We are living in intensely paradoxical times. While the 21st century is experiencing an explosion of scientific advances, there is a sense that intellectuals are no longer playing a major role as protagonists of change. The world seems to be moving towards the atomisation of life of the mind. Technology grows and thinking shrinks!
The Bill Gates of the world marvel at the 21st century’s major advances in the fields like gene editing, machine learning, driverless cars, robotic surgery, and artificial intelligence among others. Mr Gates predicts that some of the breakthrough technologies will include custom cancer treatments tailored to a person’s genome, sanitation without sewers and carbon dioxide catchers.
Science has advanced but has philosophy retreated to the ivory tower? Economists and historians are taking an ever more visible role in public life but why not philosophers?
One of the profound questions that philosophy raises is the question of how one ought to live. Have philosophers and thinkers abandoned their traditional role as critics of our beliefs and practices? If yes, why?
Is it because of the rise of ‘corporatocracy’ or the exhaustion of the modern mind? Is it because of the sclerosis of institutions? Is it the internet which is leading to a certain kind of illiteracy? Is it too much to expect philosophy to continue answering Emmanuel Kant’s questions: what can I know? What should I know?
Even French philosophy which made a lasting impact on rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism seems to be in the doldrums. Today rational discourse is in terribly short supply.
Thinkers and public intellectuals are quietly disappearing as influential factors on the public scene. In ancient times, intellectuals and philosophers added character to society. When intellectuals shine a light on a public sphere, only then does a society flourish. Plato served as an advisor to the ruler of Syracuse. He travelled to the strife-torn court of Syracuse three times risking his life to create a philosopher king. John Stuart Mill served a term in parliament. Bertrand Russell got involved in nearly every public policy debate of his time.
Philosopher David Blitz considers Russell like “few others before him and even fewer after him” bringing his intellectual acumen to bear on public issues. Public intellectuals often fight a war on the plane of ideas. But the industrial society, considered by some as a “suicide machine,” has squeezed the space for philosophy. Didn’t Arnold Toynbee warn us that civilisations are not murdered, they commit suicide? How do we explain the greatest minds walking the earth over two millennia ago – Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and Hebrew prophets?
It was around 500-300 BCE that saw the advent of the greatest religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions in Eurasian societies. German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers explains that these societies independently embraced moral universalism, prompted by the teachings of Plato, the Hebrew prophets, Zarathustra, Buddha and Confucius. Does one assume that there are extraordinary times in history when the world throws up a torrent of genius?
But why was it possible then and not before? There are others who argue that these societies were not necessarily “islands of light”. Plato’s writings aren’t really conceivable without Zoroastrianism and Egyptian moral ideals. Jonny Thompson who teaches philosophy at Oxford, explains that “when cultures, ideologies and peoples come together, great steps forward happen.”
The advent of great cities allowed great thinkers and intellectuals to debate and collaborate. Great cities nurtured great thinkers and philosophers. Cities thus spurred intellectual ferment. American diplomat and academic Nick Burns pose a rather provocative question: “Who among today’s literary figures has any chance of being recognised as a thinker on par with Dostoevsky or Marx?” We still do have great minds amid us. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s list of most influential intellectuals today includes Ibram X Kendi, Robin Di Angelo, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Peter Thiel, and Yuval Noah Harari among others.
Given the breadth of human genius, any intellectual hit parade would be an act of folly. One can at best talk of how scores of top minds are still shaping the future. Britain’s influential Prospect Magazine published a list of 50 thinkers in 2021.
It shortlisted the world’s top 10 thinkers: Palestinian biologist Jacob Hana, physicist Carlo Rovelli, political theorist Mahmood Mamdani, historian of philosophy Peter Adamson, vaccine developers Ozlem Turecci and Ugur Sahin, English professor Priyambada Gopal, theologian Mustafa Akyol, public health expert Devi Sreedhar, environmentalist Frans Schepers and essayist Rebecca Solnit. Prospect magazines 2005 top five were Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel and Christopher Hitchens. Have intellectuals become what J S Mill called “the powerless people”? In the age of junk science and moral relativism, while some intellectuals have been reduced to instruments of manipulation, others have retreated, working alone, often engaged in esoteric theorising.
With our stress on techno-solutionism, many intellectuals have been forced to live in hermetic bubbles. Intellectuals also align today with corporate and institutional thinking. And uncompromising intellectuals like Noam Chomsky have become marginal as they are excluded from the mainstream media. Is smart technology dumbing down the human race? Nicolas Carr in his book ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ says that the daily use of the internet is “rewriting our brains for skimming rather than the sustained concentration required by books.”
Susan Jacoby in ‘Age of American Unreason’ argues that technology has damaged our ability to think. She further maintains that the rise of religious fundamentalism, the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry and the triumph of video over print culture account for anti-intellectualism in the US. T
his story is no different in India. Globally, the disconnect between the people and the intellectuals is widening. Intellectuals in India are often ridiculed by the ruling class. Today parties prefer cheerleaders, rather than intellectuals. Those who have fallen from the great height of moral values are making the biggest splash.
Media, the gatekeepers, have long given up gatekeeping. Instead of public intellectuals, we now have pundits on TV channels. They denounce, mock, vituperate and lash out at their opponents in the strongest possible language. Their reasoning generates more heat than light. Social media is a poison tree. We need intellectuals and philosophers as they are the world’s eyes. As Einstein said, “intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”