Wednesday, 12 December 2018

Intellectuals on the 'Intellectual!' From Bertrand to Ayn Rand to Noah to Neil!

Today in class, we were having a discussion on Bertrand Russell’s interesting take as regards the Education-Discipline connect!

To Russell, the real purpose of education is civilization! (and civilization is partly individual and partly social). And this education-leads-to-civilisation connect, according to Russell, (the 1950 Nobel winner!) has two beautiful branches to it: it gives an individual one’s intellectual qualities, and one’s moral qualities as well!


Intellectual qualities would include – a certain minimum of general knowledge, technical skill in one’s own profession, a habit of forming opinions on evidence, etc, whereas,

Moral qualities would include, impartiality, kindliness, and a modicum of self-control!

This apart, he adds a liminal quality, that’s neither intellectual, nor moral, and he calls it the physiological – having a zest and joy of life!

Commenting on Bertrand Russell’s emphasis on civilization, I would like to take a leaf out of one equally interesting read, from the Objectivist philosopher, Ayn Rand, a raving recommend for our troubled times! It’s titled, For the New Intellectual, where she puts forth her proposition that, civilization in general, and America in particular, are in desperate need of a new philosophy and new intellectuals.

She is at once crass, and sometimes starkingly crude! She can be strategically defiant, and do a fight-until-death verbal duel to prove the merits of her stance, as well!

Commenting on the lack of good intellectuals in civilization today, Ayn Rand has this to quip:

What we need most urgently is to recognize the enormous power and the crucial importance of the intellectual professions. A culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them; it cannot exist without a philosophy of life, without those who formulate it and express it. A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head. And that is precisely the position of America today.

The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.

She takes the crass route here, when she says –

These modern zombies are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded—that they are impotent to ignite the lights of civilization, which they have extinguished!

Taking us on a tour through history’s pages, she says that the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood.

So, well, who, pray, then, are this newy brand of intellectuals?

To Ayn, Any!

Yes! Any man or woman who is willing to think belongs to the new intellectual fabric. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes!

I would like to connect this pertinent Randian rave, to Thomas Sowell’s profound and relevant take on intellectuals and their role in society!

To Sowell, modern intellectuals have never been able to shape or influence the opinions of those in Power! Rather, they have made themselves ably reach the powerhouses, or the rulers, through a highly nuanced way - by shaping public opinion in ways that, in turn, quietly and subtly have their profound effect on the actions of power holders in societies across the world!

What an astounding, sensible and lovely proposition!

Makes us realize how much our conferences and seminars help in disseminating such knowledges and ideas, that have the profound effect of shaping minds and hearts alike, in society!

Sowell adds to say that, even though the powerhouses – rulers & government leaders react with such disgust and disdain and are brazen in their contempt for intellectuals, they meekly and cheekily bow and bend to the opinion of the intellectuals, at the end of the day!

Yesss! The power of the intellectual in society is so contagious! Her charm and her power has no end! Or to put it another way, none has even an iota of an incline to predict where its influence stops! Cos it ain’t ever! It keeps influencing and impacting, mending and moulding minds by the millions!

More from Ayn that impacted me lots –

Here we go –

Those who could become the New Intellectuals are America’s hidden assets; their number is probably greater than anyone can estimate; they exist in every profession, even among the present intellectuals. But they are scattered in silent helplessness throughout the country, or hidden in that underground which, in human history, has too often swallowed the best of men’s potential: subjectivity.

They are the men who have long since lost respect for the cultural standards to which they conform, but who hide their own convictions or repress their ideas or suppress their minds, each feeling that he has no chance against the others, each serving as both victim and destroyer.

The New Intellectuals will be those men who will come out into the open and have the courage to break that vicious circle. If they glance at the state of our culture, they will see that the entire miserable show is kept up by nothing but routine and pretense, which disguise bewilderment and fear: nobody dares to take the first new step, everybody waits for his neighbor’s initiative.

So the New Intellectual is one who brings clarity to the cluttered social fabric! Order out of chaos!

And this is exactly, Yuval Noah Harari advocates with aplomb in his mighty read, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century! [thanks to Prof. Premjith, we had such a wonderful time discussing Yuval on our little reading group weeks ago]!

Well, the very first lines to the book augment with such ardent appeal this particular stream of thought that’s advocated by Ayn!

Here goes Yuval’s emphatic opening lines for us all –

 “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”

There steps in the New Intellectual!

My task here is to kinda link and sync the New Intellectual of Ayn Rand with the proactive dynamic intellectuals and thinkers who make up the so-called, Intellectual Dark Web!!!

Well, the term Intellectual Dark Web was coined noted economist Eric Weinstein to represent those intellectuals who don’t necessarily fit into either side of the left-right divide!

