What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921/

by benbreen • 11 years ago

41 21 11 years ago

It always fascinates me when those who are self-styled representatives of the public good fail to see how their empathic desires inevitably become infantilization and then outright jealousy.

Academics didn't just wake up and exploit musical genres as the vector of teaching dialectics. That was an act of desperation after a grand collapse of academic influence in the late 1970s.

Once the public learned that the academic class would 1. Rush to their defense, 2. Could weave up tales of oppression with little proof and 3. Could convert those tales into public spending programs, the public gamed the academics. The more exotic the abuse, the more hush money poured in. Once the oil shocks happened and the USD became fiat, the academic class had hit diminishing returns: now we could export inflation, now ANYONE can rabble rouse for profit, not just the learned.

The public became smarter than the academics and they haven't been forgiven since.

tn13• 11 years ago

One of the best criticism and analysis of public intellectuals I have read is in the Thomas Sowell's book Intellectuals. Ironically, being an intellectual himself a lot of his words apply to him as well.

One of the most common mistake we people make is to think of intellectuals as some higher beings. It is true than an educationist or economists will know lot more than an average Joe about their respective fields. But the probability that he will make wrong decisions is not drastically different because the real world is far more complex and the amount of stuff that we dont know is simple too large.

For example a professional shooter will be able to score much higher than an average Joe. But if the objective is to get a "100%" score then both Joe and the professional shooter are likely to fail with near same probability.

gd1• 11 years ago

One of the most common mistake we people make is to think of intellectuals as some higher beings.

Don't worry, I can assure I'm not making that mistake.

lurcio• 11 years ago

Steve Fuller's "The Intellectual" is an amusing take on the history and role. (It's quite anglo-centric & comes from a more liberal reference point than Sowell).

arca_vorago• 11 years ago

"If there is a task, it might be to participate in making "the public" more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again—dangerous to elites, and dangerous to stability..."

Honestly I think this is the problem. There has been a steady wave of anti-intellectualism throughout certain parts of the country, and in particular the education system itself. This result in a level of distrust in "intellectuals" that creates cultural filter-bubbles and it's very hard to bust other peoples bubbles without putting them on the defensive.

The bottom line is that TPTB don't desire an intellectual public. They are harder to control, are less likely to conform or be silent, etc. I've heard it put like this: "They want someone just smart enough to push papers but not enough to ask too many questions."

Add on top of that the major chilling effects of an increasingly global surveillance state that is edging towards totalitarian facism, and it's easy to understand how many of the intellectuals simply just go about their lives and try not to rock the boat. A good example of this is the state of the fourth estate, where currently just about every reporter who actually goes to the DC press club is more like a stenographer than a reporter. "Officials sources say..." is their calling card (keep an eye out for this phrase). If they rock the boat too much, they get dis-invited from the party in one way or another.

Honestly I think the state of public intellectualism is much more tied into class warfare than anyone has articulated yet.

This is also why I think that art is the new medium for intellectuals. In a surveillance state, subtle and subversive artistic endeavors seem to be the most likely to positively influence without creating defensiveness, while at the same time flying under the normal dissident surveillance radar.

Do not be fooled, with current legislation such a TPP and Net Neutrality, this is only the beginning of censorship and the chilling effect. Only the beginning. They ignored the internet and let us win the 90's crypto wars, but now they recognize the internet as a threat and "it must be brought under control." It's all about control. (as opposed to safety)

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

Sigh. While I'm interested to see the discussion this generates, the prose is turgid. Nine pages wrapped around a small number of nuggets, including some interesting history, but the core of which is this (edited down further for brevity):

The huge personal disappointment—and it puzzled me for a long time—was that junior professors did not, by and large, give us work I wanted to print [in "n+1"]. I knew their professional work was good. These were brilliant thinkers and writers. Yet the problems I encountered ... were absolutely not those of academic stereotype ... the "inability" to address a nonacademic audience. The embarrassing truth was ... [that w]hen these brilliant people contemplated writing for the "public," it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the "general reader," seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves.... The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.... [T]alking down to readers in a colorless fashion-magazine argot is such second nature that any alternative seems out of place.

