Public intellectuals

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Brad DeLong has a number of posts related to a conference currently going on at Notre Dame, Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context: Different Countries, Different Disciplines.  (He is a participant.)  From Notre Dame’s description of the conference:

This international conference, hosted by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, will focus on the roles played by public intellectuals—persons who exert a large influence in the contemporary society of their countries by virtue of their thought, writing, or speaking—in various countries around the world and in their different professional roles. Leading experts from multiple disciplines will come together to approach this elusive topic of public intellectualism from different perspectives.

The speakers:

Monday, April 22: ​

  • 8:30 a.m. Welcome, Robert Bernhard, Vice President for Research, University of Notre Dame
  • 8:45 a.m. ​“Caveat Lector: Intellectuals and the Public” Mark Lilla, Commentary: Michael Zuckert
  • 10:45 a.m. “The Public Intellectual in China” Willy Lam, Commentary: Lionel Jensen ​​* 2:00 p.m. “The Public Intellectual in Latin America” Enrique Krauze, Commentary: Paolo Carozza ​​*
  • 4:00 p.m. “The Artist as Public Intellectual” Maxim Kantor, Commentary: Peter Holland
  • 7:15 p.m.: Evening Presentation “The Religious Leader as Public Intellectual” Sr. Joan Chittister, Commentary: Ann Astell

Tuesday, April 23:

  • 8:45 a.m. “Islam and the Public Intellectual” (via web) Ahmad Moussalli, Commentary: Rashied Omar
  • 10:45 a.m. “The Blogger as Public Intellectual” Paul Horwitz, Commentary: Richard Garnett
  • 2:00 p.m. “Science in the Crosshairs: The Public Role of Science and Scientists” Kenneth Miller, Commentary: Jessica Hellmann ​​*
  • 4:00 p.m.​“The Economist as Public Intellectual” J. Bradford DeLong, Commentary: Timothy Fuerst
  • 7:15 p.m. Evening Presentation “The Former Diplomat as Public Intellectual” Gilles Andréani, Panthéon-Assas University, Paris Commentary: George Lopez ​​​ Wednesday, April 24: 8:00 a.m.​Continental Breakfast
  • 8:45 a.m. “The Philosopher as Public Intellectual” Patrick Baert, Commentary: Katherine Brading
  • 10:45 a.m. “The American Public Intellectual as Cold Warrior” Andrew Bacevich, Commentary: Daniel Philpott
  • 2:00 p.m. “The Historian as Public Intellectual: The Case of George Kennan” Jeremi Suri, Commentary: Rev. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C.
  • 4:00 p.m. “Politics and Science as a Vocation: The Ethical Imperative of Public Intellectualism for Scholars” Michael Desch, Commentary: Don Howard

The role of public intellectualism in society is an incredibly important topic.  Looking at the agenda and speaker list I have many thoughts.  Here are a few:

What does it say about me – and the speakers – that DeLong and Andrew Bacevich are the only two people on the agenda that I’ve heard of?  Are speakers simply commenting on the role of public intellectuals but not – for the most part – attempting to take that role themselves? Are they public intellectuals but I haven’t heard of them because their focus is regional rather than national? What are the metrics which qualify one as a “public intellectual”?

Although it was a bit before my time, anti-Vietnam-War activism defines my baseline for what it means to be a public intellectual.  When I think “public intellectual” Noam Chomsky is who comes to mind.  No one should be allowed to speak at a conference on public intellectualism without being able to recite the first 500 words of Chomsky’s, “The Responsiblity of Intellectuals”  It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with his politics, if you aspire to be a public intellectual or to study them it’s a primary source you should know cold.  The essay was published in The  New York Review of Books in 1967.  The first few paragraphs:

TWENTY-YEARS AGO,  [in 1947,] Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war [World War II], and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

The issues that Macdonald raised are as pertinent today as they were twenty years ago. We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the “Vasco da Gama era” of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions. I want to return to them, later on, after a few scattered remarks about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in practice, they go about meeting this responsibility in the mid-1960s.

IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. Thus we have Martin Heidegger writing, in a pro-Hitler declaration of 1933, that “truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge”; it is only this kind of “truth” that one has a responsibility to speak. Americans tend to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration. It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know. The press, foreign and domestic, has presented documentation to refute each falsehood as it appears. But the power of the government’s propaganda apparatus is such that the citizen who does not undertake a research project on the subject can hardly hope to confront government pronouncements with fact.

Recalling Chomsky’s essay made me wonder, are any of the speakers at the Notre Dame conference going to look back on that period? What about engagement on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who amongst the speakers exerted “a large influence on contemporary society” when it came to those conflicts?  I believe the answer is “None.” (More on the Iraq War below.)

