Why does Houston produce so few intellectuals?

One resident's begrudging attempt at an answer.

Photo credit: University of Houston, Clear Lake

The first hour of Tyler Cowen’s recent podcast with the biographer and critic Benjamin Moser covers several topics of enduring personal fascination (e.g. the novels of V.S. Naipaul, the art of the Dutch Golden Age, changes in the values successive generations attach to each), as well as some that I’d previously given no consideration (e.g. the novels of Clarice Lispector, the industrial scale sex toys of Canada, the wide dispersion of individual responses to each). 

But it’s not until the last five minutes of the episode that we get the most interesting exchange - “interesting” here being defined by me, a guy with intellectual pretensions who lives in Houston. 

COWEN: Why does Houston produce so few intellectuals? Or perhaps you’ll challenge the premise of that question.

MOSER: Well, I’m from Houston, and I’m something of an intellectual, but I won’t challenge the premise of the question … Houston’s changed a lot since I was growing up, Houston is so much bigger than it was. It’s so much more diverse. It’s a huge, huge and fascinating city of which I know absolutely nothing anymore.

I think it’s Calvin Coolidge who said, “The business of America is business.” The business of Houston is business. It’s a business place. “

While I’m tempted to marshal all of my transplant’s zeal into a more vehement defense of my adopted hometown than the native-born Moser offers, I have to admit that his answer is essentially correct, though incomplete. Whether or not Houston actually does produce ”so few” intellectuals is an open question to which I’ll return, but to reject the premise out of hand would be to willfully misinterpret what Cowen is really asking: why does it feel true? 

Three explanations come to mind.

1. It’s because of Houston’s reputation.

2. It’s because it kind of is true?

3. It’s because that’s how it is for (almost) all cities.

Let’s consider them in order.

It’s because of Houston’s reputation.

Houston’s official founding date of August 30, 1836 doesn’t correspond to when settlers first arrived or when the city’s charter was granted. Rather, it’s when the Allen Brothers placed an advertisement for the tract of land on the west bank of Buffalo Bayou they had purchased from a widow only four days earlier. Perhaps sensing that a mosquito ridden floodplain separated from the nearest port by twenty miles of intermittently navigable swamp water would not be the easiest of sells, these land flippers used both aspirational appeals (“when the lands of this rich country are settled, a trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas”) and creative license (“handsome and beautifully elevated”). Literally since day one, this flattest of cities has faced an uphill PR battle. 

That extends all the way to present day impressions of the city’s intellectual character.

Blame oil

Moser is right to say that the business of Houston is business. More specifically, the business of Houston is the oil business.¹ Sucking energy-dense black muck from the depths of the Earth is one of those embarrassingly physical acts humans do, like defecating. It’s anti-intellectual in the sense of being irreducibly material, the world as will rather than mere representation. Outside observers see innovation in the industry as a Mephistophelean trick (fracking, deepwater drilling, liquefied natural gas), or choose not to see it at all. As described by Lawrence Wright in his excellent 2018 book, God Save Texas:   

“Where money comes out of the ground, luck and a willingness to take risks are the main factors that determine one’s future, not talent or education or hard work.” 

Intellectualism in the sense that Cowen’s question implies - highbrow, impeccably credentialed, aloof from commercial considerations - has always been held in opposition to industry, whether that industry takes the form of a New England textile mill or a San Francisco tech startup. This dynamic is extra strong for oil, and Houston’s intellectual reputation suffers accordingly.

Blame oil money

Moser suggests that the centrality of business to Houston’s identity long precluded a native intellectual culture from taking root. But it’s also true that business and the vast wealth generated by it has funded - as any Houstonian will brag about to visitors - world class cultural infrastructure. And yet … you can sense a fundamental insecurity in our eagerness to claim that “world class” designation, a fear of never truly belonging among the elite. It’s also related to the tendency to affix superlatives of scale to our cultural institutions.²

Th éminence grises of Houston’s art world, Dominique and John de Menil, were never in danger of being confused for new money. Born into prominent French families, the Menils came to Houston during the World War II boom years to oversee the American operations of the Schlumberger oilfield services company. Over the course of the next fifty years, they’d build Houston’s most esteemed artistic landmarks (the Rothko Chapel and their namesake collection) while never quite abandoning the belief that the city was in desperate need of their salvation.

