The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/02/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/

by andsoitis • 6 months ago

50 53 6 months ago

nybooks.com

zabzonk• 6 months ago

Seem to be missing some plausible definition of "intellectuals".

ozozozd• 6 months ago

I think it includes anyone who cares to read it.

chilmers• 6 months ago

I suppose it assumes the reader already understands the word, or has access to a dictionary.

hcrean• 6 months ago

When this was written there was a clearer divide between people with higher educational training, qualifications and interest and those without.

1272• 6 months ago

Responsibility of intellectuals, or wise men/women, has always been to guide the tribe towards security, happiness and prosperity. Not to sow dissent inside the tribe by moralizing, while completely ignoring all the ills in other tribes.

So called "intellectuals" who do it just to further their own selfish goals, should not be awarded high ranking positions.

gsf_emergency_62• 6 months ago

Another perspective:

"You know, I ran into Henry Kissinger years ago and I asked him if he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work, and he said in effect, 'I am working with the ideas that I formed at Harvard years ago. I haven't had a real idea since I've been on this; I just work with the old ideas."

1272• 6 months ago

I don't see how that is related to my comment in any way.

lifeformed• 6 months ago

If morals or ethics aren't an equal partner in security, happiness, and prosperity, then the tribe deserves to fall.

praptak• 6 months ago

How far are you prepared to go with the "loyalty to the tribe" argument? If your "tribe" is 1942 Germany and you know about the ongoing Holocaust, does your line of thinking imply that you should keep quiet about it? You know, not to sow dissent by moralizing.

roenxi• 6 months ago

One of the major lessons of the 1900s is that the moral ills of your own tribe are more important than the problems other people might have. You don't live in some other country, you live in your own. Local concerns are by far the #1 issue.

Even in the 2000s, one of the most ironic outcomes is that US hegemony forced a bunch of countries into really dominant regional positions (thinking especially of Japan, China and Germany) because they had nothing else to do but fix their own internal problems and it turns out that is a dominant strategy over militarism. Moral positions like peace, law, consistency and fairness aren't vague nice-to-haves, they are principles that lead to better outcomes for the people who stick with them.

badc0ffee• 6 months ago

(1967)

hekkle4• 6 months ago

I would say that one has as much responsibility to society, as that society accepts for the individual.

As a previously homeless veteran, I'd say that is zero. Why should intellectuals, or in fact anyone have any duty to help a system that doesn't help them?

Now I know a lot of people will grandstand and say that if people just started taking on responsibility, then that would improve the system so that it would help more, but again, I did my part and was promised to be taken care of by society with its fingers crossed behind its back.

droopyEyelids3• 6 months ago

This makes sense if you are ok with your life making the world a worse place. Other people want to try and make it nicer.

hekkle4• 6 months ago

Of course, anyone always has the option to volunteer to make the world a better place; but the idea that anyone has a responsibility, or moral obligation to help a society that is actively hostile towards them is insanity.

glitchc• 6 months ago

Get off your high horse. This person bled for their country and once their service ended, was discarded without a second thought. They are entitled to feel the way they feel and have earned the privilege to voice their outrage. It is our duty to listen.

godelski6• 6 months ago

This only results in a race to the bottom. A self fulfilling prophecy. The unfortunate truth is that if you want the world to be better you need to be better to it than it is to you. It's the only way that can even work.

You can just do nothing and things will get better when others do more than they get, but by you doing nothing you've just shifted your burden to others. The burden of each individual is small. Almost insignificant even. It's not hard to be kinder to others than they are to you. But the burden accumulates and compounds. You don't have to pick up the slack, but you do need to do your part. The future is made by all of us

rented_mule• 6 months ago

you need to be better to it than it is to you

If the person you are responding to hasn't screwed society over, then it sounds like they have easily cleared that bar, even by doing nothing.

wafflemaker• 6 months ago

Beautifully said.

I'd add a quote from the beginning of a famous sci-fi*:

You have to create Good out of Evil, because there is nothing else to create it from.

Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, famous Russian anti-system science-fiction brother duo. Their other notable book is Snail on a Slope.

09283740822• 6 months ago

I'd say that is zero.

