Why are public intellectuals so low-grade?

The contemporary crop of public intellectuals is frankly shit, but this is a function of both supply and demand. A public intellectual's job is to make sense of contemporary and emerging phenomena for the public. Too many public intellectuals don't know enough about these phenomena to do this job - witness the number of critiques of neoliberalism that know absolutely nothing of even the most basic economics, or the proliferation of opinions about AI and society that know nothing of software, statistics, or machine learning, and couldn't even define 'algorithm' or 'intelligence'. But equally, the public seems increasingly guilty of preferring public intellectuals who make sense of new phenomena in exactly the same way as old phenomena, giving the public the sense that their outmoded paradigms are in fact perfectly fine. This has got to change. 

I've been pondering this train of thought for a while but it really came on strong after reading Prospect magazine's (a journal worth reading) nominees for 'Top Thinker of 2021'. Their shortlist was actually pretty good - mostly people you probably haven't heard of, most of whom are 'doers', like the winner, Jacob Hanna, an embryologist. What was more disturbing were the names of people who missed the cut but were popular with voters: Amartya Sen, Kate Raworth, Noam Chomsky, Jordan Peterson, Thomas Sowell, Kathleen Stock, Alasdair MacIntyre, among others. You could group these people (along with most in the image above) under two headings: outmoded or ideological.

People keep retweeting Thomas Sowell's advice on writing and editing. I'm def listening because that guy's honed his craft by re-writing the same book for five decades.

— Nathan Lane (@straightedge) January 1, 2021

Too many of today's public intellectuals are ancient and incapable of passing the microphone. Noam Chomsky is 92 and hasn't a fresh thought since the 70s. But commies will reliably go to him to get the same tired anti-capitalist take applied to the flavour of the month. On the opposite end of the political spectrum is Sowell, 91 (and pretty much everyone else at the Hoover Institute). Amartya Sen sits in the political centre, aged 87. At least he has the decency to write autobiography these days rather than opinion. There are so many other people you could add to this list: Stiglitz, Dawkins, McCloskey, Nussbaum, Krugman, Sommers, most of the think tank community, blah blah blah, and people sadly heading in this direction, including Varoufakis, Harris, Peterson, on and on. These people need to use their platforms to signal boost younger thinkers rather than rehashing their stale analyses.  

Outmoded intellectuals settle into their preferred opinions over time, thereby mimicking the ideological intellectuals, who are more cancerous, by and large. Their pernicious effect comes from the fact that their narrow opinion appeals to a particular audience, which gives them some traction in public debate. This means that their opinion needs to be responded to, most vehemently by some other narrow intellectual from a different part of the debate. Each side proceeds to yell at the other, which sucks any oxygen away from more reasonable parties, toxifies the discursive space such that genuinely curious people can't ask a difficult but good-willed question without some ideological minion jumping down their throats, and provokes political rather than discursive responses in the public sphere. 

I can think of no better example of this than Kathleen Stock, one of the most prominent 'TERFs' (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). I followed the TERF vs TRA (trans-rights activist) debate for over a year, at least as it plays out on academic twitter, and it is absolutely turgid. Character assassination, performative sensitivity, logical fallacies, and narcissism abound on both sides, and even the more thoughtful, nuanced, and empathic participants rapidly degenerate under the relentless toxicity of the discourse. Stock's contributions were shallow and pissy to begin with, but she managed to attract the patronage of Britain's conservatives early on, even winning herself an OBE, and so people with a particular ideology (though neither 'idea' nor 'logos' seem appropriate here) regard her as a champion.  There are a bunch of similar types on the TRA side but they weren't mentioned in the Prospect prize so I'll leave them unnamed. 

There are some less toxic ideologues, but they retain the general problem here which is the same limited paradigm applied to any and all problems. Peter Singer sees everything through a utilitarian and effective altruism lens. Arundhati Roy will always make it somehow about colonialist capitalism, as will anyone who writes for The Guardian, though they may sprinkle in some simplistic environmentalism. Pinker is peddling a largely unreconstructed 1960s rational humanism. Very occasionally I come across 'good ideologues' - people with strong political orientations but consistently fresh takes from that angle e.g. William Davies on the left, and Alex Tabbarok on the right. I think these people are worth following to ensure viewpoint diversity. 

But what you really need is someone who is just plain fresh, and hopefully multifaceted as well. My colleague Matthew Agarwala likes to say that 20th century statistics can't measure 21st century progress. Same goes for 20th century ideas making sense of 21st century chaos. My own first-hand experience of this was, among other cases, that a book I'd curated on hybrid policy theory - what I consider the best articulation of the logic of 20th century microeconomic policy analysis - was barely a starting point for understanding how to revive left behind places in America and the UK. This is one of the most important and urgent political and policy problems of the present day, and our old thinking can't do much more than help us wrap our heads around the challenge. It doesn't have answers.     

So who are such intellectuals? I can't think of many; that's my point, and my sadness. I feel like there are no Simone De Beauvoir's for the present generation, but perhaps I just haven't opened my eyes enough. Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex 10) is a great example, but he's a diamond in the rough. I often wonder whether his forced pseudonymity has helped prevent his degeneration. My boss Diane Coyle is wonderful. She reads ridiculous amounts from across the spectrum and isn't wedded to any particular way of understanding the world, and she regularly writes for a general audience. I honestly think Arnold Schwarznegger is pretty good. He knows when to listen, remains dynamic, and he speaks common, but not in a pandering way. Joe Rogan is also fine, despite his recent forays into vaccine skepticism and braindead libertarian takes. Lefties who regard Rogan as 'far right' are embarrassing themselves. He hosts a diversity of opinion in an open environment where people chat for hours. We desperately need more of that in our public discourse at this time. I like Anges Callard, but she's a humanities scholar whose columns focus on life matters rather than policy issues. Seth Abramson was hot until the Trump Presidency whereupon he rapidly degenerated, though he remains a 'good ideologue'. If he goes back to writing mostly on culture I will quickly start paying more attention. 

Do you know anyone I should be following?

I can't help but think that contemporary university settings exacerbate these problems. Junior scholars are under insane pressure to publish and popular works don't count. We are also indoctrinated into a culture wherein only extremely tight causal identification warrants an opinion, so very few of us have the shutzpah to speak on the basis of our educated intuitions. And then when we do write for a public audience, at something like The Conversation, editors have a tendency to dumb our work down not just in terms of its message or technicality but also in terms of its tone, turning it into something a newly retired suburban housewife might natter about. Meanwhile, the corporate self help literature becomes more of a grift every day, with most books published by a narcissist who has mistaken their shower thought for an original idea and proceeded to write a book about it before consulting whether perhaps Aristotle already explained why it was shit 2000 years ago. 

Perhaps the issue is simply that nobody wants to do any hard intellectual work in the public domain, either on the demand or supply side?