Here’s John in 1964 explaining to a fellow board member of the MoMA that his participation in New York would be limited. “As you know, our first responsibility is in Houston,” he wrote. “And that is where our efforts must be concentrated because here we are almost alone.”³ This attitude - patronizing in every sense - wasn’t unfair. Even when the Menil Collection opened twenty three years later, Greater Houston’s population had more than doubled and was approaching 3 million, but the local press was still looking around cautiously for signs of external approval: “The New York Times says the collection could make a center for the visual arts,” wrote one. “Just a few years ago, that newspaper said that Houston had a few nice buildings but they were surrounded by 2,000 gas stations.”

Blame other, negative associations

Heat, tropical cyclones, and disordered urban sprawl aren’t mutually exclusive with a native intellectual culture (see Calcutta and the Bengali Renaissance). But they might seem to be because they’re unlike the pictures we have in our heads of what an intellectual place looks like. Think New England in autumn, or a gentle snow falling on a cobbled Oxford lane. In place of these, Houston has 26 lane freeways and an NBA arena that’s been converted into a church.

Blame other, generally positive associations

Moser won a Pulitzer Prize for biography of Susan Sontag, a paradigmatic example of the sort of intellectual that Houston stereotypically does not produce. In place of the critic, Houston’s most representative intellectuals are practitioners. 

Surely there’s no other city in the world where two pioneering heart surgeons enjoy some level of name recognition, as Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley do here? The Nobel Prize winner and “Father of Immunotherapy” James Allison is perhaps not so widely known, but his face still looks down from a billboard at the airport. And at the Space Center, the only line longer than the one for the Saturn V is for the Mission Control tour, where you can gaze upon the desks where rows of crew cut engineers sat as they guided men back from the moon. 

Houston has some connection to glamor (Beyonce, Tom Ford) and scandal (Elizabeth Holmes, Enron), still it’s fundamentally a workaday town that distinguishes itself through feats of applied science. 

Consider the Astrodome. Arguably the most influential building in postwar America,⁴ the “Eighth Wonder of the World” is discussed far less often as architecture (that is, as a product of artistic intent) than as engineering. Any intellectual stage of the design process is assumed, in Houston, not to exist. Does it enhance Houston’s intellectual reputation that one of the private Skyboxes in the Astrodome (the first of their kind when they were unveiled in 1965) was named after the Ramayana? Or, does it just reemphasize something that everyone who loves this city knows: Houston is a strange place. 

Blame racial stereotypes

By some measures, Houston is the most diverse large city in America. This might actually hurt its intellectual reputation, to the extent that an intellectual scene is often associated with a distinctive, cohesive (read, homogeneous) set of individuals. Such externally legible group formation may occur in a place that is itself homogeneous (e.g. Transcendentalists in 1830s Massachusetts) or diverse but segregated (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York). Greater Houston is itself a segregated place, but the patterns are scrambled just enough (I give you Fort Bend County) to make it hard for outsiders to picture who lives here, and therefore, what an intellectual from here might look like.

Everyone can come up with a mental image of a French or Russian intellectual. If we don’t pretend to be immune to stereotypes, we can do it for America too - two mental images, actually. One would be a New England WASP, the other a New York Jew. Many of these fine people and their families have made their home in humid Houston, but on the whole the city is too Southern, too Latino, too African, too Asian - too much of everything - for us to imagine it as an intellectual place as well. 

Blame the movies

Although Houston is underrepresented as a cinematic setting compared to other major American cities, it does have some connections to films and filmmakers that are intellectual in the classic (i.e. just short of pejorative), egghead sense. 

Wes Anderson’s Rushmore was shot in an anonymized version of his hometown and stars Jason Schwartzman as an aspiring version of exactly the sort of intellectual Houston may or may not produce notably few of. (“My top schools where I want to apply to are Oxford and the Sorbonne. But my safety's Harvard.”) Four years earlier, and for reasons that aren’t especially clear to me (tax incentives?) Houston provided exteriors in the extremely 1994 film, Reality Bites, featuring a maybe intentional, maybe not performance by Ethan Hawke as the sort of Gen X slacker who has a lot of things to tell you about Noam Chomsky. 

