What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals?
February 15, 2015 12:29 PM Subscribe
Here’s a personal confession.
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; when it comes to education, dangerous to the idea that universities should be for the rich, rather than the public, and hostile to the creeping sense that American universities should be for the global rich rather than the local or nationally bounded polity. It is not up to the public intellectual alone to remake "the public" as a citizenry of equals, superior and dominant—that will take efforts from all sides. But it is perhaps up to the intellectual, if anyone, to face off against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down "big ideas," and call that world what it is: stupid.
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; when it comes to education, dangerous to the idea that universities should be for the rich, rather than the public, and hostile to the creeping sense that American universities should be for the global rich rather than the local or nationally bounded polity. It is not up to the public intellectual alone to remake "the public" as a citizenry of equals, superior and dominant—that will take efforts from all sides. But it is perhaps up to the intellectual, if anyone, to face off against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down "big ideas," and call that world what it is: stupid.
I love that the editor of n+1 got started in part by sitting down and reading >20 years of Partisan Review cover to cover. It feels like a model and a justification for quixotic reading projects in general.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:09 PM on February 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:09 PM on February 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
If there is a task, it might to act as an intellectual shill for the elites; to allow the appearance of controversy to give undue credibility to a position that deserves none; to foster an endless argument that leaves main streeters shrugging and deciding the truth is in the middle; to make false equivalence respectable again; to put the power and prestige of publishing behind opinions formerly banished from the public sphere; to maintain a chattering class that arrogates to itself the role of informed decision making; and to ensure that periodic bloodbaths always have a printed rationalization allowing the vicious to defer reflection on their actions.
posted by fatbird at 1:13 PM on February 15, 2015 [31 favorites]
posted by fatbird at 1:13 PM on February 15, 2015 [31 favorites]
Thanks for posting this. I have trouble sometimes with the degree of abstraction in intellectual history, but I kept on - the first few paragraphs didn't stir me, but reading to the end has been very worthwhile and provocative in giving me something to consider about why and how the "public" and its interest in knowledge and thought has been devalued and degraded.
" Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You—we—are the public....the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. "
posted by Miko at 1:21 PM on February 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
" Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You—we—are the public....the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. "
posted by Miko at 1:21 PM on February 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
If there is a task, it might to act as an intellectual shill for the elites
Certainly that was the Partisan Review model, as evinced by their receipt of CIA funding and the frequency with which they directed their most vitriolic attacks to their left. It's always weird (and often seems symptomatic) to me when people take PR as their model of honorable intellectual dissent, when in fact what it offered (by the Forties and Fifties particularly, though Greif seems to be weirdly hung up on the Popular Front moment) was more or less a deliberately cultivated form of ornamental anticommunist "leftism," created for and with the approval of liberal elites and largely functioning as a ward against actual mass politics and later as an actual pawn for the right (CCF, etc.) on the cultural front of the Cold War.
So much of the n+1 circle's turn to "leftism" has been about mistaking (or deliberately substituting?) intellectual/cultural posing and positioning for having actual politics that this kind of thing probably shouldn't still surprise me, but how deep it runs still sometimes does, as here, strike me as unfortunate. Especially the portions of this essay that edge pretty close to glorifying the economic destruction of the Depression and of our current recession, as if the immiseration of intellectuals were somehow good for public discourse, strike me as pretty reprehensible.
posted by RogerB at 1:42 PM on February 15, 2015 [6 favorites]
Certainly that was the Partisan Review model, as evinced by their receipt of CIA funding and the frequency with which they directed their most vitriolic attacks to their left. It's always weird (and often seems symptomatic) to me when people take PR as their model of honorable intellectual dissent, when in fact what it offered (by the Forties and Fifties particularly, though Greif seems to be weirdly hung up on the Popular Front moment) was more or less a deliberately cultivated form of ornamental anticommunist "leftism," created for and with the approval of liberal elites and largely functioning as a ward against actual mass politics and later as an actual pawn for the right (CCF, etc.) on the cultural front of the Cold War.
