This is a continuation of a post I made last week titled, Should Scientists Be Public Intellectuals? I got a fair amount of feedback on that post, and I’m afraid I may have ruffled a few feathers, which was never my intention. So I wanted to start this post off with an apology/clarification. I think some of the choices I made in that piece hindered people from really seeing where I was coming from.
First was an issue of tone – some people apparently felt I was overly harsh or dismissive of scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson. That was never my intention, but, as the best piece of advice I got in marriage counseling goes, it doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what they hear. Sometimes when I’m trying to cut through a problem, or even just be funny, I can come across as harsh and/or riled up. The truth is I’m almost never riled up about things: I approach intellectual questions with a fair level of detachment. That was obviously not reflected in this particular post.
Second, I think I did a poor job choosing examples. Some took umbrage with my discussion of the relation of science and religion, and whether scientists could make useful commentary on religion. Silly me, I forgot that this is a question that puts a lot of people on edge, no matter where they fall along the divide. Me, not so much, so being a person not overflowing with empathy, I can forget the sore spots. In retrospect I wish I had relegated that discussion to a footnote in order to concentrate on the example of film (where NdGT embarrassed himself publicly by listing a whole bunch of scientific inaccuracies in the film Gravity on Twitter). As it happens, I’m much more concerned about the corrosive effect of science encroaching on the humanities than I am with the “problem” of science and religion.
Anyway, the only point I was trying to make in my previous post was this: scientists are ill suited to be public intellectuals because of two salient facts. First, because their training requires a great deal of specialized knowledge – depth over breadth, if you will. Second, because their methods of inquiry are particularly ill suited to exploring questions of meaning and value in human society (yet they tend to want to solve non-scientific problems through scientific means). If you took more than that out of my argument, and subsequently took offense, I do apologize for falling short of clarity and charity in my argument.
One last point of clarification has to do with the term public intellectual itself, which I realized might be a more slippery piece of jargon than I had bargained on. When I say public intellectual, I mean someone suited to speaking intelligently to the public on nearly any occasion, who can discuss concepts of science, art, literature, music, class, race, politics, etc. with ease and insight. I do not use it to refer to someone who pops up as a spokesman for a particular issue or acts as an interpreting expert for certain fields. That’s what Neil deGrasse Tyson started out doing, and that’s what he is particularly good at – it’s when he slides over and uses that cultural cache to make statements about things outside his wheelhouse that I get bothered.
Something that occurred to me as I was talking things over via Facebook comments was that, in a sense, this problem of the public intellectual could be a symptom of a larger problem, our education system itself. As education has gradually transmogrified from providing a grounding in the liberal arts and critical thinking to becoming a glorified method of training people for specific jobs, the burden has shifted away from schools providing balance and roundedness in education. As that has happened, we get scientists who are culturally illiterate and aesthetes who know little of science. Ideally we wound wind our way back toward creating citizens who, though still capable of specializing, are competent in any number of areas. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Now that that throat clearing is by the wayside, let’s roll up the old sleeves and get down to business. More and more it seems like the role of public intellectual, someone who can further intelligent and compassionate discourse for the good of society, is either disappearing or being filled by those ill suited to the task. On whom should we call to reverse this trend? I have a list of potential fields that would make for fruitful sources of public intellectuals – plus one “pretender” category that I want to use to illustrate why some fall short.
It should be clear that public intellectuals, in order to be effective, must possess two key traits: the ability to talk intelligently and provocatively about a number of subjects, and the capacity to do so in engaging, clear ways that remain accessible to the lay person. Let’s see how well each of the following meet that criteria.
The Pretender – stand up comedians
Yes, really. If we’re honest, stand up comedians might be the closest thing we as a culture have to de facto public intellectuals. They get up in front of large groups, go on TV or radio, and communicate ideas to willing listeners. They frequently touch on important subjects such as politics, religion, and the arts. And they have devoted followers (you might even call them disciples).
Leaving aside my own personal distaste for stand up comedy, comedians make less than ideal public intellectuals. First and foremost, they find themselves in the service of the punchline, not any higher calling. The purpose of a comedian is to make people laugh, and they cannot be afraid to bend and twist situations in order to do so. Even the greatest comic playwright of the Ancient world, Aristophanes, was not above using character assassination and straw man after straw man in attacking the ideas of those he did not like, such as Socrates. There are very few comedians I have heard whom I find particularly insightful about cultural matters (usually those people who do have something good to say are African Americans commenting on race, such as the great Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle). Even great comic thinkers like David Cross and Patton Oswalt have little if any interesting and enlightening thoughts when it comes to more complex cultural topics; they tend to hold forth on the same platitudes again and again.
