The Price of Public Intellectuals

R. Sassower

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137385024
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book provides a historically-informed survey critically outlining sociological, psychological, political, and economic approaches to the role of public intellectuals. Sassower suggests how the state might financially support the essential work of public intellectuals so as to critically engage the public and improve public policies.

1

The Myth of “Speaking Truth to Power”

Abstract: This chapter outlines the historical and conceptual basis for the true and at times false dichotomy between truth seekers (and speakers) and those in power (primarily politicians). It covers the shift from Socrates the martyr to Plato’s vision of a philosopher-king. In conflating the two roles (philosopher and king), it is possible for the position of public intellectual (whose various conception will be covered in the next chapter) to surface. There is, though, an assumption about Truth that is contested in the postmodern age. With this in mind, certain instances of revelations of truths (by whistleblowers and hacktivists) are critically analyzed so as to differentiate them from the standard views of public intellectuals.

Sassower, Raphael. The Price of Public Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137385024.0004.

1.1The Quaker statement

The statement “speaking truth to power” is so familiar that we are inclined to believe it has been with us since time immemorial. It is, though, relatively recent, written in 1954 by Milton Mayer and published in 1955 under the title Speak Truth to Power (Ingle 2013). The pamphlet proposed a new approach for the American Friends Service Committee to the Cold War. “Children of the Light” or “Friends of the Truth” were labels accorded to Quakers, known more for their egalitarian prayer services than for their moral militancy. Yet this quiet and small group of worshippers, dating back to the 17th century, had the courage to critically think about how to avoid the potential of nuclear catastrophe of the Cold War.

Has this been the motto of the Quakers from their very start? Like other Christian sects, there is a “calling” associated with this group, a divine calling to direct the “light of divine wisdom” into the dark areas of human existence and interaction so as to bear witness to the “truth.” Without venturing into theological debates about the meaning of this approach to religious devotion, what becomes clear is that a group of believers, numbering as few as 199 in Germany in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor, takes it upon itself to claim authority of a truth to which others may not be privy. This claim for divine revelation is as old as institutional religions, and in its name some great and some horrible ideas and wars have been fought. Quakers during World War II have a mixed record: resisting conscription into the Nazi ranks, under claims of conscientious objection, while at times not saying or doing much to object or undermine Nazi policies of deportation of Jews and other “undesirables” (Ibid. 2–4).

With a slogan of “speaking truth to power” there is both a call to action, the speaking part of the slogan, and a realization that there is truth that must be acknowledged by those who have the privilege of receiving it. The very claim of having a special access to the truth can be perceived as problematic if not an outright pretense: Who are you to tell me what is true? On whose behalf are you speaking? What makes you so special that you were designated as the recipient of truth? The tension is exacerbated when a minority group such as the Quakers is confronting both other fellow-humans and those in power. In Nazi Germany the audience was clear, but who was it in America in 1955? To whom was the pamphlet addressed and what will be its impact? Was this a cry for fairness and justice, or was it rather a plea for moderation? How does is compare to Albert Einstein’s plea for nuclear disarmament and world peace? Obviously not much was done between 1955, when the pamphlet was published, and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union, with its satellite countries, transformed itself and put an end to the Cold War. But the slogan, the call to speak the truth to power, remains embedded in our minds as a valiant effort of the few to speak truth to the powerful authorities, the ones who could imprison the speakers in the Soviet gulags, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented, or in ways yet undocumented in the United States.

Born of a religious belief, the notion of having access to divine truth also offers a dichotomy or schism – between the earthly and the heavenly, between the here and now and the transcendent – so that human experience in this world must measure up against an ideal not of this world. One may argue that this dichotomy is a false one, that it really doesn’t exist, and that in fact it creates more problems for human affairs than it solves. Others argue that humans need this other-worldly image or ideal as a heuristic to understand better not only how to assess human interactions, but also how to envision reforms or transformations. Both Judaism and Christianity make claims to divine revelations and the intervention of God in the affairs of their followers: Moses demanding the freedom of his people from Pharaoh’s enslavement and Jesus protesting the wayward behavior of the rabbis in the Temple and the rule of the Romans. They both spoke “Truth,” they both confronted “Power,” and they both remain symbols of bravery and sacrifice in human imagination. Did the Pharaoh listen to Moses because of the miracles he performed, the ten plagues, whose devastation brought fear of the wrath of an unseen and yet unknown god? Did Moses escape Jesus’ later fate of crucifixion because his God shielded him from the Egyptians? Were they messengers, prophets, or lunatics? Their acts have earned them canonical status, but how many others have simply faded into the dustbin of history without any trace whatsoever?

