Is there a place for public intellectuals?

The rise of industrial societies and advent of modernity have birthed what may be characterized as bureaucratized mass society leading to the obsolescence of the public intellectual.¹

The contrary image of post-modernity and its constructs also may spawn relativized space which leaves little for the role of the autonomous personality that may shape cultures and events.

Whether it be the Durkheim’s anomie, Marx alienation or Weberian iron cage, social analysts have longed lamented the fragmented existence. Georg Simmel has observed that, “the objectivization of cultural content is brought about by specialization and creates an ever increasing estrangement between the subject and his products.???

“Cultural objects crystallize increasingly into an interconnected world which has fewer and fewer contacts with the subjective soul and its will and feelings???.²

Lewis Coser warns:

“even if totalitarian developments could be avoided, the intellectuals would at best be more or less tolerated marginal existences, while the centre of the stage would be occupied by mental technicians specialized brain workers, and experts of various kinds. Production engineers and engineers of the soul would be in high demand, but in such a brave new world intellectuals would indeed be obsolete???. ³

James Macgregor Burns has an admirable definition of an intellectual⁴ as “a person concerned critically with values, purposes, ends that transcends immediate practical needs. By this definition the person who deals with analytical ideas and data alone is a theorist; the one who works only with normative ideas is a moralist; the person who deals with both and unites them with disciplined imagination is an intellectual who deals with analytical ideas.???

Public intellectuals, pluralism & pluralist society

It cannot be gainsaid that the globalized world is a pluralistic society “in which – through the course of structural differentiation – an increasingly ramified network of criss-crossing solidarities are developing???.⁵

The question that is needful to be asked is what sort of public intellectuals ought Asia to produce?

Adapting Edward Shils’ three classes of intelligentsia:

(i) The High Intelligentsia;

(ii) The Mediocre Intelligentsia; and

(iii) the Brutal Intelligentsia,⁶

Thomas Sowell’s trenchant observation is apposite here:⁷

“To understand the role of intellectuals in society, we must understand what they do – not what they say they do, or even what they may think they are doing, but what in fact are their actions and the social consequences of their actions. We can begin by trying to understand the incentives and constraints inherent in the role of intellectuals, as compared to people who are in other occupations. Individual intellectuals may say and do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons but, when we try to understand general patterns among the intelligentsia as a whole, we need to examine the circumstances in which they operate, their track records and their impact on the larger society around them???.

The categories explicated by Ed Shils of intelligentsia are writ large within Asian societies. The elite framework of political arrangements is still the persistent feature of nascent democratic societies. The intellectual elites are mostly co-opted within the power structures pay-rolled by the ruling powers of the day. It may be that a particular regime may favour a specific institution elevating it to a think tank that feeds and legitimizes the government policies of the day. In such circumstance, the intellectuals at best may be reducible to policy entrepreneurs. At worst, apologist for regimes and authoritarian regimes. Often paraded out in conferences with impressive recitatives of their curriculum vitae and laudatory descriptions from the West who are anxious in bad conscience to give recognition to non-Western ‘experts’.

Emergent universities may house mediocre intelligentsia who are careerists with very rare instance which permits them to break free from the thraldom of academic bureaucratization. And rarer still would individuals be recognized as public intellectuals. Undoubtedly they have varying degree of expertise recognized in their specialized fields but they do not stray from that expertise to the public.

The marginalization of hard thinking and notwithstanding the erection and multiplication of higher institutions of learning, there is a dearth of emphasis on autonomous thought and output. Business schools and ‘commodification’ of higher education abounds and lack of critical engagement is pervasive. This is often fed by an equally mediocre tertiary and college education which pedagogical methodology places emphasis on rote learning and slavish conformity.

The words of Stanislav Andreski are apposite:⁸

“So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to cummulation of knowledge (of which the progress of natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world. ‘Social sciences as Sorcery (1972, p 90)

Dedication to truth and honesty to facts and science is the touchstone of convictions of M. Polanyi,⁹

“…believing as I do in the reality of truth, justice and charity, I am opposed to a theory which denies it and I condemn a society which carries this denial in practice... our love of truth is usually affirmed by adherence to a traditional practice within community dedicated to it.???

