“What happened to the public intellectual” is the Wrong Question

The New Statesman recently published an article whose questioning title is as interesting as it is hard (or pointless) to answer: “Whatever happened to the public intellectual?” Perhaps nothing; or there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, our quietistic-fatalist friends tell us. Or maybe the response is that it’s about time that so-called experts and intellectuals are kicked to the curb and ignored; this line of thought often going hand in hand with some extended — if cookie-cutter and predictable — rant about how we don’t need no experts telling us what to do, especially when they’re so often wrong about things. Wrongness and refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever for the words they say or the ideas they proffer are what makes people resent the expert.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes to mind as one of those at the vanguard of this movement against self-proclaimed public intellectuals or what he calls “the intellectual yet idiot” or the IYI for short. In a certain sense he is right in his characterization of the IYI, but the arrow whizzes past the public intellectual and, I think, hits the journalist — and by extension those who hang on their every syllable — instead. He says in Skin in the Game that,

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.

This is true, but it isn’t true of just public intellectuals or just the IYI’s, though it can often be true of them. What Taleb fails to grasp, I think, is that his characterization covers a great deal more ground than he thinks: since the so-called public intellectual makes their views public, Taleb conflates that which is vocalized for that which is unique to those who vocalize their views. In short, he conflates emphasis and volume for prevalence. Does he really think that it is only public intellectuals, only those with Ivy League credentials that pathologize “others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited”? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone these days— left, right, or in between — who doesn’t carry with them at some level the thought that they know people’s best interests. How humble does he think we are? The situation can be reversed with the same effect: the Brexit voter “knows their interests, particularly if they are” Ivy league dupes who thought Hillary was the Messiah.

And the word “uneducated” cuts both ways as well: when the IYI makes a horrendous decision, the non-IYI’s can rightly accuse them of being uneducated — of course uneducated in a different sense. They are uneducated in the worldly, very real affairs of life to which a university education can give little to no insight. While Chesterton can be accused of setting up the same either/or split, the spirit of his point that “sincerely speaking, there are no uneducated men” remains. He says of the supposedly “uneducated” that,

They may escape the trivial examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman and the fear of death — these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind. It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. He has learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.

Like the label “uneducated,” the “intellectual yet idiot” label seems to serve, more often than not, as a conversation-stopping assault on someone’s character or type of learning as opposed to a significant exploration of a particular viewpoint or thinker. Both sides are equally guilty of presumption and arrogance, even though, as I said, one side tends to hog to microphone and stage a bit more (and this, perhaps, is problematic). One can easily characterize, then, the situation as one of “double frenzy” — a situation now self-perpetuated by action-reaction-overreaction-overoverreaction, so on and so forth until it becomes childish and immature, to say nothing of futile, to figure out who actually started the mess in the first place. Was it the intellectuals condescension and disciplinary overstep? Probably. Was it also “plebeian” insecurity wrapped in a blanket of arrogance? Probably as well.

So it seems the most we are left with is, at best, another reason to be rightly skeptical of experts and public intellectuals, and, at worst, unduly dismissive of those who have good points with the “reasoning” that they are only pseudo-points: points that are, indeed, points but aren’t our points. As Aaron Haspel writes: “People pretend to object to what you write. Their real objection is that they want you to have written something else.” Such is how most people criticize these days. Such is how they so readily and prematurely dismiss.

My only point is that it’s hardly ever expertise that people hate; it’s more likely the case that it’s just what a particular expert or intellectual is saying that people hate — even more likely, the fact that what they are saying isn’t what we are saying. Few people are found resenting or bashing certain intellectuals and their ideas without also turning to run toward their own brand of intellectual just around the corner, saying “now this guy gets it.” If we were being cynical, we could even argue that Taleb’s ideas about the “intellectual yet idiot” may actually force more people, in turn, to run toward him, never thinking for a moment that he too might be an IYI. Well of course he isn’t: he’s read everyone who he says the IYI’s ignore and what makes them IYI’s! The situation we have on our hands, then, is like two sides, standing quite opposite each other screaming “you ready to listen and take notes you uneducated monster?” while pointing behind them to their respective generals and leaders.

Though there’s also a chance that the question “Whatever happened to the public intellectual?” is a bit too doom and gloom anyway, and that we are looking unfruitfully in the wrong places or to the traditional models of a public intellectual for examples to quell our fear. People who we can point to and say, alas, they are a public intellectual. If we are only on the lookout for those “smoking cigars and drinking port [with] voices that sound like something from Edwardian times,” we will probably miss the public intellectual. Or at least those trying to fill the apparent void. I suspect that while the lack of cigar-smoking and port-drinking is lamentable, it is not the linchpin that held everything together, just as the Blue and Gray uniforms aren’t the only thing that made the Civil War the Civil War. A public intellectual, if we’re being exact, is really just someone who’s sufficiently not private and intelligent, the latter always being the real point of contention.

