The silence of intellectuals. His death His betrayal. His disappearance? 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 where a broad rejection of authority and the need to belong to groups, to trenches, to cultural wars coexist. What do they mean? What is your role? Where are? “The idea of ​​an intellectual as someone who has a generic opinion about almost everything, a Sartre, who can write novels, has respectable political views and moral authority, is a thing of the past. Today we live in a society of distributed intelligence, with many people with a high level of information, where information can be verified, reviewed. The verticality with which they addressed us no longer makes much sense,” says the philosopher Daniel Innerarity flatly.
The diagnosis of the experts consulted has nuances, but the conclusion is not excessively different. Nor is its reverse. “In a moment of crisis for information mediators, we are faced with a paradox: today we need prescriptive figures to illuminate the present, to help interpret the complexity of the moment, the excess of information, to help read a very complex world”, points out the director of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, ​​Judit Carrera.
The current use of the word intellectual, recalls David Jiménez in his new book La palabra ambigua. Los intelectuales en España (1889-2019) (Taurus), emerges simultaneously during the last decades of the 19th century in a large part of European languages. In Spain it is 130 years old, before Émile Zola’s J’accuse for the Dreyfus case. Where before there were philosophers, professors, writers, now there are intellectuals. It is a time of growth of the middle class, of literacy and more relevance of the press, of failure of confidence in the restoration and search for new social leaders, of debates about who should lead the country or about how Spain thinks about relationship with other nations.
Those were other times. For the philosopher Javier Gomá, “the famous intellectual personified in Zola still lived in an aristocratic society where a thinking minority said certain things to which a social majority, as Ortega pointed out, had to docilely adapt. Today there is a democratic principle. We have a scattered intelligentsia. An indeterminate, unpredictable kaleidoscope that makes the intellectual aristocratic world allergic. There is an uncontrollable plurality of uncodified sources of legitimacy, but nevertheless the scarcest good in a society is talent, and it ends up being recognized. Homer, despite the christenings of history, has made it to this day. It is true that all this is mixed with a wave of vulgarity. I do not have a contemptuous attitude against 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 have an opinion, since one of the fundamental values ​​of today’s culture is to be authentic, sincere. And it often results in extreme vulgarity.”
For the editor of Taurus and Debate Miguel Aguilar, “today there is a fragmentation of the audiences, the people who have a vocation to intervene in the public debate, which in the end is what an intellectual is, it is more difficult that addresses society as a whole, only a part of it. It parallels the rise of social media, the decline of mass media, people obey less those who disagree with them. We listen more to those who reinforce what we think than to those who question it, and this is the function of the intellectual, to question what people think. The figure of the intellectual as the critical consciousness of a society is in sharp decline, I don’t know if reversible or not, but it is more difficult for a voice to interpellate the whole of society, which works rather for echo chambers, tribes, clans. It is a loss, the fact of not being able to think as a whole. There is no real exchange of ideas that appeals to society as a whole”. Nevertheless, he recognizes that from time to time “there is still some specific book that manages to generate debate and interest, such as Thomas Piketty’s, which brought the debate on inequality to the fore”. “It is increasingly difficult for the general public to engage with the culture wars, but there will continue to be books capable of overcoming these 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 The Rampant Intellectual (KRK), “the figure of the dissident intellectual, and we could go back to Diogenes the Cynic, is today more necessary than ever because only a intellectual engaged in critical thinking can help 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 speeches make the figure very necessary. Perhaps his personality has dissipated due to the abundance of alien voices that sound through all the screens, but more than ever his need is palpableâ€. He acknowledges, despite everything, that “there are many capable intellectuals with broad and deep domains, perhaps what we are missing is their intervention, their influence, which would not be a fault that we should attribute to them, but to the paradigm in which we move”.
And he asserts that “Edgar Morin, at 102 years old, Habermas, at over 90, and Chomsky, along with many others, are the only three voices that have been heard reflecting on the war in Ukraine outside the dominant discourse and together they are almost 300 years old, and that should make us thinkâ€. 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, credulity”.
Judit Carrera summarizes that “we live in very uncertain and complex times caused by accelerated changes that are related to the fourth industrial revolution and climate change”. “We are in a moment of leap of scale, of a very big 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, natural history, we need very different knowledge to understand the complexity of what is happening. Unclassifiable figures like that of Donna Haraway, speculative scientist, philosopher, with a very broad and transdisciplinary view, are important”. In this context, it claims 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 the mobile phone on a chip in their brain, it will be a new renaissance, it will allow the explosion of knowledge, you will not have to learn languages, the chip will translate everything, it is plausible. There will be superhumans and there will be those who do not have access to it. What fractures will it generate? This perspective is only offered by critical thinking and the humanities”. And, he concludes, the responsibility of intellectuals today “is to imagine possible futures, not just to diagnose that the world is ending, to create a horizon of possibility when there are new generations who do not want to have children because there will be no future for them . The opposite generates fear and demobilization”.
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 done with much more modesty, knowing that those to whom these visions are addressed are not ignorant or gullible people but people 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 disorientation, a lot of knowledge, very scattered and great difficulty in organizing it. There is a vacant mission.”