Public intellectuals who influence science policy – more specifically, public intellectuals who influence the discussion of anthropogenic climate change. Who’ve we got? James Hansen? Michael Mann?  Bill McKibben?  Who are the leaders in trying to raise awareness of the problem?

Judging only from the titles of the talks, they sound too abstract. Public intellectuals get people engaged on specific issues. There isn’t a single issue called out in the session titles. One of the things which distinguishes public intellectuals from navel-gazers is that they aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. They aren’t afraid to be unpopular or to compromise their careers in advocacy of the causes that motivate them. They don’t give a shit what the neighbors think.  Not all activists are public intellectuals but all public intellectuals must be activists.  If 90% of the audience for your writing/speaking/blogging are other intellectuals then you’re not a public intellectual.  Serious question: Where’s the passion on the speaker list?  (That’s a serious question not a rhetorical one.)  I think I understand where DeLong and Bacevich are coming from.  What about the other speakers?

In a later post DeLong quotes Mark Lilla: Caveat Lector:

I speak as a defender of liberal democracy. But I want to be a lucid one. I don’t think it can be understood or defended without recognizing two things. First, that the finance-driven economy of today is no longer your mother’s capitalism, and is threatening important democratic values around the world, including in the West, even the United States; and, second, that liberal democracy is not in the future in many countries of the world, and that to understand them we need to, well, understand them and not ourselves. During the Cold War I felt that the most important function the intellectual could serve was to expose and dismantle the radical ideologies of left and right that were spawned by the French Revolution, to hold other intellectuals responsible for the consequences of their ideas. That has been accomplished. The intellectual task before us today is different. It is to think the present, the way it actually is, and try to develop a coherent, historically grounded picture of it. As Alasdair Macintyre might have put it in an earlier stage of his career, “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–Karl Marx.

I’ll get to a Brad’s critique of Lilla and my critique of his critique in a moment but first my own response to Lilla.  Lilla says  “… I felt that the most important function the intellectual could serve was… to hold other intellectuals responsible for the consequences of their ideas. That has been accomplished.”  That last sentence is absurd.  Consider, for example, The Iraq War.  The neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and co) owned the foreign policy discussion post-9/11 and for much of the past decade. Talk about public intellectuals – name a more influential public intellectual in the 00’s than Paul Wolfowitz.  We invaded because Wolfowitz and co made the case and the opposition was impotent.  Almost 4,500 US soldiers have lost their lives (and over 30,000 have been wounded) as a result of their having sold the country on the wisdom of invasion.  How many ‘excess deaths’ amongst the Iraqi population as a result? A hundred thousand? A few hundred thousand? Half a million?  The arguments for war were based on lies.  If any of the neocon leaders have been held accountable for the war or the lies that led to it then I’ve missed it.

And, while we’re at it, let’s hop in the wayback machine… Henry Kissinger’s going to face a tribunal in The Hague any day now for his role in the US bombing of Cambodia, right?  (Read Christopher Hitchens’ “The Case Against Henry Kissinger” in the February 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine if you’re not familiar with the case that Kissinger is a war criminal.)

Remember Leona Helmsley’s “Only little people pay taxes.”? Well, for anyone who hasn’t noticed, there’s a corollary: Only losers get prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

Back to DeLong’s critique of Lilla.  DeLong writes (my emphasis):

The problem is not that international financial markets are too strong. It is that they are too weak to bear the weight that the EU’s institutions have placed on them.

And they are too weak precisely because of an ideology–the sound-finance ideology: gold and hard money are good, people should pay their debts, the bankers have sinned and because they sinned Greece and Spain must suffer.

So I would call for managerialism: for public intellectuals as people able to step back and bring what concerns ordinary people and should concern those who hold power and megaphones.

For this ideology that we have is, precisely, our great-grandmother’s capitalism. It is the “austerity” of Baldwin and Churchill and Coolidge and Hayek and Hoover and Mellon and MacDonald and Norman. It came a-crash in 1929. Yet, somehow, it is back. And it is coming a-crash again. Then the cost was 1933, 1939, and 1945. Now–we hope–the cost will be less. But we must make it so.

As much as I would like to believe that “managerialism” is a winning strategy, I do not.  As Frederick Douglass noted “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  Those who pursue power are not interested in being reasonable or being responsive to the citizenry.  They are interested in acquiring and exercising power – and in enjoying the trappings that come with it.  Appeals to “Be reasonable.” will fall on deaf ears.  They view a “Live and let live.” outlook as a sign of weakness.  People who challenge authority suffer consequences.  Has that ever not been the case?  Lives were lost advocating for workers’ rights a century ago.  Lives were lost advocating for civil rights 50-60 years ago.  I believe it’s naive to think that the stakes are any lower or that the ruling class is any more willing to concede power now than it was then.