Have Public Intellectuals Ever Gotten Anything Right? They didn’t see 9/11 coming.They also missed the 2008 crash, the Arab Spring, Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump. Daniel Johnson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/have-public-intellectuals-ever-gotten-anything-right-1482276815
In the 20 years or so since the term “public intellectual” became current, the members of this self-appointed club seem to have learned nothing from their failure to predict the collapse of communism or make sense of its aftermath. They didn’t see 9/11 coming, nor the 2008 financial crash, nor the Arab Spring. In the past two years they missed the emergence of Islamic State, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and, most recently, Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump.
Not all public intellectuals have been wrong about all these events, of course, but their consensus has been so misguided so often that the public they claim to enlighten might recall the biblical image of the blind leading the blind.
Frank Johnson, the late editor of the London Spectator, once asked: “What exactly is a public intellectual?” His answer was mischievous: “Is it the same principle as a public convenience? Excuse me, officer, I’ve been caught short conceptually. Could you direct me to the nearest public intellectual?”
The volume of essays “Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?” makes only tentative stabs at an answer. Michael C. Desch, the editor, quotes a number of definitions of which the best seems to me to predate the concept. Some 70 years ago, Lionel Trilling—one of the greatest examples of the species—lauded “the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of the mind.”
Alas, such an impulse is not much in evidence here. Rather, what we have is a collection of conference papers animated less by any concern for the commonweal than by the self-importance of the modern academy. The subtitle of the book indicates the narrowly institutionalized limits of the authors’ conception of the intellectual life. For them, a public intellectual is either a professor or a pundit, and very often a professorial pundit.
Yet most of the intellectuals in the history of Western civilization who would have met Trilling’s definition have been neither professors nor pundits. Many have been poets: From Dante to Goethe, from Homer to T.S. Eliot, poets have exercised a profound influence on political thought. That, after all, is why Plato sought to ban them in his “Republic.” Yet poets, and indeed men and women of letters in general, are conspicuous by their absence from this book.
Another kind of intellectual neglected here is the religious. Priests and rabbis have educated many of the best in the West. The only religious thinker who receives sustained treatment is Reinhold Niebuhr, in two papers: Jeremi Suri’s “Historical Consciousness, Realism, and Public Intellectuals in American Society” and Andrew J. Bacevich’s “American Public Intellectuals and the Early Cold War.” Neither author is in the least interested in Niebuhr’s theology. For Mr. Suri, he is merely the “Christian realist” who inspired George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Likewise, what mainly concerns Mr. Bacevich is Niebuhr’s impact on Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—that, and an opportunity to opine that Osama bin Laden’s revival of the caliphate “was never going to gain mass appeal.” These papers were written in 2013, just a year before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually proclaimed a new caliphate in Mosul. Mr. Bacevich describes himself as “a leading public intellectual”; if indeed he is, God help America.
A third category in my far from exhaustive list of glaring omissions in this volume is women. A secularist bias might explain the lack of such cerebral saints as Hildegard of Bingen,Teresa of Avila or Edith Stein, but why ignore atheists like George Eliot, Rosa Luxemburg or Ayn Rand? Why, in Patrick Baert’s paper on “The Philosopher as Public Intellectual,” is the focus on Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre rather than Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir—especially as the women’s ideas have weathered better than the men’s?
None of this is to say that this volume is without merit: Indeed, many of the chapters are excellent. Mark Lilla revisits his seminal study of totalitarian thinkers, “The Reckless Mind” (2001), and is as usual worth reading on what has gone awry with liberal democracy. (He may be correct that the polarized politics of “Left” and “Right,” inaugurated by the French Revolution, has outlived their usefulness.) There is entertainment and enlightenment to be had, too, from Gilles Andréani on “Diplomats as Intellectuals” in the French context; from Kenneth R. Miller and J. Bradford DeLong on the public role of scientists and economists respectively; and from chapters on public intellectualism in China (by Willy Lam), Latin America (by Enrique Krauze) and the Islamic world (by Ahmad S. Moussalli).
Comments are closed.
