September 12, 2009

Jared Diamond: A Public Intellectual

Public Intellectual… This is a term that is not often bandied about amongst those whose surname is not predicated with “Professor” or “Doctor” and can have a plethora of meanings (or depending on who you ask, no meaning whatsoever). The focus of this post will be to provide insight into this ambiguous word to laymen like myself using a prominent public intellectual as an example to illustrate what exactly is meant by this term.



Jared Diamond at TED


The public intellectual I will be relying on for this post is named Jared Diamond. Known for being a champion of ecological studies of past and contemporary society, Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies chronicles the origins of Eurasia Anglo-Saxon hegemony arguing that the vast chasms in technology and power between various societies is not due to cultural or racial differences, but rather that a simple environmental luck-of-the-draw determined the winners and the losers in today’s society. (It turns out the that white man’s inability to dance was a small tradeoff for a complete monopoly on 13 of the 14 domesticate-able species, 32 of 56 cultivatable grasses, and a geographically East-West orientation allowing easy transfer of crops, animals and technology.)


As for his eligibility as a public intellectual he is certainly qualified. First and foremost, he is both educated and completely divorced from politics. Holding both a Harvard B.A. and a Cambridge Ph.D in physiology and membrane biophysics, he is certainly an academic heavyweight. Moreover, he is unaffiliated with any political party. This separation of academia and politics is crucial to maintaining the objectivity of the public intellectual’s work. As quoted in Stephen Mack’s essay “The Decline of Public intellectuals?” Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it perfectly.


A public intellectual is not a paid publicist, not a spinner, not in the pocket of a narrowly defined purpose. It is, of course the temptation, another one, of the public intellectual to cozy up to that which he or she should be evaluating critically. I think perhaps, too many White House dinners can blunt the edge of criticism. . . .


This brings me to the next characteristic of a true public intellectual. This attribute concerns the public intellectual’s function and sole reason for being. That is, to truly be a public intellectual, one must practice and wax all things critical. The public intellectual stands as a voice of criticism to keep in check all those with the power to make decisions that affect others (or at least keep them in the spotlight of the public eye). As Mack so succinctly puts it, “…if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling.” In this regard Diamond is a critic whose to-the-point writings on the ecological collapse of society spare no one. In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed he lambasts corporate fat cats, politicians and tree hugging organizations such as Green Peace alike. This seemingly indiscriminate criticism is quite refreshing, for a true public intellectual never picks favorites…

The final criterion for a public intellectual is that they are a truly PUBLIC intellectual. What I mean by this is that they not only have something important to say, they also have a voice loud enough to say it to many. On this point I differ from Mack who writes, “The measure of a public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” By no means do I want to downplay the importance of the quality of a public intellectual’s input and output, but if people are not listening, a public intellectual does no good for the world. It’s all well and good to write volumes and volumes of brilliant work, but if no one reads them the writer is rendered completely impotent. Without a readership a public intellectual’s power to change the world and his very purpose for being ceases to exist. Diamond’s work may never make it to a best seller list, but he has had a significant influence on others and he has a strong following. This following empowers his ideas making him an agent for change and a true public intellectual.