Are intellectuals any good?

Beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

– Paul Johnson , in his book Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

Who are intellectuals? Thomas Sowell, in his book Intellectuals and Society , defines them as an occupation, as people whose “work begins and ends with ideas.” They are answerable to no one and the only touchstone they apply to test the validity of their ideas is whether other intellectuals “find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant, or ingenious”.

As a reviewer of Sowell's book put it, they take their beliefs as axiomatic truths rather than hypotheses to be tested.

Thus, the ideas propounded by intellectuals “become sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality.”

Though they may not state it explicitly, as Rousseau did, they are contemptuous of the masses as “stupid, pusillanimous and invalid”, holding themselves (in the words of John Stuart Mill) to be “the best and wisest” and “those who (are) in advance of society in thought and feeling.”

The incestuous inbreeding characterising the world of intellectuals often leads them astray and makes them incapable of having their ears to the ground and understanding the emotions of the people at large.

Neither the American, nor French, nor Russian, revolution was foreseen and predicted by the intellectuals of the time.

They were not in the forefront of the resistance to the worst excesses of slavery — Hitler's massacre of the Jews, the McCarthyan monstrosity, the racist barbarities of South Africa, or the illegal invasion of Iraq.

The reason is that the intellectuals want the least upset in life's rhythm and even tenor, in the comforts they have come to have, and in the security they have learnt to prize.

Priding themselves on their discernment and ability to see the interconnectivities of everything, they relapse into a state of “paralysis by analysis” and “activity without action”.

In the face of atrocities everywhere and everytime, they either turn the other way, or, at best, are reconciled to their views being conveniently ignored.

Worse than death

For the intellectuals put a premium on reason, not rhetoric; facts, not feeling; logic and intellect, not instinct and emotion, creature comforts, not public cause. They like to look at all sides of an event and issue and are prepared to make lots of allowances for human weaknesses and wait for the wheel of history to turn and perchance make things better, instead of putting themselves through stress and strain.

They have no qualms, however, about being the first to beat their breasts at what they fail to do, for self-introspection as a conscience-salving technique is their forte.

I remember attending an astonishingly fatuous panel discussion organised by Kuldip Nayar at Delhi's India International Centre on the ‘Failure of the Elite' during the Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi.

Amid sickening bouts of breast-beating , the hall resounded with alibis, excuses and rationalisations.

Or, take the burning issue of corruption. Its scale and pervasiveness have gone far beyond niceties.

The aam aadmis in every nook and corner of this country daily undergo minute-by-minute mental and financial torture, worse than death, at the hands of all grades of public servants, from top to bottom. In their excruciatingly painful experience, the whole of India is one hell-hole of teeming blood-suckers.

The only thought they have is how to escape from this living death. The political establishments will not do anything to combat the monster because they are its progenitors and protectors.

Not one political figure in all the 63 years of Independence has been convicted and jailed for indulging in corruption.

The intellectuals' worry in this desperate situation is not the aam aadmis ' liberation, but upholding the Anglo-Saxon juridical maxims (innocent until guilty, proof beyond the shadow of a doubt, checks and balances on exercise of powers, and so on). Voila!

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