The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual
longreads.com
longreads.com
>That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community.
I do not like this article. It does not organize its criticisms well, and it is really hard to understand exactly why the author dislikes the individual intellectuals she calls out, and likes the others. For example, Peterson actively engages his audience, but doesn't get credit for it. The best guess I have for the author's position is trying to portray her left-of-center political as authoritative by appealing to higher abstractions; I honestly don't know. It is strange.
Reality is complex. Terrifyingly so. The academics I have the most respect for walk a tightrope in a state of barely contained vertigo. It is very difficult to make a strong point, almost impossible to make it both correct and understandable, and (IMO) definitely impossible to make the tightrope accessible for others to walk. To make the point, all nuance needs to be stripped; ambiguity calcified into surety; counterpoints strawmanned for easier demolition.
Ideally the person doing that simplification does so knowingly for the purpose of education. But that is entirely opaque to public view.
So it is no surprise that those who gain most recognition are those most willing to misrepresent the nuance of their field. Or to caricature the opponents of the viewpoint they wish to espouse. How do even informed members of the public tell? A PhD from Harvard as a shibboleth, sounds about right.
I'm not saying the public is dumb. Just that none of us have the expertise or the dedication or the time. We rely on tribal signalling. So we are primed for intellectual hucksterism.
This isn't really true, though. Rather, I think there are tradeoffs. You can be really, really sure about a quite complex and nuanced statement, or make helpful simplifications but then have to admit to some uncertainty, if only because your statement might be misinterpreted. More than anything, you can provide clear, unambiguous, broadly available references to enable anyone who's actually relying on your claims to fact-check them.
Seeming more confident than you actually are is a common rhetorical trick, but one that we should be training the general public not to fall for so easily. Because a bad actor can seem so much more confident, no matter how fringe their claims might be - it's a loser move! One can take pride in sticking to the minimally-necessary amounts of ambiguity and/or nuance, whatever those might be in any given context.
One might say I stripped all nuance (etc) to make my point.
I agree with your second paragraph. On your first: I have a long-standing beef with references, though. The selection of references, I think, is much more significant than the contents themselves. And it takes a lot of expertise to intuit the degree of selection bias. It takes ground knowledge of the things not selected. I think a part of this Dunning Kruger trap is the illusion one can fact check and verify an argument. So the very presence of references becomes the shibboleth.
Similarly, group identity without reason leads to particularly dumb beliefs. E.g. how some of the wealthiest people in the nation can walk into a rural community of farmers and blue collar workers and announce “I’m one of you!” to rousing applause.
"Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
This sounds like the idea some manager have of "don't bring me a problem unless you have a solution", which is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way of managing.
I’ve rarely encountered a problem where there wasn’t enough time to consider alternative solutions before taking it to my manager. Also depending on how long a manager has been managing, there’s a non trivial chance the worker have more intimate knowledge of the implementation space than the manager, especially if they’re a developer or worker who has ownership over the task.
Granted it is a personal thing for me. I was told this in ROTC over a decade ago and I’ve never had a manager actually demand this of me. I’ve always imposed it on myself.
Honestly, public intellectual has always been an odd calling. Who would you define it? One who writes serious, scholarly books, yet also articles in the popular or semi-popular press? The difficulty might then be in judging whose serious books are serious.
> Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia
No, it's not.
> It starts as though it has a general point to make about the idea of the public intellectual,
Which it does.
> when in fact the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political opinions to the author.
But it's not, if by that you mean the particular “reactionary” figured mentioned in that paragraph, the criticism of whom in that paragraph is of he same tenor as that of public intellectuals of different political stripes in the paragraphs preceding and following that one (the next begins, “But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off...” Your thesis seems to be based entirely on taking that paragraph out of context and pretending it is the secret central point of the article, when it is clearly not, and comes off as the kind of knee jerk defense of those figures (particularly Peterson) common from certain corners of HN.
The actual central criticism of the article is made explicitly later, standardly enough in the two paragraph conclusion which also includes a resolution as well as a criticism; the main criticism being not focussed on any one political leaning, “The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality.”
The article doesn't have to be perfectly balanced in criticism of different political groups of course, but if you can read it start to finish and think it doesn't have an obvious bias then I think you're deluding yourself. I picked an extract that seemed to me the post obviously politically focused, but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.
That part is easy if you think the article is as you suggested: "the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political opinions to the author."
Besides, you left out the part of the excerpt you chose which alluded more to the actual central criticism the previous comment was pointing out:
"...tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided."