So much of the n+1 circle's turn to "leftism" has been about mistaking (or deliberately substituting?) intellectual/cultural posing and positioning for having actual politics that this kind of thing probably shouldn't still surprise me, but how deep it runs still sometimes does, as here, strike me as unfortunate. Especially the portions of this essay that edge pretty close to glorifying the economic destruction of the Depression and of our current recession, as if the immiseration of intellectuals were somehow good for public discourse, strike me as pretty reprehensible.
posted by RogerB at 1:42 PM on February 15, 2015 [6 favorites]
Greif mentions Chomsky, but I wonder if he has actually read Chomsky?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:52 PM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:52 PM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
If there is a task, it might to act as an intellectual shill for the elites; to allow the appearance of controversy to give undue credibility to a position that deserves none; to foster an endless argument that leaves main streeters shrugging and deciding the truth is in the middle; to make false equivalence respectable again; to put the power and prestige of publishing behind opinions formerly banished from the public sphere; to maintain a chattering class that arrogates to itself the role of informed decision making; and to ensure that periodic bloodbaths always have a printed rationalization allowing the vicious to defer reflection on their actions.
The manufactured debates around us are counterfeit in precisely the sense of counterfeiting, simulating something worthwhile using something comparatively worthless. Drown out thoughtful critique with a cheap counterfeit and see, soon, how real critique is taken for counterfeit, and in social terms assumes the emptiness of the counterfeit.
The problem is, as the article notes, the way elites instead imagine that there is a world for themselves and another for the fools. And anti-intellectualism is the mirror of the position, the idea that all specialized or academic discourse is bunk because it might require stepping beyond a comfortably bounded set of practices, assumptions, and positions. Both of these are forms of epistemic closure; both are forms of anti-intellectualism that inoculate elites from criticism.
Indeed, the absence of intellectual cover has never stopped anyone from rationalizing bloodbaths with appeals to tribalism, to a naive concept of "security," to fundamentalism, indeed, to a whole range of positions that explicitly present themselves as anti-intellectual. It may be that many of the institutional places we might wish to see held by generous, genuine intellectuals have been given over to glossy rationalizations for and unjust system, but it plays into the hands of the frauds to suggest that no one can so much as attempt the real thing.
I think that the public intellectual, which is perhaps an unfortunate phrase with which to identify oneself or others, must approach from the humble position of someone trying to join a conversation, to connect ideas not always their own to contexts not always their own. But that requires not only humility on the part of the intellectuals, but also a sort of humility on the part of readers, who must be just as prepared to give up their comfortable appeals to identity and sense.
The slangy, dumbed-down writing described in the article is the worst sort of dodge on the part of the "intellectuals:" an overweening self-consciousness mistaking itself for true humility, and at the same time a dripping condescension that claims the mantle of intellectual generosity. But the argument that it is all self-serving inauthenticity is an equally facile dodge on the part of the prospective readers, the resort to a self-pleasing, ultimately numbing cynicism covering over a faulty sense of political impotence.
I do think we need popular outlets for ideas that resist easy categorizations and that open uncomfortable questions about The Way Things Are, especially if that thought can be presented without immediate recourse to the shortcutting of professional jargon. It's a net good for the writer and the reader to try to present complex ideas in as many different idioms as possible.
posted by kewb at 2:02 PM on February 15, 2015 [15 favorites]
The manufactured debates around us are counterfeit in precisely the sense of counterfeiting, simulating something worthwhile using something comparatively worthless. Drown out thoughtful critique with a cheap counterfeit and see, soon, how real critique is taken for counterfeit, and in social terms assumes the emptiness of the counterfeit.
The problem is, as the article notes, the way elites instead imagine that there is a world for themselves and another for the fools. And anti-intellectualism is the mirror of the position, the idea that all specialized or academic discourse is bunk because it might require stepping beyond a comfortably bounded set of practices, assumptions, and positions. Both of these are forms of epistemic closure; both are forms of anti-intellectualism that inoculate elites from criticism.