This was emphatically not what the old "public intellect," and Partisan Review, had addressed to the public. Please don’t blame the junior professors, though. (Graduate students, it must said, did much better for n+1, as they do still.)...

But the additional philosophical element that made this complicated arrangement work, and the profound belief that sustained the fiction, on all sides, and made it "real" ... was an aspirational estimation of "the public." Aspiration in this sense ... [is] something like a neutral idea or expectation that you could, or should, be better than you are—and that naturally you want to be better than you are, and will spend some effort to become capable of growing—and that every worthy person does. My sense of the true writing of the "public intellectuals" of the Partisan Review era is that it was always addressed just slightly over the head of an imagined public—at a height where they must reach up to grasp it. But the writing seemed, also, always just slightly above the Partisan Review writers themselves. They, the intellectuals, had stretched themselves to attention, gone up on tiptoe, balancing, to become worthy of the more thoughtful, more electric tenor of intellect they wanted to join. They, too, were of "the public," but a public that wanted to be better, and higher.

Which I largely agree with. It's a discussion I've been having elsewhere.

But my God, Mark! Fewer words. More meaning.

VLM• 11 years ago

"the prose is turgid"

Another example, the page discussing professionals attempting to write for the public failing by producing camp.

N+1 is always interesting to read.

mrxd2• 11 years ago

Which I largely agree with… But my God, Mark! Fewer words.

So in fact you disagree. More junior professor writing that you don't have to reach up to grasp.

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

This wasn't a case of needing to reach up, but to slog through.

To give a case of an author I've discovered recently who manages just the opposite: William Ophuls. He writes on a difficult, complex, and diverse topic (political systems response to a world of limits), but does so with an economy of words, a superfluity of information, an elegance, and all while maintaining interest and engagement. I'm still mulling over what he's written at a month or two's remove, and want to re-enter it again. I picked up a great deal reading his works, Plato's Revenge and Immoderate Greatness.

That is mastery of language.

Mark's writing isn't.

eropple• 11 years ago

From my perspective: aside from a mild overuse of adverbs, the words used in the piece are designed specifically to evoke a tone and a mindset. There is meaning in them when I read them. You may not catch it or not care if you do, but that doesn't mean it isn't there if you know where to look.

PaulHoule2• 11 years ago

You get what people pay for.

I was watching Fox News at the gym today, side by side with CNN.

On CNN the news was about terrorist attacks, wars, and a blizzard in the Northeast. It might be the daily bummer, but it least it was News.

On Fox News they are indignant because some people didn't like a movie that was released a month ago. This segways through something I can't get through the closed captions and then they're talking about what a visionary Daniel Patrick Moynihan was in 1965.

There is a market for what there is a market for; that's TV but it is the same for books and magazines.

On top of that there are quite a few fields that are burned out. For instance up till 1968 there was a compelling literature on anarchism. Then you read Foucault and even though you feel the blood-chilling pain of humanity ground down by Leviathan but in touch with why it is necessary.

Then you had identity politics, which was a good idea at the time but pretty soon it is part of the problem because you get black and white people suffering from the same problems and not recognizing it.

For instance, the police department in the nearest city always has some incident where a cop shoots a black or (less often) a black shoots a cop. Tensions are high and many blacks fear being a victim of police violence.

Now the guy who cuts our hay would be white as a sheet except that he spends a lot of time outside. He's a man of the highest care and integrity; he's driven heavy machinery for a lifetime and never hit an animal. He's opposed to gun control because he thinks he might need guns to defend himself from government tyranny.

Oddly enough in the 60s it was urban black people who were fascinated with armed insurrection and you had the Day Hall takeover at Cornell and the black panthers.

Well you go up against Leviathan and you get smashed. Now black people are too smart for that shit and now it is rural whites getting into barricade situations with the cops. (i.e the evolution from the Philadelphia MOVE house to Waco)

If you start talking sense you get horrible trouble from all sides, for instance, liberals love the idea of investment in broadband but try saying that the CWA might be part of the problem. As for conservatives, they seem to be annoyed that the outside world exists at all and would rather be talking about the days of Moses and Abraham.

meric• 11 years ago

The conservatives are so conservative they'd stick to Moses and Abraham in the Old Testament.

yodsanklai• 11 years ago

On CNN the news was about terrorist attacks, wars, and a blizzard in the Northeast

Whenever I go to the US, I get to watch CNN at the airport (this time a couple of days ago, waiting in the immigration line). It strikes me that I always see images about war. The US are in a state of perpetual (defensive) war just as described by Orwell.

