Wednesday, June 6, 2007
who are public intellectuals?
The other night, Jill and I were discussing the problem of public intellectuals in the US, and scrounging for names--she suggested Michael Ignatieff, I mentioned the old chestnut, Gore Vidal. Then today at the gym, it struck me: America's public intellectuals are Jeopardy contestants.
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Or perhaps Family Feud contestants, given their skills dealing with population data. They are the ones with their fingers on the pulse of America. Try asking Gore Vidal to predict what people will say when asked to name an item commonly found in the boss's bathroom.
Hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board.
I'm trying to compose a song somewhat like "I need a Hero" from Footloose. But what I need, in this song, is someone like Hannah Arendt. Unfortunately her name doesn't lend itself easily to rhyming, nor to the kind of rhythmic scansion common to pop songs.
More bent? Car went (as in, "I do love Hannah Arendt/but I wonder where the car went")? Or something.
Also, Anna, your Family Feud suggestion is not so far from the approach of Richard A. Posner in his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline, published by what the website I just looked at calls "the estimable Harvard University Press." A central method for his ranking of 500 pre-selected public intellectuals was to note the number of hits they produced on Google (which, in a 2002 article about the book in the NY Times, is identified as "a popular internet search engine"--ah, time). The results: the US's leading public intellectual is Henry Kissinger. Is that guy even American?
as much as i like the family feud suggestion, it has been stuck in my mind all day as not-quite-right. a public intellectual isn't supposed to know what everyone thinks (or at least knowing that would not be enough)... what is needed is some help with what 'we' ought to be thinking, or thinking about, or why we are thinking about some things rather than others, and why we might want to switch our focus. and if that is what's needed, top five answers might matter very little. but maybe what we have here are different definitions of what a public intellectual is (or ought to be).
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