The portrait drawn by Richard A Posner, a jurist from Law & Economics background of Public Intellectuals is sadly reductionist. For Posner, it is important to construct a supply and demand chart in applying to intellectuals and in Posnian terms.¹⁰

As rightly pointed out by commentator David Brooks,¹¹ “watching Posner try to apply economic laws to public debate is a bit like watching a Martian trying to use statistics to explain a senior prom. He is able to detect a few crude patterns, but he is missing the complexity of the thing.???

“Line S represents the supply of that work. It slopes upward to indicate that the cost of supplying public-intellectual services produced (q) and the price (p) in money and other (call it psychic) income that the producers receive.??? The Posnian language furthers permits him to then urge that,

“the reduction in the cost of supplying public intellectuals services could be shown in figure 2.1 by rotating S downwards from its intersection with the vertical axis. When this is done, S intersects D at a lower point, implying a lower market price and a greater output.???

Notwithstanding the reductionist vision of man as homo economicus, there is a vestige of a valid question in Posner’s critique as to which public does a public intellectual lay her claim on and what is her place in the smorgasbord of ideas.¹²

Public intellectuals in semi democracy & authoritarian states

The men or women of ideas who labour within what is characterized by William Case as semi democracy suffer from various constraints that inhibit their flourishing. In certain countries, there are legal and political constraints for publication of their views, even if there be those that distinguish themselves as intellectuals beyond their field of study.

In Malaysia, for instance, there is the notorious Loyalty oath (Akujanji) which binds the serving academic to rules and orders not just presently promulgated but also in futuro. Under post-colonial times, unless the individual pursues an independent career or calling which provides him/her with financial autonomy, he/she will find that the demand of securing stable income and security will birth a multitude of accommodation to the status quo.

Any writings which expressed robust analysis of the depredations of the polity or expose of the corruption of the administration can earn severe backlash. Sometimes even distant in time from the writings. In a quip that has been circulated, “even if there is a constitutional guarantee of Freedom of speech, the issue is whether there is freedom after speech???.

The semi democracies and authoritarian states have a wide arsenal of legislative, policing and public security rules that exercises a draconian and debilitating impact upon the exercise of free imagination and creative conjectures and output of the intellectual.

Indeed the public intellectual is an imperilled species, whose vocation is doubtful and whose work may lead to financial uncertainty and lack of affirmation and institutional recognition with all its attending accoutrements and benefits.

In more severe versions, detention without trials and backlash from ethno-religious nationalists can take form of incipient violence and threats.

Prospects: Conversation to communities of judgment

All intellectual discourse, including this writing, is couched in language. We inhabit mutual life, worlds and play our various language games.

Allan Gibbard, philosophe, pithily puts it,¹³

“Walk across a campus on a beautiful fall day and observe what a conversing species we are. Chimpanzees can be taught to talk a little, in sign language. Put educated chimpanzees together, though, and they turn out to have nothing to say to each other. We humans are different; we can even find silence awkward.???

Borrowing Gibbard’s rich phrase, we – unless we are only talking heads – are participants within our various communities of judgment.

“Life in a messy and dangerous world depends on being able to form broad communities of judgment on a restricted range of norms – norms that enable us to live together. To thrive we need more intimate communities as well. In these communities we can exercise our normative capacities and try to make sense of life and its possibilities.???

Within the communities which a public intellectual lives, she would be required to negotiate accommodation and contestations. To be able to live out the truths and to bear witness of a shaping of meaning and signification right order, beauty and justice is the vocation of a public intellectual.

The means by which this may be facilitated and given impetus is by no means certain, and remains challenging, if not outright daunting.

Max Weber’s brooding insight holds true for us even decades from his prophetic call:¹⁴

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above, all by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into transcendental realm of mystic life or intimate brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our grates art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situation, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand welding them together ...

