“I don’t think there’s any shortage of opportunity, there’s shortages of will. In fact if you look at the history of intellectuals, it’s not a pretty one. Overwhelmingly, intellectuals have labored in the service of power. The term “intellectual” entered modern western usage with the Dreyfusards. And nowadays we respect and honor the Dreyfusards, the defenders of Dreyfus, critics of the French state. It certainly wasnt true at the time. They were bitterly condemned. The leading, most prominent intellectuals denounced them, berated them for daring to criticize state power, the Holy Army…and what right did these writers, painters, and so on have to talk about things they ‘knew nothing about’? The respected intellectuals, the immortals…were bitterly hostile to the Dreyfusards. But that’s typically the pattern…and it goes back in history as far as you like. Back to the earliest recorded history, there were people who were approximately what we would call intellectuals today. In Classical Greece, one of them [Socrates] was forced to drink the hemlock because he was…asking embarrassing questions and challenging doctrine and dogma. Around the same time in the Biblical record there were people who, basically, were intellectuals, they’re called “Prophets”, but that’s just a bad translation of a pretty obscure Hebrew word. They were people who criticized the crimes of the king, called for mercy and compassion for the poor and deprived. They presented geopolitical analysis and warned of the threats that the evil kings were bringing to the people. So that’s intellectuals.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 02:50:43 +0000
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