These are intellectuals who have a strong inclination to honour the other’s freedom of speech, have a great willingness to engage in conversations with people who have different beliefs and political viewpoints, have proactive discussions, and produce proactive ideas, that are worth listening to, and they are those, who reject identity politics of any kind! They believe in the innate, essential goodness of an inclusive humanity, with such a humane perspective to life!

The New Intellectuals, are, thus, according to Paolo Bonari, liminal intellectuals!

A lovelyyy term, aint it?

Can we think of a new type of intellectual, who is a critic more than a philosopher, an intellectual who does not belong to any institutionalized discipline and who stays in-between different areas of social knowledge?

I would propose a liminal intellectual. The type of intellectual that I propose is someone who does not belong to any of our institutionalized disciplines and because of that he is free to be a “parrhesiast,” (foucauldian again), that is to say someone who tells something that could be recognized by anybody else, but still is hidden. Why? It is hidden because of two factors: masses need more knowledge or more courage. These are two main causing factors of the situation: ignorance or fear.

What is the role of a liminal intellectual? Why has he not to belong to any institutionalized knowledge, to any institutionalized power? A liminal intellectual, just by watching what is happening inside a field, could recognize which truths are debated and attacked, by which weapons and by whom. He would have to defend his enemies, when they will be attacked by his own friends: in a victimary age, it is the most courageous act he can decide to make. Just because he does not belong to institutionalized areas, he can see what happens inside them: he stays along the margins of division between disciplines. A liminal intellectual is a meta-critic, that is to say he has to criticize “simple” critics, those who create distant and useless images of power.

A liminal intellectual is an authentic revolutionary, a “revolutionary by profession.”

Yuval, to me, is one such liminal intellectual!

And so is Neil Postman! A great inspiration he’s been to me for years! I must admit that, I’m an ardent and enthusiastic practitioner to some of his wonderful precepts!

Although a host of books have come out, of late, vouching to the power of entertainment in our lives and how they’ve made us stupored to a rip van winklish sleep of epical sorts, Postman real oughta-gotta be the pioneer in their tracks, I bet!

In his inspirational read, that’s so starkly ‘Saint-Gobain’ian a mirror to the societies and signs of our times, titled, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) he reflects on how the television is quietly turning all public life (including education, religion, politics and journalism,) into an addictive entertainment of sorts! how the image is devaluing all other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our unquenching appetite for Television will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we'll be overwhelmed by an “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we're being amused!

More than the oppression wrought by state control, that Orwell puts forth in his 1984, Neil Postman points to the oppression effected so cleverly on the unsuspecting public by their addiction to amusement, which continues to be the order of the day!

To Neil, as with Noah, “people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights!

Again, Neil sees television’s entertainment value as a present-day ‘pleasure drug’ by means of which the citizens’ rights are exchanged for consumers’ entertainment.

Here goes, this liminal intellectual’s take, on page 28 of his lovable read:

We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word. To be sure, there are still readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools, the last institutions where print was thought to be invincible. They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens. Like the fish who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by older and clearer waters.

Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. 

You may get some sense of how we are separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. 

This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.  

It is also the difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much.

The farm boy following the plow with book in hand, the mother reading aloud to her family on a Sunday afternoon, the merchant reading announcements of the latest clipper arrivals —these were different kinds of readers from those of today. There would have been little casual reading, for there was not a great deal of time for that. 

Reading would have had a sacred element in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a daily or weekly ritual invested with special meaning. For we must also remember that this was a culture without electricity. It would not have been easy to read by either candlelight or, later, gaslight. 

Doubtless, much reading was done between dawn and the start of the day's business. What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose. The modern idea of testing a reader's “comprehension,” as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending? As far as we know, there did not exist such a thing as a “reading problem,” except, of course, for those who could not attend school.

To attend school meant to learn to read, for without that capacity one could not participate in the culture's conversations. But most people could read and did participate. To these people, reading was both their connection to and their model of the world. The printed page revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical and relevant criticism.

To Neil, It is only in the printed word, that complicated truths can be rationally conveyed. He gives us a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind.

Gerald Graff has a similar take in his book titled, Clueless in Academe!

Intellectuals, according to Graff, listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This Argument Literacy, is the realm of the academic intellectual! And hence, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has an equally effective take that authenticates the need for Argument Literacy in academia!

And well, arguments arise only when there’s an atmosphere for a dialectic democracy in the class!

Indianness, or the notion of India, according to Sen, is famous for its long and illustrious tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India's history.

To be continued…

Image Courtesy - 
Toonpooldotcom
researchperspectivesdotorg
intellectualvirtuesdotorg

No comments:

Post a Comment