But there is some truth, as The New Statesman article states, to the idea that “Academic life has become more professionalized. They write for each other, not for the general reader. Academic political philosophy ­today, for example, has zero influence on the practice of politics.” Rarely do we see philosophers sitting on or chairing committees like Bernard Williams did in the U.K. or John Dewey did in the U.S. or Charles Malik did with the Human Rights Commission in the mid-twentieth century. This could be due to, as Richard Hofstadter’s book title suggests, the long streak of “anti-intellectualism in American life.” More likely, I think, the public intellectual is often found caught between being lumped in with academia (both when they are full-time professors themselves or not) or characterized as IYI’s, talking heads with a mass of troglodyte followers and groupies. They are either the handmaiden-spokesperson for the academy’s wacky views or they are populist demagogue who is motivated by vanity, glory, and book deals.

In both cases the strategy is a refusal to engage, and not only this but a refusal to engage at a deeper level. It is a refusal to believe Oakeshott when he writes that not to “detect a man’s style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his actions and utterances.” It is a similar refusal to understand and reflect on Weber’s concept of Versthehen — the idea that we should attempt to understand people’s actions by, switching to Rorty, asking “what the subject thinks it’s up to before formulating our own hypotheses,” which are usually reductive and inattentive to what any given person says they believe. The overwhelming tendency is to think that one’s own explanation for what they are doing is self-contained within their words or is rather something that they do not have privileged access too. Psychology, neuroscience, etc. will finally pluck at the heart of the mystery. It is true that what people say they mean might not link up with what is happening or what they really mean, but it is not the case that we can then say that they have no insight into these matters.

As Mary Midgley puts it,

If we want to account for somebody’s action — that is, to explain it — the first thing we need to know about will be their own point of view on the facts that they face, their beliefs about it, their skills and conceptual schemes, their motives, their background, and of course the subject-matter that they are trying to deal with. Without understanding the problems that face Napoleon, we can get no handle on his thinking. After that, we shall also need to know more about the options open to him, which means examining the whole social and physical life around him.

We need to get out from under this idea that people who we think are wrong or misguided are under some sort of illusion or spell of appearance; that what they are seeing is not quite right. And with a bit of common sense or actual education, they will be set on the right path.

All this is to say that the atmosphere or environment is poorly suited for public intellectuals to survive. The question isn’t, then, “What happened to the public intellectual?” but rather it’s “What happened to the public space?” It’s not that Williams or Dewey didn’t catch massive amounts of flack for the public appearances and proclamations in their time; what’s peculiar about their time as opposed to ours is that it was their actual public utterances and proclamations that were being attacked — not the idea that they should or shouldn’t be making public appearances or proclamations. The charge of pseudo-intellectual may have been close in tow, but the important thing is that it is in tow and not towing the boat. We may be past the time of the public intellectual, but it is no one’s fault but our own, we who conflate deplatforming with criticism and, as Hans Blumenberg says, “dissatisfaction” with “diagnostic precision.”

Taleb is right to knock down a few pegs the intellectual yet idiots who have been wrong about nearly everything but are nonetheless “convinced that [their] current position is right.” But this says nothing about anyone. His characterization isn’t a critique or criticism of anyone in particular — quite the opposite: it is a generalist critique of anyone who reads the New Yorker or listens to Ted Talks. Again, he is right to deride these folks if they present themselves as knowledgeable or well-versed in this or that area based on a few pop-psychology books or Tedx conventions, but he is wrong in thinking that this is the only type of arrogance. That a swing in the opposite direction — those nodding in agreement to Taleb’s sweeping and harsh denunciations but haven’t read Montaigne, Oakeshott, Gray, or Battuta — isn’t just as painful; just as unproductive. It’s easy to see, in other words, how denouncing the intellectual yet idiot could equally lead to either an arrogant common sense and intellectual complacence or to people becoming the type of intellectual Taleb wants and praises: which is apparently just real ones.

Dupes — public intellectual dupes especially — ought to be exposed. But they ought to be exposed on terms other than “he’s an intellectual yet idiot.” This is merely a cover for “I don’t agree with what he’s saying” or “He’s been wrong about so much.” Taleb’s position seems at times nothing more than identity politic by a different means — that is, he frames the issue in different words and images but the spirit of identity politics remains. There’s a difference between being wrong about a lot and being wrong, the latter being a mast we humans are tied too, and it is a difference only a discriminating, gentle, and sympathetic mind can detect. As Rorty says,

If we look to for the people who made no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have very few heroes and heroines.

“Intellectual yet idiots” do not seem to me to be the problem or at least not the crux of the problem: a refusal to understand deeper than what our immediate senses detect and a refusal to have sustained conversations over port and cigars seems to me the problem. Though, if invited, I will insist on beers.