PaulHoule2• 11 years ago

Well we are not directly involved in all the wars. For instance I want to be bullish on Nigeria but Boko Haram is a real problem. Also the Ukraine is out of our hands, no way we could fight the Russians on their own turf. Certainly nobody in Europe has the balls to do anything about it since Russia might quit sending them methane.

Even when you look at the terrorism issue I think Europe is much more vulnerable than the US. The US is by no means perfect but Muslims come here and get jobs and own businesses and they don't drink and their kids don't fk up cars at the mall. If you want to wear a Burka or some other kind of headscarf we don't give you trouble, we have the first Amendment because we know how much trouble an "established religion" caused in England.

In France and other euro countries they warehouse Muslims in Big Block apartments out of some Le Corbusier nightmare on the edge of town (where euro people don't want to live) and they live off welfare and it takes hours and hours to get anywhere on public transit. Muslims there have grievances that go far beyond the indignities of being dissed in comic strips. On the other hand I am personally pissed at the Boston Bombers because we gave them a safe place to live where nobody wants to kill you because you are a Chechen. (We do have idiots in the US who attach Sikhs because they hate Muslims or attack Iranians because they hate Iraqis, but this is really a lunatic fringe.)

When CNN is not talking about war it is talking about some plane that disappeared or how the daughter of somebody famous was drowned in a bathtub or how the Republicans and Democrats can't agree on the budget (i.e. fund Homeland Security so we can avoid the kind of attacks that hit the Euro zone, fund NASA so we can get astronauts home from the ISS...)

AnimalMuppet• 11 years ago

There's been a style change. People used to be impressed by high-sounding prose. Writing the way he favors impressed.

But things changed, and now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind. The present style is for clarity rather than impressiveness.

Interestingly, the article itself displays the problem. It tries to hard to have the impressive style. That style gets in the way of actually saying something. (In the end, the article does in fact say something. But the style makes it harder to wade through. Instead of "trying to get readers to reach higher", it becomes "selecting only those readers who are willing to put up with that", which is not the same thing.)

tormeh• 11 years ago

now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind.

In fact, this is usually a good heuristic to tell whether someone is trying to get off the hook with saying nothing at all. Politicians love this. It's all about filling up the listener/reader's short term memory buffer and get them to lose track of what you were saying. Once you've done that you can basically loop for a pretty long time. Many are embarrassed enough of their mental limitations that they'll just pretend something important was said rather than confront the speaker or admit to themselves that they can't keep up.

That said, that kind of writing is gold when you're writing fiction with, say, Gaimanesque magic in it, because it allows you to be really woolly and create a sense of non-understanding and mystique.

ruricolist• 11 years ago

I was just thinking to myself the other day that the danger of actually taking the time to write something thoughtful and cogent the days is that once you have convinced the intelligent, open-minded readers, that leaves everyone else to write comments. Which means when people come to look at the article in the future, and skip to the comments to get a sense of what kind of reaction people had, they get precisely the wrong impression.

This is an interesting article. It's not a "think piece" about writing "these days". It's a serious attempt to understand just what "public intellectuals" were in the first place, what conditions made them possible, and what part of that, if any, can be revived, or is worth reviving.

He might be completely wrong. But he deserves a little better than TL;DR because he dared to write above the eighth grade level.

VikingCoder• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the Catholic switch from Latin to local language, and from facing the altar to facing the assembly.

eruditely• 11 years ago

All public intellectuals that propose or push their body of work should be forced to offer warranty or insurance on said work so if the results do not turn out there can be consequences.

Just like every one else.

http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/10/25/speaking-honestly-...

Promise to truthful speech as opposed to free speech.

freshhawk• 11 years ago

So if this idea gains popularity and the chilling effect results in a decline in new ideas being presented for discussion and debate in the public sphere which then results in stagnation ... what consequences can I impose on you?

What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

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