Public Intellectuals: The Public and the Intellects

Does AA stand for alcohol anonymous or average American? After living in the most densely populated area of the US (Southern California) for ten years I honestly don’t know if there’s a difference. No, my point isn’t that the average American is a binge drinker but that he is uneducated and unaware of his role in the United States. Given that our country is driven by the average American, it’s a little unnerving that he’s drunk at the wheel. The blame game doesn’t stop there though. What about the ivory tower intellects that spend their time talking about topics that are either irrelevant to the average American’s day-to-day living or talked about at a level so intellectually elevated that the average American can’t make that connection. No wonder then that 3 hour car chases and Brittney Spears’ latest scandal get more air time than immigration policies, international trade agreements and interest rate fluctuations combined. ABC 7 news is the number one rated news station in Southern California and yet no decently educated person would think they were getting a good idea of what’s going on in the world by watching a whether girl dressed like a stripper and two news anchors whose only real talent in life is pretending to be smart.

Society has dictated a symbiotic relationship between public intellectuals and the average man that has broken down over time in America. The public intellectuals give the people the facts and the average man decides, in utilitarian fashion, what to do based on those facts. However, both parties have broken their contractual agreement to the other. The average American is not educating himself enough to be able to comprehend even the simplest of concepts and consequentially the public intellectual, in his impatience, has resolved to just being an intellectual. That is, he no longer tries to explain himself to a population lacking the expertise that he has.

The Average American is grossly undereducated considering the resources available to him regardless of his socioeconomic class. The national graduation rate for high schools is 71% in the US. California specifically, which holds the most electoral votes and most seats in the house, has a 64% graduation rate. Take that statistic and then consider how horrible our schools are in relation to the rest of the first world. We ranked 19 and 20th in math and science respectively among 36 countries (side note: this test was done later with both first and third world countries – we were beat by a couple of the third world countries so our ranking went even lower). To put this in perspective for you, when I taught IR to a few LA public high schools HONORS classes I was unable to find a single student who could explain to me what capitalism was. To give another anecdote - I attended my little sister’s high school homecoming game a few months back in the suburbs. The homecoming princesses were supposed to be the smartest and prettiest girls in the senior class. Only one out of five of them had any aspirations for attending college. The other four said, “I would like to get married and start a family after graduating from high school.” The college bound teen did not win the crown…Ladies and Gentlemen; these are your future voter.

Given that your audience doesn’t understand capitalism, how far can you really dumb down the material in order to explain why their jobs are going overseas? I sympathize with public intellectuals – I really do. However, walking away from the masses by locking yourself in an ivory tower does not bring meaning to your work anymore than discovering the cure for cancer and then keeping it a secret, does. Stephen Mack is absolutely right when he talks about the supposed “conflict” between intellects and anti-intellectualism in America:

[The “conflict”] is both wrong and wrong-headed. It is wrong in the sense that it traffics in the self-serving fiction of American anti-intellectualism. And it is wrong-headed in the sense that it undermines the value of citizen responsibility by subordinating it unnecessarily to the most elitist argument for the public intellectual, the one grounded in the myth of an aristocracy of experts.

It is not an American tradition to be anti-intellectual and believing that it is only further separates the intellectuals from the people they are supposed to be trying help, by excluding them from the problem solving process.

There’s an obvious disconnect in this country between intellects and the masses. Both parties have turned their backs on each other in distrust leaving a vacuum that’s filled by mindless media dribble and misleading politicians. Both sides need to reach out to each other in order to become the body of criticism that’s needed to turn the wheels of democracy. Our country’s system of governance ultimately relies on the watchful eye of the people to administer justice and make changes in the system where need. The status quo would suggest that a bank robber just walked out with the cash and the security guard shook his hand. The US would do well to take a page out of the book of other countries. Pakistan is in horrible condition right now but it’s most recent election results would suggest that they know a corrupt dictatorship when they see one.