That's your society, not all societies. People, veterans or not, aren't homeless in mine.

hekkle4• 6 months ago

I can only speak for the society I live in, Australia. I'm glad you perceive yours (wherever that is) to be doing much better. I hope you use that privilege to enrich your fellow man instead of just bragging online.

antman• 6 months ago

They are helping society not the system. They might fight the system. There is no ignoring, thats supporting the system. There is no silence, the system can produce fake intellectuals. There is no hiding, the system must pursue the individuals because its the ideas that need dying. The intellectuals are pursued even after death.

keiferski2• 6 months ago

Chomsky basically says that intellectuals have a responsibility to expose the lies said by those in power. Hard to argue with, but maybe kind of a platitude.

I think I’d answer this question differently in 2026. The responsibility of intellectuals to society at large today, in an era overwhelmed with information, propaganda, immensely complex issues, etc. is – communicate the issues of the day in a way that is clear and accessible. With the assumption that intellectuals are “experts in ideas.”

I say this because so many contemporary debates seem really mangled and unclear, which makes them basically impossible to solve intellectually. Instead they just turn into battles of will where one side seeks to defeat the other in toto, not actually arrive at a solution that overcomes the conflict.

Unfortunately the academic system is explicitly designed to create specialists, not people that can effectively communicate to the Everyman.

SilverElfin• 6 months ago

I agree with your suggestion, but I wonder if it is enough. Look at what happened today. Moments after the shooting, there was a coordinated campaign to flood the zone with misinformation. Twitter accounts for Trump, DHS (Kristi Noem), Vance, Miller all said someone tried to assassinate ICE officers and was shot in self defense. This was completely the opposite of what happened and given how quickly they put out these messages, they had no way of knowing either.

They simply put it out there because no matter what, this is what they will say in response to an ICE shooting. It is a way of confusing the messaging and preventing their supporters from being convinced by anyone else or any evidence. Once their base form that initial opinion, it is very hard to change their mind. So will intellectually actually reach those people effectively?

Remember, this base has been told to distrust the academics and distrust science and distrust the news media.

keiferski2• 6 months ago

I would describe events like that as:

battles of will where one side seeks to defeat the other in toto, not actually arrive at a solution that overcomes the conflict.

The deeper issue is immigration policy, which is a topic that displays the pattern I mentioned: no real attempt to solve the issue by addressing both sides/various parties, and instead boils it into an us-them struggle of political wills.

The responsibility of intellectuals in this case should be IMO to clearly analyze the immigration debate and discuss the benefits, downsides, likely consequences etc. of various actions.

But we don’t get that. Instead everyone just has an opinion already formed, including the intellectuals. And unfortunately unbiased rational approaches seem to lose (in money, attention) to the loud and opinionated.

So as the problem gets more complicated, people get further and further away from actually solving it.

godelski6• 6 months ago

You're right, but also we shouldn't make it easy.

The reason exterminate always go after academics is because they make things harder. The vast majority of academics could make more money than they do as a professor. The authoritarian relies on the religious nature of followers and it's harder for those followers to have faith when it's constantly being questioned. It's why your mental model of an authoritarian regime is where people are afraid to speak freely.

You're right that the strategy is to confuse and overload. It's difficult to counter and I think you're exactly right to say "enough". We need to adapt to this strategy too. I think it's important to remember that truth has a lower bound in complexity but lies don't. They have an advantage because they can sell simplicity. We have the disadvantage when we try to educate. But what we need to do is remind people of how complex reality is while not making them feel dumb for not knowing. It's not easy. Even the biggest meathead who is as anti academic as they come will feel offended if you call them (or imply they're) stupid (are you offended if they call you weak?). We need a culture shift to accept not knowing things and that not knowing things doesn't make one stupid. I have a fucking PhD and I'm dumb as shit. There's so much I don't know about my own field, let alone all the others. I've put in a lot of hard work to be "smart", but the smartest people I know say "I don't know" and that's often the most interesting thing you can hear.

It's no easy task to solve. Don't forget, we're a species that would rather invent imaginary invisible wizards than admit we don't know. We're infinitely curious but also afraid of the unknown.

smitty1e4• 6 months ago

The article was hilarious to me. To whom are we responsible? And who manages the "truth" supply?

