Modernism, Intellectualism, and the Agony of Contemporary Life

I'm reading Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and some of the points it's making have stuck out to me strongly. Bell describes the evolution of culture, focusing on the emergence of Modernism in the world of art. Here is a quote I really like:

Modernism, too, insists on the meaninglessness of appearance and seeks to uncover the substructure of the imagination. This expresses itself in two ways. One, stylistically, is an attempt to eclipse "distance"--psychic distance, social distance, and aesthetic distance--and insist on the absolute presentness, the simultaneity and immediacy, of experience. The other, thematically, is the insistence on the absolute imperiousness of the self, of the man as the "self-infinitizing" creature who is impelled to search for the beyond.

I feel this modernist spirit very strongly. So much of the time I feel distant from others, and things feel pointless without deep human connection. I yearn to be understood and I yearn to understand others. I don't want to be treated like an object to be managed within a bureaucratic machine--yet I experience this every day.

I don't want to only look on the dark side of things; it seems defeatist. I feel the two opposing forces of possibility and the entrenched bureaucratic status quo ripping me apart. I do not know if the answer to this dilemma is accepting and learning to love the status quo or if it's to transform the status quo. Is there a third option? I just desire to be cared about by the people I interact with. But the problem is that we interact with so many people in this modern age, so really caring for everyone would be impossible--or so it seems to me.

Another theme explored by Bell is the incorporation of the intellectual sphere into mass society. This trend began in the 1950's and things have never been the same since. The Bohemian intellectual escape is gone. Whether this trend is for the better of for the worse, I know not. However, through my personal experience growing up in the '90s and '2000s, I get a sense that our "intellectuals" are impotent. I see several factors behind this. One is our modern culture's information glut sucking the intellectuals' insights into the great expanse, another is absurd, inaccessible micro-cultures created by the forces of academics within our bureaucratic system of higher education (academics jump through absurd hoops in order to receive tenure, which results in over-specialization, inaccessible jargon, and intellectual uselessness--for more on this read Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals. But does this mean that if these two problems can be overcome, intellectuals will gain real power in society? I'm not sure. I sense that there are still more problems left to be dealt with. For example, is it really possible to attain the wisdom of an intellectual without being an intellectual? Can we really expect the middle of the road person to be able to gain the essential wisdom of an intellectual's work without reading most of the books that intellectual has read? So can a society where the intellectual represents a distinct class ever be a society where intellectuals have real power--or rather, where intellect has real power? I don't think so.