The belief in "progress" does not disqualify one from being a reactionary (and I don't mean to make any specific comment on Peterson or Pinker since I've only read critiques of certain aspects of their thought, so I don't feel qualified to judge them as wholes).
At least on a wide range of social issues, I can't think of a better example of the advocacy of a return to the (romanticized) past that defines a reactionary as Peterson.
But whether Peterson is or is not a reactionary is really beside the point.
> but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.
Well, if you wanted to find negative mentions of public intellectuals of any stripe, you'd find plenty, but no, you couldn't find many positive mentions irrespective of politics because there are very few. (The only clearly positive mention of a current figure outside of the conclusion is of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and only positive in regard to dropping his Atlantic column; I suppose the description of Zola’s seminal piece as sort of the archetype from which public intellectualism has devolved is positive, but outside of the far and alt-right, public anti-anti-Semitism isn't exactly a position dividing the right from the left these days.)
It's true that the three figures used as examples of the new model at the end are left-leaning figures, but they aren't praised (insomuch as the emergent model is praised) for their viewpoints, which differ little from the left-wing figures that are criticized, but for their manner of engagement.
As much as you are desperately grasping at straws to make this about left-vs-right, that's very much not what this piece is about.
The author insinuates the topic to be about sex and race while the general public actually seems to be better situated here compared to academia. I think it is very easy to make an argument based on proximity as to why this may be the case.
Many of the most important intellectuals often had no big role in academic circles. Quite the contrary. Due to prevalent morals of the times.
This is a little bit harsh on Peterson because a lot of Marxists themselves haven't read Marx. You could say that the intellectual history of marxism (at least in the second half of the 20th century) is comprised of a large majority of "marxists" who haven't read his works and a small minority who have done so and who at least have a general idea of what marxism really is about (if it matters I do believe that Žižek has indeed read Marx and he knows what he's talking about).
And on the back of clueless intellectuals like Marcuse you have today's pseudo-intellectuals (including people like Peterson) who ignore the big marxist elephant in the room: the fact that poor people are being exploited by the rich to this very day, instead they are focusing their intellectual "fights" on irrelevant things (like being a feminist or an anti-feminist).
To point back to the article, we have no Zola of our times.
I also really do believe that today's public intellectuals are ignoring the blight of the majority of the people inhabiting this planet, being they men or women (like I said, we have no Zola of our time). I'd be happy to be proven wrong in which with case I'm eager for book recommendations.
Honestly, I'm pretty taken down by comments such as yours, with general statements that point at nothing in particular (again, what does "X" mean?) in response to a comment like mine that directly mentions two or three things included in TFA (Peterson, Zola, Marx and public intellectuals generally speaking). I expect better from the HN public.
Literally any topic that one might try to have an intellectual debate about.
In this case, you're choosing "Marxism", but my point is far more general than that. If you're going to stand up and publicly make arguments about feminism, dark energy, protecting endangered species, the rise of China, post-impressionism... the very least you can do is enough background reading to not make a fool of yourself.
Contrary to your assertion that "accusing a non-marxist that he is clueless about marxism is not that big of a thing", I am saying that being clueless about the very thing you've arrogantly stood up to talk about in public is a big deal and should be humiliating.
I don't think you and I actually disagree that Peterson is an embarrassment.
Not that Nazism and Communism are equivalent. The later at least has some non-evil implementations - there is a wide difference between unironic Stalinists who see murdering anyone slightly better off as a solution and those who think "Hey we can try to provide a good standard of living with worker owned cooperatives". Even if the latter is doomed to failure it is in no way equivalent to Nazis or even Stalinist "cousins".
Source: lived in the USSR
Dunno, with all the awful things that your rulers have done, I think that if the impotent Tsarist Russia has survived into the WWII, I'd be speaking German at the very best.
As for Auschwitz, nice strawman. Stalin and Lenin have blood of millions on their hands, no need to bring up something unrelated.
[1] I know people IRL who claim Poland should have teamed up with Hitler against USSR and then double-crossed him, but I have doubts it would work.
EDIT: I re-read the above conversation, and I'm still not sure how did I end up defending USSR in the name of a discussion boiling down to "do you prefer plague or leprosy?" I don't think we really disagree all that much, so I'm out, thanks for conversation.
To have a bare minimum of an idea of what was Marx talking about, I'd recommend reading at least "Wage Labour and Capital". Judging from how many strawmans of Marx's take on Labour Theory of Value are out there, I'm fairly sure it can't be guessed from context.
If what "Marxism really is about" has not changed, it's stale and outdated ideology.
If all outsiders understand Marx wrong, I very doubt that it's worth of reading his original works. He clearly can't write clearly if you need dedication to Marxism to really understand.