Wednesday, November 27, 2013

20131127.0904

Yesterday's post has lingered with me.

When I posted a link to it to a social media feed, I did so by contextualizing it as "the kind of public intellectualism I hope to continue to do."  The post is one that assails the words of a reporter for their inaccuracies and shortcomings, which is problematic.  While flaws in the transmission of knowledge and disagreements about the presentations thereof ought to be noted, linking "public intellectualism" to that activity serves to reinforce unhelpful stereotypes that contribute to the idea of the scholar as undesirable company.  It supports the kind of thing that makes one of Zawacki's jokes work, inadvertently contributing to the anti-authoritarian, anti-intellectual component of the US zeitgeist John McWhorter identifies in Doing Our Own Thing and which I discuss a bit more here).  As such, the comment was ill-advised.

Certainly it is the role of the intellectual to identify errors that are passed on as "fact"--and publication in major media associated indelibly with "factual" writing* comes off as presentation as "fact."  It is the role of the intellectual to apply the cultivated powers of mind, the result of a society organized such that people can take the time and expend the effort to cultivate them instead of necessarily and solely the crops in the field (not that I am arguing against those who do, particularly given how much I like to eat), in the pursuit of perfecting human activity--and the discourse of people, their dissemination of information, is a fundamental human activity.  So it is the role of the intellectual to pick apart what is presented, to find the holes in it and, by extension, the holes in humanity they indicate; only by doing so can those holes be filled, and only by doing so can what is needed to fill those holes best be known.

Yet that...corrective impetus is not the only role of the intellectual.  I was reminded of this while I was looking over materials in support of yesterday's post: the words of the Good Doctor.  In "Galley Slave," Asimov writes that the work of a scholar is that of an artist; scholars "design and build articles and books.  There is more to it than the mere thinking of words and putting them in the right order" (although that is no small task).  Scholarship is a creative act as much as painting or dance or sculpture or poetry.  Those of us who work The Work try to capture some small slice of our perception of The Truth in a way that others can see and follow to their own perception of The Truth; the end goal is to have enough separate views of The Truth that it can be shown in all its magnificent splendor to the eyes of any who care to look upon it.  And if I seem something of a mystic in my phrasing, that is not to be wondered at; I have linked my work as a scholar to the exercise of my faith before(here, here, and here, at least), and I have experienced something of the Divine in my work on various projects.  Oxymoronic as it might seem, my scholarship is in large measure my worship, and because I am called to share my experience of the Transcendent, I do what I do.

It simply sometimes does not go as well as I would hope.

*I am aware of the contested nature of the claim as it regards any publication and presentation.  I am also aware that long-standing cultural assumptions at work in the United States hold journalistic writing up as an exemplar of "unbiased" and "accurate" presentations of "fact," and that the New York Times is cited as more or less the national newspaper of record.  It is "supposed" to be "fact."

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