In what follows, it will become clear how this dichotomy between earthly and heavenly affairs has been deployed in order to set the stage for understanding the role some people must play in the affairs of the state in order to offer a different – divine or imagined – view of human affairs. The price they and what we would call today public intellectuals paid in their lifetime for earning posthumously martyrdom status remains a vivid reminder of the dangers associated with this activity. But with a privileged position, reminds us Noam Chomsky, intellectuals bear a special moral duty to uncover lies and present them to the public, as was the case during the Vietnam War (1967).

1.2Greek archetypes: Socrates’ Trial and Plato’s Republic

Without fully defining yet the category or class of people who embody the notion of public intellectuals, it’s clear that in contemporary culture they are considered to be speaking truth to power. The archetypal case of Socrates (469–399 BCE) in ancient Greece teaches us one important lesson: if you speak truth to power publicly, you will be killed. In other words, if you don’t want to die by the hands of the authorities, remain silent or speak in ways that are pleasing to the powerful. Does this mean that we should no longer seek the truth? Or rather, should we seek the truth without speaking it out loud to others or to those in positions of power? While the next chapter outlines the various labels bestowed upon public intellectuals, here I confine my observations to problematizing the very activity undertaken by them: their so-called truth, their so-called confrontation with the powerful, and their power relations in the postmodern age.

Historically, the typical choice has been to continue seeking the truth in isolation from the citadels of power. For intellectuals this meant a mixture of contempt for nonintellectuals, dependency on patrons, and general irrelevance in the affairs of the state. Monks insulated themselves in monasteries under the auspices of the almighty Catholic Church; professors in the modern university either sought church protection, the largesse of patrons, or state funding; and all other independent thinkers became marginalized against their will or well-paid apologists in think tanks. The Athenian Senate apparently accomplished its task and forever silenced gadflies like Socrates. But did it? As any tract about public intellectuals attests, Socrates remains an iconic figure worthy of emulation. Was he indeed the martyr for truth that future generations have claimed him to be? Given the two charges leveled against him – corrupting the youth and disbelief in the gods of the city – assessments of his innocence (and therefore his claim on our imagination as a martyr) remain somewhat open ended.

While the standard view emphatically follows Socrates’ own arguments in his defense so as to bolster his “human wisdom” (as attested by the oracle at Delphi), his expertise in teaching the youth (rather than corrupting them), and his right to believe in whatever gods he wishes, there is another view that claims the opposite. Without too much detail about Socrates’ trial as told by his admiring student Plato (427–347 BCE), we recall not only the accusations, the speeches, and the guilty verdict; we also recall the punishment of death (hemlock) that had been challenged by Socrates himself – wanting to remain a paid gadfly – and his friends – wanting to secure his escape. Turning to I. F. Stone’s scathing critique of the cult of martyrdom associated with Socrates may prove useful if somewhat unsettling. To begin with, Stone rightfully reminds us that, “We know the story only as told later by loving disciples” (1988, 3), those who have turned their beloved teacher into “a cult hero and a secular saint” (Ibid. 108). But isn’t it a well-deserved status? According to Stone, there was a “fundamental philosophical divergence between Socrates and Athens. He and his disciples saw the human community as a herd that had to be ruled by a king or kings, as sheep by a shepherd” (Ibid. 38). Unlike “the dominant Greek view” that in fact “gave dignity to the common man,” the Socratic view “demeaned him. This was an irreconcilable divergence” (Ibid. 40). Instead of viewing Socrates as roaming the streets of Athens and conversing with whomever he could find, Stone portrays him as an arrogant, out-of-touch, elitist: “Neither the Xenophonic nor the Platonic Socrates makes any mention of the poor. They never seem to enter his field of vision” (Ibid. 44). And even when political events shake the city, like the tyrannical rule of the Thirty, “it is as if he continued to live apart from the city, in the clouds above it, still looking down on it with disdain” (Ibid. 156).

