The Necessity of Conversation. Part I.

As I sit here and think about my first entry for this blog, I realize that I'm always very self-conscious about my writing and about what other people will think about it - whether they'll agree or not, whether they'll really understand.  I thus often put off writing because I rationalize that it would take too much time to lay out what I have to say, and in the end it may never accurately communicate what I desired to say.  However when I actually do convince myself to write, I tend to be very verbose, trying to cover every angle and explaining myself in as detailed of a manner as possible.  After I've finished writing, I then get annoyed with myself that I took so long just to say something which I understand in my head in a second.  So why should I bother to write at all?  Why communicate ideas?

Well if no one shared their ideas, where would the world be now - how could progress ever have been made if all the philosophers and great thinkers of the past kept their thoughts to themselves?  I'm sure the world would be a much poorer place for that.  Without Pythagoras where would modern Mathematics be?  Even Plato was greatly influenced by Pythagoras, and without Plato's ideas where would Western Civilization be today?  And although, as we found out later, Aristotle wasn't entirely correct with his ideas about there only being Five Elements, many of his other ideas have informed and had some influence upon almost every area of science and philosophy (at least in the Western world) in existence today.  For a broader example, in the East, just think about how the teachings of Shakyamuni (AKA Buddha) influenced India, then China, Japan, and really all of East and Southeast Asia for that matter.

So surely there's no harm in putting forward one's ideas, whether they be right or wrong in the end, the fact is that people are influenced by other people.  Indeed it is vital in a healthy society to have continuous discussion and exchange of ideas.  Modern academia is all about this ongoing debate, one scholar building upon another's work or criticizing it and putting forward an idea that he claims to be more accurate.  Ideas are important.  And if ideas are important, so are the people who put those ideas forward.  Among these groups of idea-makers are artists, philosophers, politicians, scholars, musicians, etc, everyone producing a stream of ideas in their own particular area of expertise.  It is these types of people that shape society and decide which form it will take, for it is ideas that are the true currency of power.  Out of this group of idea-generators is a smaller group called 'public intellectuals' who, being experts in their own particular field, take it upon themselves to share their knowledge with those people who are not as knowledgeable about that field; they explain things in 'layman's terms,' breaking out of their academic enclaves and translating what would otherwise be confusing jargon so that society as a whole can learn and appreciate their ideas too.  Public Intellectuals fulfill special roles in influencing society, acting much like the prophets or sages of long ago, being able to interpret the world around us and provide insight and guidance in the way we should go.

So who are the public intellectuals of today?  In 2008 Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy Magazine conducted a poll of their readers to find out who they thought were the top 100 public intellectuals of the time.  Among the results are such familiar names as Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, Fareed Zakaria, Jürgen Habermas, and Jeffrey Sachs, as well as possibly less-known names like Wole Soyinka or J.M. Coetzee.  One of these public intellectuals that struck me in particular is Kwame Anthony Appiah, a London-born, Ghana-raised, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.  His specialties lie in political and moral theory, race and identity theory, philosophy of language, and cosmopolitanism.  I was primarily intrigued to find out what he had to say about cosmopolitanism and identity theory because those are issues very important to me as someone with a lot of multicultural experience (which I'll write about in a future post).  Appiah himself comes from a multicultural background, his father being a Ghanaian politician and his mother being a daughter of a British family of politicians, giving Appiah a very interesting mixture of experiences growing up.  These experiences, it seems, have influenced Appiah's academic endeavors, as his approach to philosophy is a very multicultural one that seeks to be as inclusive as possible of the many ethnic and racial groups in the world.  Indeed, although Appiah has strong African roots, he doesn't play the typical Afrocentrism card, though neither does he advocate a Eurocentric view in favor of his British side, but seeks to find a truly objective conglomeration of many different views.  When discussing his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Appiah says that "if people with vastly different religious, sexual, and political attachments are to live together without violence they must master the art of conversation."  I agree completely with this statement, and believe conversation and communication between diverse people groups to be absolutely essential in the increasingly cosmopolitan world we find ourselves in today.  Which brings us back to the importance of public intellectuals like Mr. Appiah who can act as spokesmen who can promote understanding between diverse people groups, politicians and constituents, Democrats and Republicans, Africans and Europeans, Muslims and Christians, Blacks and Whites, Easterners and Westerners, laymen and high-brow academics, and anywhere else where there is a brink in communication that often leads to misunderstanding, distrust, and even violence.  I intend to investigate further what Appiah has to say about cosmopolitanism.  You can find more information about him at his site.

Further exploring this idea of a public intellectual, Stephen Mack in one of his blog posts discusses a possible decline in public intellectualism due to a supposedly rising anti-intellectualism.  He seems to disagree with this idea, and I do as well, pointing to people such as Appiah as well as the other 99 public intellectuals (and many others of course) who still play an important role in society.

