I know it is not the best form to follow one post with a second on the same subject, especially when one makes pretentions of being a generalist. But an article by William Fisher on The Weapons of Mass Change caught my eye recently. He points out something that should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention lately, namely:

One of the uglier paradoxes of our time is that, as the world becomes vastly more complicated, the punditocracy becomes more simplistic.

Today, those who get paid to deliver their opinions and convictions in newspapers, on television, in the White House, and on the floor of Congress are more undeniably, more absolutely, more positively certain their point of view is not only the right one, but the only one.

He goes on to point to an increasing lack of intellectual humility among those in the news media to whom we traditionally go for information on the news and issues of the day. In place of that humility in the face of an uncertain, complex and multivariant world is a sense of certainty beyond arrogance. Too many Pundits have become avatars of hubris in their pious conviction that the rest of us are too stupid to cope with a complex world. Fisher further makes the point that the intellectual drivel served up by these monotone ideologues has had the effect of making much of the viewing public just as dull and incompetent to evaluate world trends and events as the pundits would have us believe.

The French philosopher and essayist Auguste Emile Chartier (1868-1951) once observed that “nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it is the only idea we have.” The ability to entertain two competing ideas simultaneously is the sine qua non of a functioning mind. Now that skill is not merely dismissed, it is actively berated as a sign of weakness or intellectual or moral degeneracy.

It is hard not to draw comparisons, as others have done, with the decay of the intellectual institutions of ancient Athens. The rise of Sophism was the increasing prevalance of people who argued a point not because it was true, but because they could gain material or political advantage from it. These “Sophists” (“wise guys” one might call them) took the role of the shapers of public knowledge from those who called themselves philosophers (“friends of wisdom”) and scholars in retrospect see this as a major component of the decline of ancient Greece as a center of intellectual brilliance. The parallels should be sufficiently obvious that I need not point them out.

But who were the “philosophers” that are now being replaced by the sophistic pundits of our day? There are the Edward R. Murrows and David Brinkleys, of course, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite and the rest, but we must also look outside the journalist’s trade at the “Public Intellectuals.” The word Public Intellectual may not have much resonance today, but some twenty years ago it was well understood. By the mid-90’s the Public Intellectual had vanished or retreated behind the ivy-covered walls of academia. Robert Boynton gives a wonderful glimpse of the Public Intellectual in his 1995 Atlantic Monthly article The New Intellectuals.

Boynton laments the passing of the Public Intellectual, but he also chides traditional academia for taking the intellectual out of the public realm and the public debate. I submit that it was this intellectual vacuum that the vacuous minds of the current punditocracy sought to fill. Traditional academia has rendered itself largely irrelevent to modern American life except perhaps for scientific research done under contract to the highest bidder. The punditocracy carries the dash and swagger, but none of the discipline shown by the earlier Public Intellectuals. One might argue that the vacuum they sought to fill remains. The rise of the blogosphere has been a welcome anodyne to this state of affairs. This new intellectual force is still unbeholden to larger moneyed powers, still mostly independent, and although there are many ideologues among them, it is possible for one reasonable and rational voice to shine through. The good ones are guerrilla scholars par excellence.

If you are an independent learner and thinker, you might do well to consider what your work might have to offer the larger public sphere. This is not to say that every independent scholar must enter the political debate, but we should do what we can to bring our work before the public if only to remind them that there are many ideas out there, and that ideology is no substitute for deliberate, rational consideration.