If we're assuming a postmodern stance that there is no objective truth, or even a utilitarian stance that truth is a consensus, then life is reduced to some extended chemical reaction, and there is no difference between a Stalin and a Mother Theresa.

If one posits some religious definition of an objective truth, then at least there is a definition to measure against beside "Do as thou wilt".

I'm not a huge Chomsky fan anyway. Despite his appeal to truth, he tends to ring false for me.

smitty1e4• 6 months ago

Saw the link to the full article below.

Chomsky never gets around to a teleological argument as to why US intervention in Vietnam was wrong; it's all so much quoting and puffery.

tvink• 6 months ago

utilitarianism is when you add up the suffering. stalin made number go up, mother teresa made number go down. these are also not the only options.

datsci_est_20154• 6 months ago

Yet, we are bombarded with easily-falsifiable claims (“assassin”) by government officials and ridiculously-framed accounts (“officer-involved shooting”) from certain news outlets.

This sort of contrarianism is especially grating given the amount of distancing from social responsibility occurs here as a forum of what should be mostly intellectuals.

Put differently, intellectuals and technologists wield more power to enact both positive and negative change than the average citizens in a democratic society. I would agree with Chomsky that there is some relationship to exposing truth in an information-based society.

bbwbsb• 6 months ago

Responsibility is to those that give status. Duty of the pro-social sort is what you buy status (regard) with.

Neither subjective or consensus accounts of truth (neither of which correspond with postmodernism or utilitarianism in the way you imply) are obviously inconsistent. Philosophers would not bother talking about them if that were the case.

Funnily enough, I can't tell which of Stalin and Mother Theresa you are worried will be confused with the other, given that many people have opposite ideas of which was moral and which was immoral.

Modern religions define objective morality, not objective truth (excluding metaphysical assertions, which are not what one usually means by truth).

armchairhacker3• 6 months ago

Truth exists and matters. Even for far-away events like news, where "truth" is impossible to prove beyond doubt like hard science. Even for informally-defined concepts like justice, where "truth" is ambiguous and partly subjective. There are answers for the former that are more probable, and for the latter that resonate with more people, and those tend to correlate with the answers that are more conducive to whatever goals one has (even greed), and especially (utilitarian) long-term human prosperity.

The truth is unfathomably complex yet coherent. White lies lead to bigger lies that eventually unravel, because the implications of a lie are more lies. Sometimes even lies that seem like they'd never "blow up in your face", because humans aren't perfect. Some obvious lies one can accept and pretend are the truth, and it does work...until it doesn't, because those lies have implications that can't be accepted.

Unfortunately it can take a long time, until the lie no longer matters and/or the liar is dead. But truth practically always wins in the long-term, even historically for the losers (yes it's impossible to disprove that people and groups have been erased, and random nobodies are forgotten; but today we can even read burnt scrolls and know lots about the "Lost Colony" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony)). More importantly, I believe truth wins more often and faster than most people argue, to the point where one should generally assume it matters. Though I can't prove it, like the events/concepts I'm describing, assume otherwise at your own loss...

---

Related to the recent ICE shooting: even some conservatives oppose the MAGA narrative, look at https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/. Others will never defy MAGA, but they aren't the majority; Trump won but with barely over 50%. Truth exists and matters.

Joel_Mckay• 6 months ago

Sycophantic idealism mixed with political Brand analytical-blindness is incompatible with functional democratic processes. Verifiable facts are the core responsibility of the Scientific process, and a lot of people still fail that minimal standard.

https://mchankins.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/still-not-signifi...

Modern corruption is just unsustainable populist negligence, that coincidentally also collapsed many empires in history. Suggesting Academic bureaucracy is a functional Meritocracy is naive wishful thinking, and ignores why these structures usually still degenerate to merge with poorly obfuscated despotic movements.

"Despotism" (1946)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w

Have a great day, =3

joecool1029• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/PlqTr

tsoukase• 6 months ago

"With great power comes great responsibility" and Intellectuals have great power.

The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)

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