Indeed, the absence of intellectual cover has never stopped anyone from rationalizing bloodbaths with appeals to tribalism, to a naive concept of "security," to fundamentalism, indeed, to a whole range of positions that explicitly present themselves as anti-intellectual. It may be that many of the institutional places we might wish to see held by generous, genuine intellectuals have been given over to glossy rationalizations for and unjust system, but it plays into the hands of the frauds to suggest that no one can so much as attempt the real thing.
I think that the public intellectual, which is perhaps an unfortunate phrase with which to identify oneself or others, must approach from the humble position of someone trying to join a conversation, to connect ideas not always their own to contexts not always their own. But that requires not only humility on the part of the intellectuals, but also a sort of humility on the part of readers, who must be just as prepared to give up their comfortable appeals to identity and sense.
The slangy, dumbed-down writing described in the article is the worst sort of dodge on the part of the "intellectuals:" an overweening self-consciousness mistaking itself for true humility, and at the same time a dripping condescension that claims the mantle of intellectual generosity. But the argument that it is all self-serving inauthenticity is an equally facile dodge on the part of the prospective readers, the resort to a self-pleasing, ultimately numbing cynicism covering over a faulty sense of political impotence.
I do think we need popular outlets for ideas that resist easy categorizations and that open uncomfortable questions about The Way Things Are, especially if that thought can be presented without immediate recourse to the shortcutting of professional jargon. It's a net good for the writer and the reader to try to present complex ideas in as many different idioms as possible.
posted by kewb at 2:02 PM on February 15, 2015 [15 favorites]
That faulty sense of political impotence is what the article itself indulges in, of course; the real flaw I see in it is that the author does not believe that the public has any political power of its own, which makes public intellectualism either a gift from above or the merely instructive shadow-play of some "real" politics reserved for others.
posted by kewb at 2:06 PM on February 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by kewb at 2:06 PM on February 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
Public intellectuals should be more maxist. What a radical and daring critique.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 2:55 PM on February 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 2:55 PM on February 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
what exactly is an elite? someone who publishes...someone with grad degrees...someone who writes books? Ought we read articles in Time and Readers Digest instead of say, NY Times?
posted by Postroad at 3:20 PM on February 15, 2015
posted by Postroad at 3:20 PM on February 15, 2015
I feel a bit bad for adding an early sour note to the discussion. I really didn't mean to fly the flag of anti-intellectualism. RogerB and kewb both raised parts of my issues with Greif's essay; more broadly, I've developed a really deep cynicism about academia lately, so calls for academics to go forth and arm the masses with rigorous yet populist arguments... not so much.
My immediate response to Greif would be that we already have public intellectuals doing fine work--academically rigorous and directly publicly engaged, in a way that the publishers of Partisan Review couldn't dream of. They're called bloggers. Some are muckrakers, and some are dangerous demagogues, but against anyone that Greif held up as an ideal, I would hold up Ta Nahesi Coates, and drop the mic. The pick and shovel work of public discourse has been well and truly democratized, and there's nothing an MIT graduate can add that I can see.
posted by fatbird at 4:25 PM on February 15, 2015 [11 favorites]
My immediate response to Greif would be that we already have public intellectuals doing fine work--academically rigorous and directly publicly engaged, in a way that the publishers of Partisan Review couldn't dream of. They're called bloggers. Some are muckrakers, and some are dangerous demagogues, but against anyone that Greif held up as an ideal, I would hold up Ta Nahesi Coates, and drop the mic. The pick and shovel work of public discourse has been well and truly democratized, and there's nothing an MIT graduate can add that I can see.
posted by fatbird at 4:25 PM on February 15, 2015 [11 favorites]
The pick and shovel work of public discourse has been well and truly democratized, and there's nothing an MIT graduate can add that I can see.
