We were discussing progressivism of the early 20th century in my American Political Thought class recently, and Assistant Professor of Political Science Nick Buccola described the prominence of public intellectuals at the time. A somewhat vague description, Buccola asked the class if we could think of any current public intellectuals. The class remained silent, but eventually I came up with Howard Zinn, who, although he sadly passed away recently, certainly fit the bill.
Upon further reflection, I came up with a few more in my head: Noam Chomsky, Reza Aslan and Leonard Peikoff. They all seem to be public intellectuals to me, but they are hardly household names.
Buccola discussed the apparent disappearance of American public intellectuals in class, but I am unconvinced that they are truly nonexistent. Rather, it seems they are just not as public as they used to be.
This leads me to wonder: Are Americans missing out on important thoughts by diminishing the prominence of public intellectuals? Or have we simply redefined the term?
Are Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart the public intellectuals of today? I shudder at the thought, but the more I think about it, the truer it seems to be. They are certainly some of the most public American figures, and they undoubtedly shape the opinions of many Americans.
But these men are not thinking and formulating opinions for the heck of it; they are paid to do so. It’s not hard to see that Fox News and MSNBC exhibit biases to make money.
Has America privatized public intellectualism? What have we lost by transferring the authority that public intellectuals had almost a century ago to cable news networks and other private organizations just looking to make money?
What we lose are the real public intellectuals, such as the ones I mentioned at the start. Those men are all incredible thinkers, and there are many similar people in the country. But they are too often pushed to the side and ignored. They are assumed to be radicals who we refuse to take seriously.
Instead, we like opinions and viewpoints to be televised, edited and watered down. We like our intellectuals loud, staunch and obnoxious.
Why have we pushed these important voices away? Not all the blame can be placed on TV. I have trouble believing people simply do not want to be informed. We like information, but perhaps we like it presented a certain way. Maybe we just don’t like intellectual “elites,” who think they’re so much smarter than us. We all like to think that each of us is the smartest person in the world. We prefer to hear opinions from people we think we can relate to, and TV has a way with presenting people in just such a way.
We need to accept that there are people in the world who are more intelligent than us and that their opinions may be more thought out than our own. Perhaps we could learn something from them.
I’m a big fan of educated citizens, but education should not end after finishing school. We can learn a great deal from the public intellectuals we have shunned. Why not take advantage of that opportunity?
Braden Smith
Opinion editor Braden Smith can be reached at [email protected]