Intellectuals: can’t play, won’t play
I’m afraid I must resist being tagged by John Hobbins. I’m far too stupid to have heard of some of these people. I think the list is far too biased in favour of political scientists. I think that by being biased in terms of being active in public life, the list ignores some of the real intellectuals who drive those in public life. (What no Alisdair MacIntyre?!) I simply don’t think some of the people on the list are intellectuals. Dawkins is a very clever man and a polemicist, Chomsky a pseudo-intellectual whose reputation rests on linguistic obfuscation, and a predilection for being outrageously stupid in his support for totalitarian regimes wherever they are to be found. So, sorry, John, I don’t like this list, and I’m not showing up my ignorance by playing the game.
April 27th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Political scientist Dan Drezner also complained about the preponderance of his kind on the list. He said: if so many of the top intellectuals in the world are political scientists, we are f*ed. Hard to disagree with that.
Martha Nussbaum in the list is a sort of stand-in for MacIntyre. If you haven’t read her, you will be glad you did if one day you choose to. I don’t agree at all with your take on Chomsky. Is it really true that Dawkins is no good in his field? I’ve heard rumors to that effect, but hesitate to believe it.
April 27th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I don’t think Dawkins has done any work in “his field” for years, if by that you mean biology. If you mean his official title field “public understanding of science” I would argue he’s done very little of that either and a great deal more on the “public misunderstanding of religion”.
You’re quite free to disagree with my take on Chomsky: however, you are wrong to do so. Chomsky the cultural critic has long since supplanted Chomsky the creative linguist, and as a cultural critic Chomsky has come up with justifications for one dictatorship after another. “If it isn’t Western market capitalism it must be right” is hardly an intellectual position.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
You know I like a lot of what you say but I’m sorry I don’t think you’ve represented Chomsky remotely fairly, at least on politics (I just don’t know enough about linguistics to comment on that side). This allegation of Chomsky (who is more or less an anarchist, constantly and harshly critical of totalitarianism - see numerous publications but a basic one would be Understanding Power) supporting totalitarian regimes is not true. This is often said but rarely argued.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
James, I have probably been unfair to Chomsky, and I’m not referring to his political writings as such. What I am referring to is the way in which, because he is so passionately critical of the US Government and its foreign policy, he ends up in the media (rather than his academic work - of which I haven’t read enough) defending the most outrageous regimes, simply because America is criticising or attacking them.