and self-doubt of the intellectual community under these circum-
stances is not surprising.
Which of the three types of stagnation do we exemplify? Loss of cultural
capital (Stagnation A), certainly, marked by the inability of today’s intellectuals
to build constructively on the achievements of their predecessors. Simultane-
ously there exists a cult of the classics (Stagnation B): the historicism and
footnote scholarship of our times, in which doing intellectual history becomes
superior to creating it. And also we have the stagnation (C) of technical
refinement: to take just a few instances, the acute refinements and formalisms
of logical and linguistic philosophy have proceeded apace in little specialized
niches; in the same way among all factions of the intellectual world today we
find the prevalence of esoterica, of subtleties, and of impenetrable in-group
vocabularies. As with the nominalists and other scholastics of the 1300s and
1400s, today’s intellectual technicalities sometimes offer a high level of insight
in their own spheres, but they are overrefined to travel well outside.
In our own day, as at the end of medieval Christendom, all three types of
stagnation exist and interact. The underlying cause rests not with any individ-
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^521