“Slacker” as a term was itself popularized by another nineties film, this one directed by the Houston-born Richard Linklater, whose amiable, discursive filmmaking style is European art house cinema done in the American (or Texan) idiom. Linklater’s Waking Life pairs rotoscope animation with loosely connected and intermittently coherent monologues on existentialism, free will, and the meaning of life: though not very good, it’s a strong candidate for most self-consciously “intellectual” film of the century.⁵

The films that do acknowledge Houston as their setting (Urban Cowboy, Rollerball, The Bad News Bears Break Training) tend towards the lowbrow.

It’s because it sort of is true? 

One proxy for a city’s production of intellectuals would be the education level of its residents. Houston sits pretty low on lists of cities ranked by degree attainment or years of schooling.

While Houston is home to more university students than all but a handful of US cities, it is very much not a “college town.” Put aside Berkeley, Ann Arbor, or Austin and compare Houston to other megacities too large to be defined by college affiliations. Even within this peer group, it’s obvious that the universities in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles make a deeper imprint on the neighborhoods where they’re located and enjoy greater recognition with outsiders. 

Upstream in the educational pipeline, Houston’s public schools are perhaps no worse than other cities’, but the fact that they’ve been subject to a state takeover certainly doesn’t enhance our claim to being a place where intellectuals are made. 

But you don’t have to look up statistics on degree attainment or study K-12 educational policy to come to the conclusion that Houston is in some subjective but real sense, just not that intellectual of a place. 

“The city is proceeding with plans for a $100 million medical center but it still dumps its garbage out on the edge of town. Houstonians draw fewer than 100,000 volumes a year from their library but they pack wrestling shows.” 

That’s from a Life magazine article published in 1946, though updated versions are still being written today. 

It’s because that’s how it is for (almost) all cities?

With a different guest, Cowen might have just as easily asked, “why does Dallas produce so few intellectuals?” Or Phoenix. Or Miami. Or Atlanta. One answer that would apply in all these cases (as well as to Denver, Charlotte, Nashville, Las Vegas, Orlando and dozens of other cities in the Sun Belt) is that they got only big recently - too recently for us to know whether they produce intellectuals at a lower rate than older cities.

It’s also possible that the Sun Belt cities have gotten big too late to ever produce many intellectuals in the sense implied by the question. That’s because the concept of the “intellectual” seems antiquated. It’s too insular and elitist for the YouTube era. Ask a reasonably well read person (such as yourself) to quickly name ten famous American intellectuals and I’ll bet they’ll come up with a list that has more people who wrote for the Paris Review in its first five years than people who were born in the last fifty. Does this mean we’re bereft of fresh thinking? Of course not. Just that the intellectuals of tomorrow, whether they’re from Houston, New York, or Nairobi, won’t conform to the templates of yesterday. 

In reflecting on Cowen’s question, I was struck by how rare it is for a city to produce an obviously notable number of intellectuals. Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and St. Louis spent decades ranked in the top ten US cities by population, but I find it hard to come up with a list of famous thinkers from each. Then again, what do I know about intellectuals? I’m from Houston.

1. As a newcomer I've been surprised by two things. How consistently people ask, when they find out you're new in town, "did you move here for oil and gas, or medicine?" And how consistently people refer to the "oil and gas" industry as opposed to less charged "energy industry."

2. Houston’s Theater District has the largest number of seats of any city outside of New York.

3. Quoted in Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil by William Middleton.

4. What could compete? The Seagram's Building maybe, by dint of how many subtly indistinguishable variants on its International Style can be found in CBDs across the world? The Guggenheim? Falling Water? I don't think the competition here is especially close.

5. About which two Houston related things.

1) Waking Life's charms and flaws are both reminiscent of the earnest, eager to share autodidacism you find in people who grew up feeling intellectually solitary in places like, say, 1970s Houston.

2) Linklater's other rotoscope animated film, Apollo 10 1/2, is a fascinating depiction of Houston in the 1960s that only occasionally pretends to be the children's movie it was pitched to Netflix as.