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
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