The
public intellectual is not a formal career. Universities do not offer
curricula for it nor can it be found on any job listing. It is a
function taken on by thinkers voluntarily out of a concern for
society and a deep passion to understand. The breadth of Vidal's
interests is astounding, running from issues like the America First
movement to the Byzantine emperor Julian who attempted to restore the
Roman gods that had been replaced by Christianity.
Other
public intellectuals such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert
Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have been key figures in helping people
understand their cultures, both the good and the bad. This species
of humanity is as ancient as Socrates walking the Agora debating the
nature of goodness. That the public intellectual as a recognized
undertaking is still suspect is evidenced by Wikipedia's expressed
reservations on the legitimacy of the “topic” even though it is
merely reporting the 100 most significant contemporary public
intellectuals as determined by polls conducted by two reputable
magazines, the Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy
(US).
A
significant number of these people have been novelists, which
indicates the role the novel can play in understanding and evaluating
a culture. My own sense is that the complexity and immediacy of human
life hides the more general characteristics, trends and forces of a
culture and it is these that the public intellectual brings to the
surface in a way consonant with the lives of those who read them.
Public intellectuals are not social scientists concerned with
demographic percentiles or specific tendencies quantified for use by
others in decision making. Nor are they journalists, as important as
these can be, who report immediate conditions and events.
This
country began with a plethora of public intellectuals such as Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and it
shows in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution. With this range of intelligence
and concern it has seemed a tragedy to me that this country has so
firmly rejected the role of the intellectual in influencing the
decisions it makes and the courses it takes. Evidence that
intellectualism has become a political liability was blatantly
displayed when Adlai Stevenson ran for President and was attacked for
being an “egghead.” Richard Hofstadter in his book
Anti-Intellectualism in America details the depth of this
sentiment in the American psyche. My own judgment is that
intellectualism got lost in the immediacy of survival needs as the
population in increasing numbers continuously dealt with the demands
of the western frontier. The longer view or the search for underlying
influences seemed to have little value in this environment, indeed
intellectualism came to be seen as a kind of pretension. A very
interesting and challenging question to ask oneself is “What would
Jefferson or Madison say or do once they saw that their cherished
individualism had spawned a corporation-dominated society deaf to the
needs of all except the wealthy?” Would they, for example, be found
on Wall Street with the rest of their rich brethren? Would they
feather their economic bed like Bill Clinton has done or would they
make the transition to the concerns of ordinary people in a mass
society? Would they be Libertarians with their freedom uber alles
view and the law of the jungle it entails or would they see freedom
as dependent upon human well-being as did Franklin Roosevelt?
As
Peter Scheer wrote in TruthDig's Vidal obituary “A
student of history, he struggled to tolerate America’s strange
regression in the new millennium.” Vidal
was caught between America's promise and America's rejection of that
promise.
Bob
Newhard
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