Something was bugging me about the article and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I think it's this. The author isn't bemoaning any actual loss of intellectual writing that I can see, but rather the loss of the role of the powerful gatekeeper - a role which he crucially clearly sees himself fitting right in.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:50 PM on February 15, 2015 [7 favorites]
Something was bugging me about the article and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I think it's this. The author isn't bemoaning any actual loss of intellectual writing that I can see, but rather the loss of the role of the powerful gatekeeper - a role which he crucially clearly sees himself fitting right in.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:50 PM on February 15, 2015 [7 favorites]
Intellectuals. You'd be much better off moderating that outlook.
30 years ago...
Brian: 'Cause I'm stupid...'cause I'm failing shop. See we had this assignment, to make this ceramic elephant, and um--and we had eight weeks to do it and we're s'posed ta, and it was like a lamp, and when you pull the trunk the light was s'posed to go on. My light didn't go on, I got a F on it. Never got a F in my life. When I signed up, you know, for the course I mean. I thought I was playing it real smart, you know. 'Cause I thought, I'll take shop, it'll be such an easy way to maintain my grade point average.
Bender: Why'd you think it'd be easy?
Brian: Have you seen some of the dopes that take shop?
Bender: I take shop. You must be a fuckin' idiot!
Brian: I'm a fuckin' idiot because I can't make a lamp?
Bender: No, you're a genius because you can't make a lamp.
Brian: What do you know about Trigonometry?
Bender: I could care less about Trigonometry.
Brian: Bender, did you know without Trigonometry there'd be no engineering?
Bender: Without lamps, there'd be no light.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:14 PM on February 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
30 years ago...
Brian: 'Cause I'm stupid...'cause I'm failing shop. See we had this assignment, to make this ceramic elephant, and um--and we had eight weeks to do it and we're s'posed ta, and it was like a lamp, and when you pull the trunk the light was s'posed to go on. My light didn't go on, I got a F on it. Never got a F in my life. When I signed up, you know, for the course I mean. I thought I was playing it real smart, you know. 'Cause I thought, I'll take shop, it'll be such an easy way to maintain my grade point average.
Bender: Why'd you think it'd be easy?
Brian: Have you seen some of the dopes that take shop?
Bender: I take shop. You must be a fuckin' idiot!
Brian: I'm a fuckin' idiot because I can't make a lamp?
Bender: No, you're a genius because you can't make a lamp.
Brian: What do you know about Trigonometry?
Bender: I could care less about Trigonometry.
Brian: Bender, did you know without Trigonometry there'd be no engineering?
Bender: Without lamps, there'd be no light.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:14 PM on February 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
I think a better question regarding "public intellectuals" is "what's wrong with the state of current public discourse in the USA when people like Thomas Friedman and Andrew Sullivan are unironically considered 'public intellectuals'?"
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:05 PM on February 15, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:05 PM on February 15, 2015 [9 favorites]
I agree. I've felt similarly disappointed by other people raised to that stature, like Adam Gopnik. I wonder if it's part of aging, though, that we don't feel we have Titans.
posted by Miko at 7:38 PM on February 15, 2015
posted by Miko at 7:38 PM on February 15, 2015
This has now made me think of something else. I studied Philosophy at NYU, at the time considered the top program in the country (this is not to brag - I got into NYU as part of their Film program, and added the double major later; the Philosophy department had no internal entrance requirements. I am not special.)
I mention that it was NYU because, at the time at least (I don't know now, I haven't kept up, really) the program there was seemingly unique in that its focus was analytic. There were a couple of lecture classes so people could get the history, but almost all classes were small seminars built around ripping apart any and all theories currently making waves (to the point where Ned Block had to have his TA teach about Daniel Dennett just to keep from compulsively spoiling everything Block hated about him.)
I absolutely adored it, but when my philosophy-major friends from other programs talk about their classical programs, displaying their depths of understanding of Kant and Wittgenstein that I never received, I feel a bit of loss. When I put together a very well-received (in reality probably pretty trite) mathematical refutation to Pascal's Wager, I felt like a king. This was it! I can take down the Greats! But I totally missed the fact that Pascal was probably writing his own variation on "A Modest Proposal."