(we are called) ... to bear the fate of our times ... one way or another he has to bring his intellectual sacrifice that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in favour of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter that the evasion of plain duty of intellectual integrity, which sets in if one lacks courage to clarify one’s own ultimate standpoint and rather facilitates this duty by feeble relative judgements. In my eyes, such religious return stands higher than academic prophecy which does not clearly realize that in the lecture rooms of the university no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity. Integrity, however compels us to state that for many who today tarry for new prophets and various the situation is the same as resounds in the beautiful Edomite watchman’s song of the period of exile include among Isaiah’s oracles:

“He calleth to me out of Sir, watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, the morning cometh and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.???

The people to whom this was said has enquired and tarried for more than two millennia, and we are shaken when we realize its fate. From this we draw the lesson that nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently; we shall set to work and meet the “demands of the day in human relations as well as in our vocation.???

Afterword

Is the desire for community of public intellectuals a chimera and anathema to the vocation of an intellectual in his actions and words that will advance politics of emancipation? Alain Badiou thinks so,¹⁵

“Moreover, ‘community’ today is one of the names used in reactionary forms of politics. Every day I take a stand politically against the diverse forms of communitarianism by which the parliamentary state seeks to divide and delimit latent popular zones from their inconsistencies.

Last ‘community’ perpetuates sense, under the embrace of finitude. The coming forth of the collective in its own limits the mortality of its assumption. The nostalgic echo of the Greek polis as a site of thought that is exposed: all that is there in the word ‘community’.

Badiou’s vision of a post-Marxian emancipatory politics may equally be either a precursor for authentic intellectual effort or a last gasp of a yearning and nostalgia for absolute thought.

Lesser mortals in our peregrinations will have to work out our future as fellow travellers to create networks of thought leadership for our fragmented broken worlds.

This paper was presented at Asian Public Intellectuals in Manila on May 28-30, 2010.

Footnotes:

 1. See Bennett, The Fall of Public Man.
 2. Philosophies des Geldes (Leipzig) (1900) cited in Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas: A sociologist view (Free Press), p253.
 3. Lewis Coser, pp255, 256.
 4. James Macgregor Burns, Leadership (Harper Perennial Political Classics) (1978) p.141 Chapter 6 ‘Intellectual Leadership Ideas as Moral Power’. See further Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership (Random House) (2000).
  5. Journal of Social Issues, XVI, No.3 cited in Lewis A. Coser p.259.
  6. Brutal Intellectual is illustrated by Julian Benda’s (Treason of the Clerks confession, “The Dreyfus affair taught me that I was capable of true ideological fanaticism, I knew moments when I would have with pleasure killed Mercier [Minister of War during Dreyfus first  trial ]…. I love those who, unable to hurt a fly, are capable of becoming ferocious in the name of an idea. Lest we assume this is provenance only of the West we cannot forget the killing fields of Pol Pot Cambodia which was fueled in part by Intelligentsia educated from French Salons.
  7. Thomas Sowell,, Intellectuals & Society  (Basic Books) (2009) p.281.
  8. In Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense Postmodern Intellectuals ‘Abuse of Science.??? (Picador) (1998).
  9. Michael Polanyi, “Science Faith & Society: A searching examination of the meaning and nature of scientific enquiry.??? (Chicago) (1946) p.81.
 10. Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals (Harvard).
  11. NYT January, 2002. D Brooks equally castigates, “the serial posturings of your average panel discussion – the sycophantic introductions, the flattering references by the panelists to one another’s work , the show time  vehemence of the professional radical, the slow talking gravity of the  emeritus thumb sucker, the pompous pose of cogitation  that symposiasts adopt as they pretend to listen to the other speakers. None of this is reducible to supply and demand.???  
 12. Compare Cornel West, “The American evasion of Philosophy.??? See specifically Chapter 6 ‘Prophetic Pragmatism: Cultural Criticism and Political engagement’. (Wisconsin) (1989). 
 13. Allan Gibbard , Communities of Judgment??? in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D Miller Jr, Jeffery Paul Foundations of Moral and Political Philosophy  (Blackwell) (1990) pp.175, 178.
 14. Max Weber , Science as a Vocation  fr  Gareth & Mills From Max Weber essays in Sociology ( Oxford) ( 1946) p.155.
 15. See A. Badiou , Conditions (Continuum) (2008), Chapter 10 ‘Philosophy and Politics’,  p.172.