On the responsibility of the intellectuals
The Vienna Humanities Festival is a remarkable showcase of relevant currents in contemporary thought, ranging from philosophy to geopolitics, with frequent forays in more journalistically exciting topics—the Wall Street Journal correspondent Bojan Pancevski gave a gripping talk on the North Stream conspiracy. The closing talk this year was assigned to Eva Illouz, an accomplished academic whose credentials would take too much space to be listed. She is chiefly known for her contributions to the sociology of romantic love, consumerism and the impact of capitalism on the emotional life. For her Gran Finale, however, she chose to speak about the Responsibility of the Intellectual, a topic that she changed from the originally announced focus on Trump and King Lear. As a motivation for her change of mind, she announced on stage that, upon reflection, she is tired of Donald Trump. A vague sense of suspicion flurried up in me, but without second chances life would be too predictable.
The Responsibility of the Intellectuals is a phrase that I immediately associated with an essay by Noam Chomsky from 1967 (recently republished in Italy along more recent writings), but nothing from the first half of Illouz's lecture gave any hint about it. She started by quoting Andrew Carnegie "The man who dies rich dies disgraced", in a non-obvious metaphor of the elite's responsibilities towards the larger, and less fortunate, swathes of society. Taking for granted the equation between rich magnate and intellectual (something that presumably applies to her own predicament), she proceeded to affirm that if you are fortunate enough to have more than others (whether financial or intellectual capital), your responsibility is to give during your lifetime so that you can die poor (or incapacitated, if the analogy holds), whilst having enriched others.
She made a very convincing argument about the twentieth century's role of the intellectual having effectively been born with the affaire Dreyfuss, when Emile Zola converted his epistemological currency into a commitment in the field of justice through the evidence he and many other with him could provide not only to the courts, but most importantly to the public opinion. At this point I had a very good feeling that she might remark how the intellectuals should be always alert not to become a simple instrument in the hands of the power that be to disseminate the hegemony of power across society at large—something Gramsci had already formalised more than one-hundred years ago. This constitutes in itself a definition of responsibility.
However Illouz went on to eventually introduce Chomsky's essay in an attempt, which I must admit did elicit some sympathy in me, to undermine the guru of twentieth century's thought for his "arrogance" and sophistry in disguising authoritarian thought behind a facade of liberalism. From this moment on, the responsibility of the intellectuals was all but forgotten as a topic of the lecture, which became more like a plea to urge self-declared intellectuals to reflect upon their above-the-average intelligence. There are of course different definitions of responsibility one may embrace, but the one she purported struck me as debatable.
The relevance of her tirade was recovered by Ivan Krastev joining her on-stage with a number of questions aimed at recovering the lost track. As it is the case with most people of substance, Ivan made his own thought transpire from his questions. For example he suggested that the intellectual is a figure that was associated with a period of history where thought was mostly communicated through printed texts, and that we have now entered a phase of history in which the influencer has replaced the intellectual as a figure of relevant weight on the public opinion. In this transition of power, truth is the eminent victim, not because the influencers deliberately lie (not always at least), but because it is simply no more relevant. He wrapped up the conversation by quoting James Jesus Angleton: "Deception is a state of mind, but it is also the mind of the state."
What I missed very much in Illouz's lecture was a commitment from the intellectuals to embrace the rest of society (the many non-intellectual parts of it) in a common mission to improve the world in its dysfunctional present and uncertain future. I missed the very simple, and frankly quite intuitive, dedication of a lifetime of study and hard intellectual work to find solutions to problems that do not simply concern academic cockfights between overpaid professionals of the brain-at-work. I missed the honest admission of guilt, in the name of over eighty years of post-war intellectual thought, for not having succeeded in making the non-intellectual parts of society look up at the intellectuals as beacons of hope, wisdom and respect. In sum, I missed a credible explanation that Illouz understands what the responsibility of the intellectuals is. But maybe I am not intelligent enough to have grasped it from her lecture. At the end of the day, she was giving the lecture, not me. I was a simple audience member, with the only consolation of being surrounded by what looked like a really interested and curious crowd. That is what every intellectual, at the end of the day, still wants.