WA:Your critiques of Salman Rushdie and Niall Ferguson have generated considerable notoriety. What do you see as the role of a public intellectual? PM:I think the very fact that we have to ask this question about intellectual responsibility shows how serious the problem has become in our time, and how much of a dodo the unaffiliated intellectual has become. Even writers and intellectuals with a great deal of integrity and courage have become too professionalized, too career-oriented, and too concerned not to upset their peers, not to mention those they regard as their more famous and successful superiors. Many people we think of as intellectuals are basically global professionals, very adept movers in the networks of Oxbridge, the Ivy League, the London School of Economics, think tanks, Davos, and Aspen. They regurgitate, with some embellishments, the wisdom they have picked up there. The result is a stultifying sameness in the intellectual public sphere: loud echo-chambers in which you have a whole class of writers and journalists saying the same things over and over again, people who may not seek proximity to power but who are careful not to provoke its wrath lest they be cast out of the charmed circles they feel they depend on. This professional docility and its codes of omerta are what allow people like Ferguson to flourish. And of course the state’s institutions are always looking for intellectual respectability from historians, sociologists, and journalists.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 18:52:07 +0000