Asymmetrical Information

Thank you for bringing this person to my attention.

Please, feel under no obligation whatsoever to do so again.

Life is too short - I'm willing to go with my impression that the linked article tells me everything I will EVER wish to know about him.

That's a revealing statement: "critics of power". A properly skeptical person should of course always question authority. But that means evaluating things independently and not taking the word of authority blindly. It does not mean always opposing or even always criticizing authority, as there is no reason why an authority cannot be right. And if you end up blindly opposing authority then you invalidate yourself because you end up in the wrong or in the right purely arbitrarily. Which entirely defeats the purpose of questioning authority.

And also..if a "public intellectual" took it as his mission to be a "critic of power," he could find plenty of liberal and left-wing entrenchments of socially-irresponsible power, starting with the education establishment.

In the corporate world, people rarely get fired for saying "no" to projects which involve risk, especially accountants and lawyers.

There is an old saw that nobody was ever fired for selecting IBM computers, or ATT long distance service, or...(fill in the blanks).

There is no penalty for being an average teacher. There is typically no reward for being an extroadinary teacher, other than personal satisfaction and the respect and admiration of your students. The penalty for being a terrible teacher takes so long to be assessed as to be meaningless.

Only tenured professors dare be openly conservative, no less "right wingers". I worship the quicksand untenured, openly conservative professors walk on, but it's still quicksand and our universities are the last bastion of "that giant sucking sound". "Brown swirlies" are not just for fraternity initiations anymore!

Since those in power right now are right-wingers, and they've been doing things like ordering the torture of prisoners, I'd say no self-respecting human being should want to be on their side.

During the Vietnam war, some assholes at Stanford Linear Accelerator continuously bragged that they did no DOD work. They did not, however, disdain to cash their paychecks from the country they were too good to participate in defending.
They never got any smarter, either. Both Panofsky and Drell have continued to oppose any defense of the United States.

By definition, one thinks of public intellectuals as critics of power.

The implementation of this idea runs into a logical problem. Presumably, the author wishes the ideas of public intellectuals to have some sort of effect on society, and would be happiest if the circle of public intellectuals had a large effect on society. If such a group of people has an effect on society, especially if it has a large effect on society, then that group of people has power. Now what happens to the public intellectual who wishes to become a critic of that power. This person would likely end up defending the ideas and institutions that the other public intellectuals are defending, meaning that this person would need to be ostrazied from the circle of public intellectuals.

Why does this logical problem not bother the author of the quote. I think that the psychological way out of this problem is to think that power does not corrupt public intellectuals in the way that power corrupts "ordinary" people. I have spoken to many people who fancy themselves to be "intellectuals" and many of them consider themselves to be more incorruptable, more pure of motive, than the general population. Thus, as well as the "cover your ass" aspect of the quote that Mindles points out, there may also be a self-congradulatory aspect to it as well.

What I find truly spectacular about this individual is how he manages to pass through his entire career without - it would seem - changing his mind in any respect, about anything, whatsoever. Even his getting involved in one of those interfaces between central american governments and tribal communities that we are now told to regard as essentially genocidal doesn't shift his ground or cause him any pause for thought. Yet, by his own classification, during one of the darker incidents in Nicaraguan history, he was the one in power. Where's the criticism? And the assumption that the left-wing view will always be the correct one, always 'radical', never open itself to the criticism he would pour onto people in power. Then there's that openly racist anti-crack poster he proposes. Has he no self-awareness of what that might have led to? He seems comfortable in suggesting that a racist fairytale about the crack epidemic be legitimised by public advertising: how would he regard a poster that tells whites how blacks want them to drink that hooch? For all his 'interest' in 'race', it's clear from his own words that he isn't interested in racial equality, but sees opportunities in preexisting racism to push his own political agenda.

> One more small knife in the back of open-mindedness in academia.

No. Its one honking BIG knife.

The fact that someone whould think such an obviously assinine thing is unremarkable. All manner of extreme opinions are held by all manner of extreme people, and I have no doubt that there are more one-race kooks, or consipracy-theory nuts, or other fruitcakes in positions of influence than would make us comfortable.

No, the really scary part is the sheer ordinariness of it all, the fact that this... person should blithly assume that such unthinking prejudice would be accepted as axiomatic.

Its as if we were back in the 1800's, listening to some professor explain how his research proves that blacks aren't fit to be anything but slaves.

Some attidutes cannot be corrected except through outliving them. Which is a nice way of saying that things won't improve until old age kills this bastard and lets some fresh air inside.

Makes me wonder what the human race will do if we discover immortality. Just how long can one live without learning anything, anyway?

Look, before you all build your sand castles too high, take a deep breath and read the whole thing. You'll immediately note one thing, which is that Bourgeois himself acknowledges that his relationship to mainstream academic anthropology is rather tentative and that he is in many ways atypical. Certainly there are many anthropologists I know who regard his work and his presentation of his work as problematic.

This is not to say that the sentiment itself is problematic (that the work of the public intellectual is to be critical of power), if for no other reason than it demonstrates very little evidence of thoughtfulness about the idea of "the public" and about what makes it possible for the public intellectual to actually articulate a critique--any thoughtfulness has to undercut the distinction that Bourgeois makes between "power" and "the intellectual".

This is also not to say that this remarkably self-satisfied and relatively superficial formulation is unique to him. You'll hear variations of it from a decent number of academics. But I would caution you all to slow down a little bit before you make this particular scholar into a typical, representative figure, given that even he himself is at pains to acknowledge the ways in which he is not.

That's a bit unclear, my second paragraph: I'm acknowledging that Dreck is right to criticize the basic sentiment in his initial entry--it's a very weak slogan applied with a lack of reflectiveness and open-mindedness.

Thanks Tim, I think you make a good point. It's 'Bourgois', by the way. Adding the 'e' would render the irony too thick.

That whole thing reminded me of the philosophers union in "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Hmm. "By definition, one thinks of public intellectuals as critics of power."

It reminds me of something Isaac Asimov (noted liberal) once wrote about the "Aquarius generation": "They could easily be maneuvered into crewcuts if President Nixon made the ultimate sacrifice and grew his hair long".

Is "public intellectual" some kind of official position? How would I go about getting the title? I consider myself an intellectual. Do I need a license or something to intellectualize in public?

That whole paragraph was just meaningless babble. All the words made sense, but put together in that order they meant nothing.

Of course classifying people into "right winger" and "left winger" and then assuming they are all typical of their "side" is asinine, too.

Bolie IV

Isn't a "public intellectual" some sort of authority?
So isn't he saying that a "public intellectual" should oppose himself?

Is anyone surprised by the equivalence of the CIA and the military as "right-wingers"? I was under the impression that the politics of the average CIA person was much more moderate than the CW believes -- that may not be the case for the military.

Bolie,

"Is 'public intellectual' some kind of official position?"

Sort of like how "town drunk" or "village idiot" are official positions. I bet the pay is about the same.

Jim English
Chicago

"Is 'public intellectual' some kind of official position?"

Sort of like how "town drunk" or "village idiot" are official positions. I bet the pay is about the same.

Although the status is rather lower.

Since the power on most university campuses is the left, I suppose it follows that the duty of public intellectuals who are members of university faculties is to be right wing.

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