The Contenders
Journalists
This is an obvious choice. Journalists have certain ties back to the Enlightenment concept of the philosophe, a person whose job it was to know a little about everything in the service of educating society. Journalists ideally are those who take complex ideas and boil them down to their essence, translating them for lay people. As such, they should be particularly well suited to the challenge of conveying a great number of ideas across subjects.
Journalism too has some obvious problems with it. First off of course is the deepening crisis of old models of journalism, and the uncertainty involved in trying to monetize Internet journalism. It seems a mite unfair to ask journalists to step into the gap when many of them are fighting to keep a job. Second, journalism seems more and more to have succumbed to the fate of specialization, with journalists ossifying in one particular region of expertise. The area of journalism I’m most acquainted with is film criticism, and I find myself shaking my head again and again when I see film critics I admire greatly try to engage in wider cultural criticism – their opinions tend to range from innocently naive to monstrously uninformed. Even dear sweet Roger Ebert, who taught me more than anyone else about film, tended to get insipid and wearisome when he wrote about other topics. Third, I get a sense that with the shift to the Internet comes a greater crystallization of ideological purpose, such that the ideas and arguments that tend to come from particular organizations usually lack insight and fluidity. I had to stop following Slate on Twitter, because every time I clicked on an article I found myself disappointed by the bland progressivism on display. (Don’t worry, I’m fair and balanced – you don’t even want to get me started on conservative sites). There are exceptions to this, of course, like the wonderfully wonky James Poulos, who manages to confuse the heck out of most people with his references to Tocqueville and others. Still, it is clear that journalists today face a challenge if they want to become thoughtful commenters on numerous aspects of society.
Humanities/Social Sciences Professors
Maybe it seems a bit unfair to claim that scientists make poor public intellectuals but humanities professors do not. To be honest, I have many reservations about professors stepping into the role of public intellectual. For one, as much as I’d like to believe that people in the humanities receive a grounding in many types of thought, I’m not naive enough to believe that that is prevailingly the case. The humanities has been on a gradual drift toward ever more concentrated specialties, driven in part by the misapplication of the scientific model to the humanities. It makes no sense to throw new professors into a publish or perish environment where the only way to secure tenure is to produce work that attains originality only due to extreme specialization. Better that they find themselves in a place that encourages actual teaching (Lawd forbid) and emphasizes the learning community aspect of professorship. That change would also make them better able to speak to non-professors. As someone who’s tried to explain complex concepts to high schoolers for five years, I can attest to the fact that bringing real knowledge to teens forces you to dig and think deeply about what you say and how you say it.
But if we break beyond these problems I think professors, if willing, could fill necessary roles as public intellectuals more often than they do. There are of course professors who already do this, with varying levels of success. These range from a special few high profile professors (like Cornel West, who, though not perfect, is a treasure) to lesser known but very insightful professors like Alan Jacobs of Baylor, who does some of the best work on the intersection of technology and modern life out there (among many, many other things). Beacons like this make me hopeful that more professors will embrace the public sphere in interesting ways. Be that as it may, I still think professors are not the ideal choice to act as public intellectuals. In my mind, that spot is reserved for…
Novelists
Understood correctly, what is the job of the novelist if not to sip deeply from many streams of thought? I speak of course not of the sort of novelists who write books with titles like Shieks of Ecstasy or Horrible Phantoms of the 53rd Dimension, but rather writers of serious fiction – not necessarily somber, but serious. These writers tackle the important topics of human existence – love, identity, community, place, existence – in their fiction, so why should they not bring some of that with them to the real world?
Whoever wrote this is disqualified from being a public intellectual. Especially since that guy was Saddam Hussein. Yes, really. (Photo by Eloff777)
There are of course a number of authors who might not be suited for the task, for any number of reasons. Some are just too introverted, unable to step outside the worlds they create and speak to large masses. Some, despite the high level of their prose, have little of real interest to say (and let’s be clear – there are plenty of “good” writers out there who have terrible, uninformed opinions about culture). Yet the ideal of the novelist, someone who takes humanity and translates it, probes it with words, strikes me as someone who would be marvelously well equipped to tackle the tasks of the public intellectual. Novelists, in order to sketch convincingly human society, need to be well acquainted with its major facets, from religion and science to politics, film, and music. They also need empathy and open eyes and ears, the ability to process through everything they encounter with care and precision. [I'd include poets in this camp as well, but I've chosen novelists as shorthand thanks to their concern with narrative clarity].
It’s unclear whether current novelists are up to this task. The novel itself, as we keep hearing, might well be in decline, and its certainly true that the storytellers we look up to these days find themselves working in other media. But there’s still the hope that novelists – engaged as they are with words, and understanding, can make valuable contributions to the public square. Let’s hope so, anyway.
