You once wrote an essay called "Responsibility and Intellectuals". Perhaps we could start by talking a little bit about that. First of all, what makes a person an intellectual in the first place. What is an intellectual?
It's not a term I take all that seriously. Some of the most intellectual people I've met and known in my life were very remote from the so-called intellectual professions. Plenty of people who are called intellectual workers, who work with their minds, not their, say, hands, are involved in what amounts to clerical work. An awful lot of academic scholarship, for example, is basically a kind of clerical work.
Suppose we use the word positively.
With a positive connotation I would want to talk about whoever it is who's thinking about things, trying to understand things, trying to work things out, maybe trying to articulate and express that understanding to others and so on. That's intellectual life.
So "things" could be society, it could be quarks ...
It could be music.
It could be sports. So basically, arguably, just about everyone.
Except that an awful lot of the activity of most of us is routine, not considered, not directed to problems that really do concern us and not based on efforts, maybe even opportunities to gain deeper understanding.
So intellectuals have a whole lot of time to do this part of life that we all do some of the time.
There are people who are privileged enough to be able to spend an awful lot of their time and effort on these things if they so choose. They rarely do. They often do turn to routine kind of hack work, which is the easy way.
So supposing a society like ours does give some people the opportunity to spend more time doing intellectual work, then I guess that's the context in which we raise the question, What's the responsibility of a person like that, a person who is free to have that time?
We can distinguish what we you might call their "task" from their moral responsibility. Their task, that is, the reason why social institutions provide them with this time and effort, their task is, say, so that they can support power, authority, they can carry out doctrinal management. They can try to ensure that others perceive the world in a way which is supportive of existing authority and privilege. That's their task. If they stop performing their task, they're likely to be deprived of the opportunities to dedicate themselves to intellectual work. On the other hand, their moral responsibility is quite different, in fact, almost the opposite. Their moral responsibility is to try to understand the truth, to try to work with others to come to an understanding of what the world is like, to try to convey that to other people, help them understand, and lay the basis for constructive action. That's their responsibility. But of course there is a conflict. If you pursue the responsibility, you're likely to be denied the privileges of exercising the intellectual effort.
It's pretty evident, not hard to understand. If you're a young person, say, in college or in journalism or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of an independent mind, meaning you're beginning to fulfill your responsibility, there is a whole variety of devices that will try to deflect you from that error and, if you can't be controlled, to marginalize and eliminate you some way. In fourth grade you may be a behavior problem. In college you may be irresponsible and erratic and not the right kind of student. If you make it to the faculty you'll fail in what's sometimes called "collegiality," getting along with your colleagues. If you're a young journalist and you're pursuing stories that the managerial level above you understands, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to the police desk and advised that you are not thinking through properly and how you don't have proper standards of objectivity and so on. There's a range of devices. We live in a free society, so you're not sent to the gas chambers. They don't send the death squads after you, as is commonly done in many countries ... you don't have to go very far away to see that, say in Mexico. But there nevertheless are quite successful devices to ensure that doctrinal correctness is not seriously infringed upon.
But certainly intellectuals aren't only journalists, economists, political scientists and the like. That's one set in the social sciences. But then there's also hard scientists. There's biologists and physicists and the like. There it would seem that there's less of a social control problem, and so maybe you get a different kind of behavior. Are the intellectuals in the linguistics department comparable to the intellectuals in the economics department?
First of all, there is a social control problem. It's just that we've transcended it. Galileo faced it, for example. You go back a couple of centuries in the West and the social control problem was very severe. Descartes is alleged to have destroyed the final volume of his treatise on the world, the one that was supposed to deal with the human mind, because he learned of the fate of Galileo. That's something like the death squads. The Inquisition was doing precisely that. Okay, that's past, in the West, at least. Not everywhere.
Why is it past? In other words, what is it about a society in the West that enables at least that kind of pursuit of knowledge to be free to go wherever it goes, but not in, say, Moslem society?
There are a number of reasons. One of them is just increase in freedom and enlightenment. We've become a much freer society than we were in absolutist times. Popular struggles over centuries have enlarged the domain of freedom. Intellectuals have often played a role in this, during the Enlightenment, for example, in breaking barriers and creating a space for greater freedom of thought. That often took a lot of courage and quite a struggle. And it goes on until today. But there are other factors, too. It's utilitarian. It turns out that with modern science, especially in the last century or two, the ability to gain deeper understanding of the world has interacted critically with modern economic development, modern power. In fact, the course of science and the course of military endeavors is very close, way back to Archimedes. Archimedes was after all designing devices for military purposes. And military technology and science, their history closely interweaves in the modern period, particularly since the mid-nineteenth century. The sciences have actually begun to contribute materially to industrial development. So there are utilitarian purposes, but I wouldn't overexaggerate them. It's like the kind of result that led to freedom in other domains, like slavery, let's say. Or after a hundred and fifty years of American history women were allowed to vote. Things like that. These are significant.