PR presented articles from great minds and, through doing so, was able to elevate them as great. It's a lofty position, and one that's hard to trust, as the questions of PR's editorial slant and the motivations behind it make clear. For better or worse, we no longer exist in that world. Thomas Friedman might be vaunted as a "public intellectual," but in reality is a yes-man for corporate interests and all intellectuals know it. Andrew Sullivan has a large microphone but it is followed up by a comment section critiquing what he has to say. On the other hand, just as it seems impossible for something like Rite of Spring to incite a riot in any other time and place than when it did, it seems exceedingly unlikely now that someone like Chomsky (who I don't even like at all but must respect as a great mind) could develop his field and see it take root while his rabid anti-empiricism was subject to the criticism of the masses.
The current world of intellectual pursuit and discussion is the one I was trained for, one where "peer review" means that the entire world gets to respond, and almost immediately. I'm thinking now, however, that that world might trample a lot of the best, subtler, deeper ideas into dust before we get to really understand them though.
Nothing to be done about it now, though, except for what we're all, here, already doing, I guess. If the internet is the current palace of ideas, which it is, and an institution were designed for it in order to find the best of those ideas and delve into them, well... it would look like Metafilter, really. Except we also have funny youtube videos of cats. And we have cameras.
Did PR even have cat videos?
posted by Navelgazer at 11:53 PM on February 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
I mention that it was NYU because, at the time at least (I don't know now, I haven't kept up, really) the program there was seemingly unique in that its focus was analytic. There were a couple of lecture classes so people could get the history, but almost all classes were small seminars built around ripping apart any and all theories currently making waves (to the point where Ned Block had to have his TA teach about Daniel Dennett just to keep from compulsively spoiling everything Block hated about him.)
I absolutely adored it, but when my philosophy-major friends from other programs talk about their classical programs, displaying their depths of understanding of Kant and Wittgenstein that I never received, I feel a bit of loss. When I put together a very well-received (in reality probably pretty trite) mathematical refutation to Pascal's Wager, I felt like a king. This was it! I can take down the Greats! But I totally missed the fact that Pascal was probably writing his own variation on "A Modest Proposal."
PR presented articles from great minds and, through doing so, was able to elevate them as great. It's a lofty position, and one that's hard to trust, as the questions of PR's editorial slant and the motivations behind it make clear. For better or worse, we no longer exist in that world. Thomas Friedman might be vaunted as a "public intellectual," but in reality is a yes-man for corporate interests and all intellectuals know it. Andrew Sullivan has a large microphone but it is followed up by a comment section critiquing what he has to say. On the other hand, just as it seems impossible for something like Rite of Spring to incite a riot in any other time and place than when it did, it seems exceedingly unlikely now that someone like Chomsky (who I don't even like at all but must respect as a great mind) could develop his field and see it take root while his rabid anti-empiricism was subject to the criticism of the masses.
The current world of intellectual pursuit and discussion is the one I was trained for, one where "peer review" means that the entire world gets to respond, and almost immediately. I'm thinking now, however, that that world might trample a lot of the best, subtler, deeper ideas into dust before we get to really understand them though.
Nothing to be done about it now, though, except for what we're all, here, already doing, I guess. If the internet is the current palace of ideas, which it is, and an institution were designed for it in order to find the best of those ideas and delve into them, well... it would look like Metafilter, really. Except we also have funny youtube videos of cats. And we have cameras.
Did PR even have cat videos?
posted by Navelgazer at 11:53 PM on February 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
I think a better question regarding "public intellectuals" is "what's wrong with the state of current public discourse in the USA when people like Thomas Friedman and Andrew Sullivan are unironically considered 'public intellectuals'?"
