What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?
chronicle.com

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.

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.

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.