Back to the point, especially after the great scientific revelations of the seventeenth century, it got to the point where you simply couldn't do science if you were subjected to the doctrinal controls that are quite effective outside the hard sciences. You can't do it. You try to be a physicist after Newton spinning off ideological fanaticism, and you're just out of the game. Progress was too much. It's striking. You can see it right here in Cambridge. I've lived here almost all my adult life. There are two major academic institutions only a couple of miles apart. One of them is science and technology based, MIT. The other has sciences of course, but the tone of it is basically humanities and social sciences, Harvard. And the atmosphere is radically different.
In fact, there is a funny problem in the natural sciences. That is that there is an internal conflict. The goal, and in fact what you're being paid for, to put is crassly, why you're being given the opportunities, is to find out the truth about the world. And you can't do that under doctrinal constraints. So there's a tension. On the one hand it just has to be free, and it just has to encourage independent thought. On the other hand, people with power and authority want it to be constrained. That contradiction is much more striking in the natural sciences than it is in the social sciences or humanities. You can tell falsehoods forever there.
But that implies that in the social sciences and economics and so on, to be crass, what they're being paid for is not to find the truth but something else.
They are performing their role as long as they provide ideological services. To make it simple, take, say, modern economic theory, with its sort of free-market ideology. Planners in business and government are not going to waste their time following those rules. So the U.S. has a steel industry because it radically violated those rules. It was able to recover its steel industry in the last ten years under allegedly free-market doctrine by barring all imports from abroad, by destroying labor unions, so you could wipe down wages, and just a couple of days ago by slamming tariffs up to over 100% on foreign steel. That's planning. On the other hand, the free-market ideology is very useful. It's a weapon against the general population here because it's a weapon against social spending. It's a weapon against poor people abroad, saying, You guys have to follow these rules. As long as the economists are providing what looks like an intellectual basis for this ideology, they're doing their job. You don't have to pay attention to them for actual planning. You can't do that with physics.
How does it happen? Here we have students who finish undergraduate work and decide they want to be an economist. So they go to, let's say, Harvard or MIT or some other school in economics. Presumably when they come in they have some notion of doing something that's relevant to society, to making life a little better, something like that, at least a reasonable number of them. When they come out, they're either going to teach at some small community college or they've learned the correct lesson. But no one gets up in front of the class and says, We will henceforth serve the interests of capital.
It happens in a lot of ways. Let me tell you a story I once heard from a black civil rights activist who came up to Harvard Law School and was there for a while. This must have been twenty years ago. He once gave a talk and said that kids were coming in to Harvard Law School with long hair and backpacks and social ideals and they were all going to go into public service, law and change the world. That's the first year. He said around April the recruiters come for the summer jobs, the Wall Street firms. Get a cushy summer job and make a ton of money. So the students figure, What the heck? I can put on a tie and jacket and shave for one day, because I need that money and why shouldn't I have it? So they put on a tie and a jacket for that one day and they get the job for the summer. Then they go off for the summer and when they come back in the fall, it's ties and jackets and obedience and a shift of ideology.
Sometimes it takes two years.
Sometimes it takes two years; that's overdrawing the point. But those factors are very influential. I've fought it all my life. It's extremely easy to be sucked into the dominant culture. It's very appealing. And the people don't look like bad people. You don't want to sit there and insult them. You try to be friends, and you are. You begin to conform, to adapt, to smooth off the harsher edges. Education at a place like Harvard is in fact largely geared to that, to a remarkable extent. I was a graduate student there. There was an organization called the Society of Fellows, which is a research outfit that selects a couple of people from all fields over the year. It was a remarkable opportunity to work. You had all the facilities of Harvard available and basically no responsibilities. Your only responsibilities were to show up for a dinner every Monday night which was sort of modelled on the Oxford-Cambridge high table. You spent the evening at the dinner with a couple of senior faculty members and other distinguished people. The purpose of that was basically socialization. You had to learn how to drink port and how to have polite conversations without talking about serious topics, but of course indicating that you could talk about serious topics if you were so vulgar as to actually do it. There's a whole set of mannerisms. In those days you had to learn how to wear British clothes. That was the appropriate affectation.
And it's very rare for a person to do all that and not begin to rationalize and think, This is really pretty good. Aren't I something for all this? And to begin to be impressed.
It kind of seeps in. They've had, for example, back in the early forties ... in the 1930s of course there was pretty big labor strife and labor struggle and it scared the daylights out of the business community because labor was actually winning the right to organize and even legislative victories. There were a lot of efforts to overcome this. Harvard played its role. It introduced a trade union program which brought in rising young people in the labor movement, the guy who looks like he's likely to be the local president next year. They're brought to Harvard, they sit in the business school and the dorms. They go through a socialization process. They're brought to share some of the values and an understanding of the elite. They're taught, our job is to work together. We all are together. There are two lines. One line, for the public, is, we're all together. We're all cooperating, joint enterprise, harmony and so on. Of course, meanwhile, business is fighting a vicious class struggle on the side, but that's in a different corner of the universe. That effort to socialize and integrate union activists, I've never measured its success, but I'm sure it was successful. It's pretty much the way what I experienced and saw what a Harvard education. There's much less of that at MIT, naturally, for exactly the reason you said: They're not training the people who are going to rule.