Not to mention Jonah Goldberg.
posted by Gelatin at 5:33 AM on February 16, 2015
Not to mention Jonah Goldberg.
posted by Gelatin at 5:33 AM on February 16, 2015
This made me wonder about the term "public intellectual" and its own historiography - how was this idea constructed? I see I am not alone in wondering. I found The Role of the Public Intellectual by Alan Lightman, Ta-Nehisi Coates' critique of the racist insularity of a mid20C conception of public intellectual, Nicholas Kristof's plea for more public work by academic intellectuals, an essay by Daniel Drezner and a response in the NYT by Barry Gewen, and the content from a Forum by the Nation featuring a number of speakers.
After digesting it all I'm sort of left thinking that maybe if all these folks addressed the public on a topic other than what happened to the public intellectual, the problem would solve itself.
It strikes me that there is a cross-disciplinary way of understanding this rooted in the specificity of "public." For instance, I work in the world of "public history," which is considered distinct from plain old "history" in its concerns. Other fields include public memory, public culture, public art - each has its own aesthetics and principles and requirements derived from what our understanding of the "public" is. The problem likely lies in our shifting understand of who represents "the public," and I thought some of the economic analysis in the FPP led in a useful direction.
posted by Miko at 8:00 AM on February 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
After digesting it all I'm sort of left thinking that maybe if all these folks addressed the public on a topic other than what happened to the public intellectual, the problem would solve itself.
It strikes me that there is a cross-disciplinary way of understanding this rooted in the specificity of "public." For instance, I work in the world of "public history," which is considered distinct from plain old "history" in its concerns. Other fields include public memory, public culture, public art - each has its own aesthetics and principles and requirements derived from what our understanding of the "public" is. The problem likely lies in our shifting understand of who represents "the public," and I thought some of the economic analysis in the FPP led in a useful direction.
posted by Miko at 8:00 AM on February 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
Some entertaining Grief-related posts from The Awl - Choire and (fellow Harvard alum) Tom Scocca liveblog an n+1 column, then Scocca goes deep with (fellow Harvard alum) Keith Gessen afterwards.
Also re "My co-founders and I—all of us planning together this unfunded magazine" - NY literary party gossip (never verified but from a pretty solid source) I heard years ago from (fellow Harvard alum) __________ was that (fellow Harvard alum) Ben Kunkel was monetary backstop via his family's wealth.
'Public' intellectuals.
posted by 99_ at 10:41 AM on February 16, 2015
Also re "My co-founders and I—all of us planning together this unfunded magazine" - NY literary party gossip (never verified but from a pretty solid source) I heard years ago from (fellow Harvard alum) __________ was that (fellow Harvard alum) Ben Kunkel was monetary backstop via his family's wealth.
'Public' intellectuals.
posted by 99_ at 10:41 AM on February 16, 2015
The pick and shovel work of public discourse has been well and truly democratized, and there's nothing an MIT graduate can add that I can see.
Your prime example for the democratization of public discourse is a senior editor at The Atlantic, a conventional mainstream publication that pays for and publishes his work.
There was a lot of talk about democratizing public discourse back in the early days of blogging. And it's true that the Web has made publication easier than ever. But public discourse -- serious, broad-based, non-academic intellectual discussion, insofar as such a thing exists -- is still largely structured by institutions that act as gatekeepers. This discussion thread, for example, is about an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education written by an editor of a traditional print magazine.
posted by twirlip at 2:06 PM on February 16, 2015
Your prime example for the democratization of public discourse is a senior editor at The Atlantic, a conventional mainstream publication that pays for and publishes his work.
There was a lot of talk about democratizing public discourse back in the early days of blogging. And it's true that the Web has made publication easier than ever. But public discourse -- serious, broad-based, non-academic intellectual discussion, insofar as such a thing exists -- is still largely structured by institutions that act as gatekeepers. This discussion thread, for example, is about an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education written by an editor of a traditional print magazine.
posted by twirlip at 2:06 PM on February 16, 2015
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posted by dhartung at 12:45 PM on February 15, 2015 [4 favorites]