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This video is brought to you by Storyblocks. Our stream, Wisecrack Live, might have seen me having an honest-to-goodness breakdown recently. The analogy would be this: let’s do it better, guys. Let’s do a better job than [Ladies Man] James Lindsey, whose penis has never left his pants and he pees his pants all the time. I’m saying, I’m saying he’s never taking his pants off every time he pees, he pees his pants. The reason? Well, I watched a self-styled public intellectual butcher the work of education theorist Paolo Freire. What he’s saying right here is maybe if we want people to read this is what Freire would say: let’s give them text that apply to them and engage in the cultures in which they live. But Lindsey says the freak-out wasn’t just because he was totally wrong, but he was so.
Is the point here that systems don’t exist, organized networks of power and organization don’t like there’s no such thing as a system, or because his misinterpretation has dangerous implications, which it does? He just said the cause of school shootings is just restorative justice and inclusive classrooms. It was also because it reminded me that the only figures with large public platforms talking about subjects like philosophy and social theory these days seem to be idiots, especially here in America. There are exceptions in the 94-year-old Noam Chomsky, the 69-year-old Cornell West, and the American-friendly 73-year-old Slavoj Žižek, but along with all being respectfully super old, their voices have an increasingly small seat at the table of digital discourse.
So what happened? Is the disappearance of public intellectuals and especially of public philosophers symptomatic of a wider anti-intellectual streak? Did public geniuses fail us? Did we fail them? Or both? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition: Where Did All the Smart People Go?
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To understand how public intellectuals got shoved out of the discourse, it helps to think about how we talk about big ideas in the first place. Put simply, we live in a society that is straight-up hostile to intellectualism. We can do an entire video on just that point, and if you want to watch that video, let us know in the comments and we’ll make it. But for our purposes here’s a TL;DR from historian Richard Hofstadter, who diagnosed the problem way back in 1964, arguing that America had never developed a robust intellectual culture comparable to those of European countries. Though arguably the problem is worse now than it ever was. He looked at the broader discourse warning the public about the rise of pseudoscience and superstition, and imploring them to find ways to overcome these dangerous trends. Whether it’s still possible for another Gromsky or Sega to emerge and earn the same acclaim today remains unclear. Could an action-oriented public intellectual, knowledgeable beyond single expertise, cut through the noise? Or would they just be shouted down by hot takes and half takes?
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