According to Stone, who has been derided by those who find the critique of their idol unacceptable, there are more serious grounds for his view of Socrates. Socrates’ folly has been to argue that “virtue was knowledge, but real knowledge was inaccessible” (Ibid. 39). This inevitable disconnect between the virtue of learning and acquiring knowledge – and the truth along the way – and the fact that human wisdom, no matter how well honed, remains inherently wanting, brings about what he calls “the negative dialectic of Socrates.” That means that Socrates’ “identification of virtue with an unattainable knowledge stripped common men of hope and denied their capacity to govern themselves” (Ibid. 97). Stone’s assessment of the “real” Socrates is that he is “revered as a nonconformist but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed. Socrates was one of those Athenians who despised democracy and idealized Sparta” (Ibid. 121). Using the terminology made popular by Karl Popper (1902–1994) in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966/1943), distinguishing between Socrates the democrat and Plato the autocrat, Stone’s Socrates is as guilty of being an antidemocrat as Plato.

Stone retells the story of Socrates’ trial: “So it became Socrates’ mission in life to go about and question his fellow townsmen to see if there was anyone among them wiser than he. And that, Plato’s Socrates tells the jurors, is how he got into trouble and made himself unpopular” (Ibid. 80). But in fact, Stone claims that Socrates used “his sophia or skill as a logician and philosopher – for a special political purpose: to make all the leading men of the city appear to be ignorant fools. The divine mission he claimed from Delphi turned out to be what we would call an ego trip – an exercise of self-glorification for Socrates and of belittlement for the city’s most respected leaders. He thus undermined the polis, defamed the men on whom it depended, and alienated the youth” (Ibid. 81). An unflattering picture indeed, but one that Stone has to qualify as well: “When Athens prosecuted Socrates, it was untrue to itself. The paradox and the shame in the trial of Socrates is that a city famous for free speech prosecuted a philosopher guilty of no other crime than exercising it ... . He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought” (Ibid. 197).

Incidentally, lest one considers Stone an offbeat crank who couldn’t see the obvious martyrdom of Socrates, let’s consider a recent affirmation of his view. On January 31, 2013, The National Hellenic Museum (NHM) in Chicago staged a re-enactment of Socrates’ trial. Under instructions by the Honorable Richard Posner, Socrates was judged under Athenian and not contemporary law; a jury of Chicago politicians, business leaders, and notable media voted, ending in a hung jury. “The surprise came when the audience convicted Socrates, albeit by a slim margin ... According to NHM’s President Connie Mourtoupalas, ‘This is a first. I’ve been involved in three other Socrates trials, twice in Washington, DC, and once in New York, and all three times he was found innocent. Convicting Socrates in the 21st century is no easy feat, but they did it.’” As the report continues, “There was no need for hemlock however, as jurors, audience and judges voted against the death penalty. Judge Posner issued the final ruling stating that Socrates was ‘a crank’ who ‘encouraged the brats of Athens,’ but wasn’t a threat to society. ‘A 70 year old loud mouth [sic] shouldn’t be put to death, and the punishment is a fine and home confinement’” (2013).

The report concludes “with a majority of one thousand ‘jurors’ finding him to have been guilty of the charges of corrupting the youth and not believing in the city’s gods. History was wrong, according to this trial, in finding him innocent and a martyr for all future critical thinkers. Conformity is the rage in democratic America despite whatever ‘checks and balances’ we so enthusiastically endorse for our governance” (Ibid.). If we are inclined to retain Socrates as a role model, we best stay among library book stacks than in the streets of our metropolitan centers; we better worry about the cultural context in which audiences listen to a Socrates of their times. One may find Chicago typical – it’s in the heartland of America, the Midwest – or atypical – it’s a relatively liberal urban city with conservative judges, like Posner. Either way, it’s fascinating to note that just like in 399 BCE, a jury and audience in 2013 found Socrates guilty. The only lesson of history then is not to execute, but show mercy, free the “old crank,” perhaps out of pity and self-assured pomposity that someone like Socrates was “no threat” at all than out of a deep commitment to free speech, however cranky it may sound to the refined ears of the elite.