So what would contribute towards anti-intellectualism?  Perhaps some paranoid people think that intellectual elites are conspiring against everyone else and are passing out candy-covered poison apples to unsuspecting fools.  To be sure, one must be careful about high-strung academics who seem to be too self-conscious of the idea that they are the leading expert in their field - an idea that can at times lead them to believe that they can lead their field of study off in any direction they please, being sure that inferiors will accept what they say in acknowledgment of their ignorance; there is such a thing as intellectual arrogance and self-deception even amongst the intellectually brilliant.  Yet I think such a cynical mindset is a rather lonely burden to bear if you are to be distrustful of everyone who offers their opinion to you; in the end it's really up to you whether you take the advice of public intellectuals or not, but aren't we the richer for at least hearing people out?  I mean, surely we're not all so arrogant as to think we're experts in every area of life.  We all need specialists who know more than us in order to help inform our decisions.  Of course there's something thrilling about the idea of rebelling against those snobby intellectuals who shove their propaganda down our throats - you gotta stick it to the Man and resist that brainwashing, right!?  Except that for those of us who believe that a good education does have at least a tiny bit of inherent benefit in it, and have accordingly obtained such an education, more and more we realize that things are not quite as simple as those adolescent punk rockers would have us believe; many of those silly things our senile parents told us growing up actually ended up being fairly accurate in the end, didn't they?  Now of course this is a caricaturization, but really, I think so called 'anti-intellectualists' are either simply unable to grasp the arguments put forward by public intellectuals or they simply disagree and find it easier to call names and cast blame than to really try to understand another's viewpoint.  These 'anti-intellectualists' by refuting intellectualism are in fact creating their own brand of intellectualism anyway, right?

So while I don't think there is any so-called declining interest in public intellectuals, I do think the boundaries of the game have been shifted somewhat in recent times as new media forms and technological advancement have provided new opportunities for people to voice their ideas.  This very blog is a clear example of one humble college student who is able to get his ideas self-published and thrown out into the world to see what may come of them - all made possible by new media technology.  With blogging and the Internet today, any ordinary fool can become a public intellectual to a certain extent.  What matters though is whether they get any attention paid to their ideas.  This is one possible reason why some people may stop paying attention to intellectuals altogether - because there are too many out there and to find those worth paying attention to has become too cumbersome.  Perhaps people have become numb to the excess invasion of information into our lives what with advertisements, movies, music and television all telling us what we should think, buy, do, even be, and we end up tuning out.  In addition, the common individual is generally better educated than in the past, so people don't need to rely upon intellectuals nearly as much as they used to, being quite capable of making well-informed decisions for themselves.  Yet none of these reasons diminishes the importance of having public intellectuals in society.  There will always be some area of expertise, some complicated matter where people will need an expert's opinion to help them out; we're not yet so individually advanced that we have no need of some kind of guidance (or did we forget how often we check the weather forecast or get a check-up with our doctor?).  To be sure, we need public intellectuals around for more than simply technical skills.  During political elections, we need experts from all world views debating and asking the big questions for everyone, speaking for the masses so-to-speak, in a public forum in order that everyone might know more about each candidate and the implications of policy proposals.  In this way the attaching adjective of 'public' to 'intellectual' is very important, for if these discussions are had in the open, then there is communication to vast amounts of people, albeit many times only one-way (from experts to the population at large), but it goes much further in spreading information than only having, say a political debate between two political science majors who bring up very good arguments but no one outside of those two get to hear it.  Public discourse is key to societal growth and solidarity.

Again, with technology today, there is much better access to the vast library of the writings of public intellectuals, present and past, and people can access them at will, studying them and informing themselves.  While some of the ideas of the old philosophers have grown old and are not applicable today, there are many that are still very useful.  But for the changes that confront our modern age, we continually need new input, new ideas to help us make sense of what is unique to this age, what we in the 21st century confront that no one else in history had to deal with.  Here there is a need for public intellectuals to put forward new theories, new policy options.  Then for those of us who don't have the time in our busy lives to sit back and contemplate fully the implications of a new law being passed, we need the advice of those who do have the time to investigate more thoroughly.  For example, I know very little about the health care system in the US (that's just not my area of study), and with all this debate about health care reform, I see the following possible options for me to take: 

1.  Form an opinion with the little information I have and follow that, though it's likely to be biased and uninformed - probably not a good idea.

2.  Brush the situation to the side and let other people deal with it - but then again if I get screwed by this reform in the future, I have no one to blame but myself.

3.  Find out what more-knowledgeable people are saying about it and discerning from several points of view which one seems to be the most accurate, then go with that.

Of these three (there may be other choices too!) I think the third is the wisest course of action.  Though to a certain extent trust has to be involved, which takes us back to a reason why some may shun relying on public intellectuals - they just don't trust anyone but themselves.

Even if I'm pretty sure that I have the qualifications and knowledge necessary to make a wise decision about something,sometimes it just helps to get an intellectual pat on the back, a confidence-booster, to let you know that you're not alone in your viewpoint.  And some people are simply a little more eloquent and can breakdown and explain a point of view which we already held, though we did not have the words to defend it.  In this situation, listening to public intellectuals may not shed new light on a situation, but it can certainly arm us with the tools to effectively analyze and debate about that situation.

I have tried to cover many different scenarios of people's situations and views of public intellectuals, though of course I'm sure there are many more.  But I think we can all agree that everyone has a certain responsibility to do what they can to inform themselves about important debates and problems that face our society today, contributing towards finding the best possible solutions, and even if we disagree, at least understanding the other side's view point more accurately.  To do this, we must communicate!