The silence of the intellectuals. His death. His betrayal. Your demise? Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir. Albert Camus. Ortega y Gasset. Unamuno. And Jürgen Habermas and Noam Chomsky as survivors of a supposed golden age. But where are the intellectuals today? In a world with a large population with higher education, with the omnipresence of social networks and in which a broad rejection of authority and the need to belong to groups, trenches, and cultural wars coexist. What sense do they have? What is your role? Where are they?
“The idea of ​​the intellectual as someone who has a generic opinion on almost everything, a Sartre, who can write novels, has respectable political opinions and moral authority, is a thing of the past. Today we live in a distributed intelligence society, with many people with a high level of information, where information can be verified, checked. The verticality with which they addressed us no longer makes much senseâ€, affirms the philosopher Daniel Innerarity emphatically.
The diagnosis of the experts consulted has nuances, but the conclusion is not excessively different. Nor its reverse. “At a time of crisis for mediators of information, we find ourselves with a paradox: today prescriptive figures are needed to illuminate the present, to help interpret the complexity of the moment, the excess of information, to help to read a world that is very complexâ€, says the director of the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, ​​Judit Carrera.
The current use of the word intellectual, recalls David Jiménez in his new book The ambiguous word. Intellectuals in Spain (1889-2019) (Taurus), emerged simultaneously in the last decades of the 19th century in most European languages. In Spain he is 130 years old, before Émile Zola’s J’accuse for the Dreyfus case. Where before there were philosophers, professors, writers, there are now intellectuals. It is a moment of growth of the middle class, of literacy and of greater relevance of the press, of bankruptcy of confidence in the Restoration and the search for new social leaders, of debates about who should lead the country or how to think of Spain in relation to other nations.
They were different times. For the philosopher Javier Gomá, “the famous intellectual personified in Zola still remained in an aristocratic society where a thinking minority said certain things to which a social majority, as Ortega pointed out, had to adapt tamely. Today there is a democratic principle. We have a scattered intelligentsia. An indeterminate, unpredictable kaleidoscope that produces an allergy to the aristocratic intellectual world. There is an uncontrollable plurality of sources of non-codified legitimacy, but even so, the scarcest asset in a society is talent and it ends up being recognized. Homer, despite the lurches of history, has reached today. True, all this is mixed with a wave of vulgarity. I do not have a contemptuous attitude towards it, it is the combination between equality and freedom, a new creature in the history of culture. Before there were vulgar people, now vulgarity as a cultural category. Vulgarity is the expression of spontaneity without limitations and has reached a supreme state, anyone can comment, since one of the fundamental values ​​of today’s culture is to be authentic, sincere. And most of the time it results in extreme vulgarity.â€
For the editor of Taurus and Debate, Miguel Aguilar, “today there is a fragmentation of audiences, people who have a vocation to intervene in public debate, which in the end is what an intellectual is, it is more difficult for them to address the whole of society, only to a part. It parallels the rise of social media, the decline of mainstream media, people are less obedient to those who disagree with them. They listen more to those who reinforce what we think than to those who question it, and that is the function of the intellectual, to question what people think. The figure of the intellectual as the critical conscience of a society is in clear decline, I don’t know if it is reversible or not, but it is more difficult for a voice to challenge society as a whole, which works more through echo chambers, tribes, clans. It is a loss, the fact of not being able to think together. There is no real exchange of ideas that challenges the whole of societyâ€.
Even so, he acknowledges that from time to time “there is still a specific book that manages to generate debate and interest, like the one by Thomas Piketty, who managed to bring the inequality debate to the fore.” “It is increasingly difficult for the general public to be challenged with the culture wars, but there will continue to be books capable of overcoming those bubbles and forcing us to look at ourselves. Challenges such as artificial intelligence or the environment force us to overcome these divisionsâ€.
They are not the only challenges. For Basilio Baltasar, who has just published the set of essays El intellectual rampante (KRK), “the figure of the dissident intellectual, and we could go back to Diogenes the cynic, is more necessary today than ever because only an intellectual committed to critical thinking can help to better discern the difference between propaganda, information and reflectionâ€. In this sense, he reasons that “the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between what is true and what is false, the abundance of products from the entertainment industry and the flow of advertising discourses make the figure very necessary. His personality may have been dissipated by the abundance of crazy voices blaring across all the screens, but more than ever the need for him is palpable.†Even so, he acknowledges that “there are many capable intellectuals with wide and deep domains, perhaps what we miss is their intervention, their influence, which would not be a fault to be attributed to them but to the paradigm in which we operateâ€.
And he assures that “Edgar Morin, with 102 years, Habermas, with more than 90, and Chomsky, with as many others, are the only three voices that have been heard reflecting on the war in Ukraine outside the dominant discourse and together they have almost 300 years, and that should make us think. Baltasar concludes that, yes, “the need for intellectuals can confirm something that we do not like, and it is the failure of the Enlightenment from the point of view of the universal education that it promised. Failure is a fact: the infantilization of adults, the cognitive atrophy of users, gullibility.
Judit Carrera summarizes that “we are in very uncertain and complex times caused by accelerated changes that have to do with the fourth industrial revolution and climate change.” “We are at the moment of a leap in scale, of a very great transformation of what the human condition means. This requires answers that come from very different places, the pandemic showed that geopolitics was not enough, that we needed to know about climate change, about natural history, we need very different knowledge to understand the complexity of what is happening. Unclassifiable figures such as Donna Haraway, speculative scientist, philosopher, with a very broad and transdisciplinary perspective, are importantâ€.
In this context, he vindicates the role of the humanities, of critical thinking. “Artificial intelligence, networks, are fascinating, but they raise many questions. In 15 years, perhaps many will carry their mobiles on a chip in their brains, it will be a new Renaissance, it will allow the explosion of knowledge, you won’t have to learn languages, the chip will translate, it’s plausible. There will be superhumans and many others without access. What fractures will it generate? That perspective is only offered by critical thinking and the humanities.†And, he concludes, the responsibility of intellectuals today “is to imagine possible futures, not only to diagnose that the world is ending, to create a horizon of possibility when there are new generations that do not want to have children because there will be no future for them. The opposite generates fear and demobilizationâ€.
For Innerarity, “in a world with so much knowledge but so fragmented, accessible but difficult to organize, we need people who dare to give a general, panoramic vision. But this general vision must be carried out with much more modesty, knowing that to whom these visions are directed are not ignorant or gullible people, but with a lot of critical capacity. Our problem as a society at the beginning of the 21st century is not a lack of knowledge, but rather disorientation, a lot of knowledge, very dispersed and great difficulty in organizing it. There is a vacant mission.”