Against the archetype or model of the one against the many, the lone seeker of truth and spokesperson of divine revelation or human wisdom – Moses, Jesus, or Socrates – there was another archetype where the dichotomy between truth and power could disappear from view. Socrates’ disciple, Plato, offered a cunning solution in Socrates’ name in the utopian blueprint for a republic: the philosopher-king. No longer will there be tension between truth and power, but instead they’ll be combined and embodied in one. Here, truth is power; power is truth. And once the two coalesce, power, which is now in the service of the truth, is legitimate and absolute. Plato’s solution, however clever, challenges the example of Socrates’ tale of speaking truth to power. It reveals a way out of the truth-power binary that can result in devastation: What happens if the presumed “truth” is no truth at all, but simply an expression of the powerful? What critical checks will be available to curtail tyranny?

In The Republic, itself a utopian vision – prescriptive and normative rather than descriptive – Socrates prefaces the outline of his image of a philosopher-king with the words: “It is likely to wash us away on billows of laughter and scorn” (Republic 5.473c). But in addition to laughter, perhaps a lesson will be learned:

Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun. But this is the thing that has made me so long shrink from speaking out, because I saw that it would be a very paradoxical saying. For it is not easy to see that there is no other way of happiness either for private of public life. (Ibid. 5.473d–e)

For Socrates it seems a necessary condition for the constitution to be put into practice and for human happiness to be viable privately and publicly that “political power and philosophical intelligence” should be combined, should be the purview of one and the same ruler or king. This is said while the fragile democracy of Socrates’ Athens is still under pressure, and while Plato has been drawn to Syracuse three times under the urging of Dion to help the young Dionysius II, who had philosophical pretensions and tyrannical aspirations. Chiding and dismissing the “motley horde of the natures who at presently pursue either apart from the other,” Socrates himself sounds as if his worry is not limited to the “laughter of scorn” of others. Why would he “shrink from speaking out,” if he had not done so with so many other topics? What would induce him to keep quiet? Was it his elitist arrogance, as Stone claims, or his fear of repercussion (as his eventual trial demonstrated)? Was the very idea of merging philosophy and power preposterous?

Bernard-Henri Levy, for one, thinks (in a footnote) that, “It should be recalled that Jambet has shown that the Platonic dream was never that of the ‘counselor of the prince,’ but, and this is altogether different, the dream of a Master who would no longer be a Master, who would abolish the principle of all lordship, and whom he names, for lack of a better term, ‘philosopher-king.’ The Syracuse adventure should thus be understood as a solution chosen out of despair, and not as the mirage of some intellectual and moral reform of the polis” (1979/1977, 205; italics in the original). The very constellation of the philosopher and the king (or ruler or leader) is a dream-like image that comes out of “despair” rather than out of a courageous invention. The despair is that of power engulfing, suffocating, and extinguishing the “intelligence” of philosophers, their knowledge of the truth. The “master,” in Levy’s commentary, is losing his power, or more accurately the legitimacy of the authority accorded to him (either democratically or by force), and as such desperately needs some philosophical grounding to re-establish the warrant for the exercise of power.

Mark Lilla agrees with Levy’s interpretation, and adds that, “The philosopher-king is an ‘ideal,’ not in the modern sense of a legitimate object of thought demanding realization, but what Socrates calls a ‘dream’ that serves to remind us how unlikely it is that the philosophical life and the demands of politics can ever be made to coincide” (2001, 212). The likelihood being remote, perhaps there is no danger in entertaining such an image or a dream. But if the dream is heuristically powerful, if it remains one of the most profound expositions of how a state ought to be ruled justly, if it becomes the archetype fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Myth of Speaking Truth to Power
• 2  A Variety of Intellectual Experiences
• 3  Four Standard Approaches
• 4  Certified Public Intellectuals
• 5  Intellectual Welfare
• Appendix: Lists of Public Intellectuals
• Bibliography
• Index