Religion in Public Intellectualism

To add on to my previous post on Public Intellectualism, the role of the so-called cleric in the realm of intellectualism is one that is highly debated. Some hard-line secularists claim that the two realms of religion and intellectualism are mutually exclusive – one is based on belief and the other facts. Others claim that religion has a large role in the public intellectual realm. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. Once again, I will encourage you to head over to the increasingly cited Stephen Mack, who wrote a companion piece to his own Public Intellectual essay entitled Wicked Paradox: The Cleric as Public Intellectual.

Mack makes a lot of convincing arguments in this piece. While I don’t usually agree with Mack on everything, I think he does a fair job of protecting the role that religion has played in shaping American politics against the angry secularists who denounce its legitimacy in their field. While I myself am not a very religious person at all, I still agree that religion played perhaps the central role in forming this nation, and the Constitution is based on many of the good things that religion is supposed to provide. Mack does a nice job of explaining this in the following passage:

In many ways, American political history is the history of activist theologians from the right and the left. These men and women have been intellectuals of a special kind—people whose religious training and experience shaped their vision of a just society and required them to work for it. They have been key players in some of our most important reform movements, from abolitionism, the labor movement, and civil rights to the peace movements of various generations

This hostility towards any religion in the public intellectual field reminds me of point I made in my previous post about the pessimism towards the role of intellectualism as a whole in America. I find many of these public figures to be angry people who seem to feel they are above the rest of the country in their intelligence and importance. While I wholeheartedly agree with strict separation between church and state, I find it undemocratic to try and ban the discussion of religious values in formulating public policy. Many of the tenants of religion (specifically the Judeo-Christian values found in the majority of American figures, but found in the vast majority of all major religion) are aimed at promoting harmony and peace. There is nothing wrong with promoting just laws and policies aimed at these goals, and our country has been formed to try and guarantee at least “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Now when it comes to education, I agree that religion should not be prevalent. When it comes to that realm of intellectualism (academia), the two seem to be incompatible. However, public intellectualism covers a lot more ground than just academia, and thus there is a room for religion in the realm. So I agree that evolution should be taught instead of creationism, and no public funds should go to promoting any religion in the classroom. Fortunately, these things are already protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Our government is designed to neither promote nor prohibit any particular religion, and so far I think it is doing a pretty decent job at it.

Recently, the role of religion in the public sphere has been magnified during the last seven years of the Bush Administration. The outspoken liberals on the left have been blaming plenty of things on the Bush Administration’s using religion as a crutch to round up support from the conservative religious population, and the conservatives claim that the liberals are attacking religion itself with their extreme secularism. There is no doubt that the Administration made a strategic decision to target the religious right in the small states and Middle America, with very successful results. However, how much has religion actually played on any important legislation? Abortion is still legal, and creationism is still not being taught in school. The only real issue with strong religious points of contention has been the debate over same-sex marriage. However, this has not been a conservative vs. liberal issue, as many democrats oppose legislation legalizing it as well. Why? Well, because virtually ALL political figures are religious themselves (and if they are not, they have to play like they are for the voters)! It is not the religious right vs. secularist left battle that it is often portrayed as. Once again, religion plays a large role in public intellectualism.

So where do we go from here? Over the course of our development as a country, we have been working to arrive to the point we are at today. There is a clear divide between religion and the state (and education), yet religion is still extremely prominent and represented by our elected officials. Public intellectuals will have to ease their anti-religion stance and recognize its importance in their field of expertise. It permeates all of society and is something that should not be feared or persecuted against.

Public Intellectualism

From the earliest philosophers to the latest columnists, many people throughout history have been labeled “Public Intellectuals”. These people have and continue to serve an important role in society, providing the public with figures to look to when evaluating issues that require informed opinions. Sometimes these individuals feel they know the solution to every problem, and others simply prefer to point out problems. Through Public Intellectuals, societies have literally sprung to life based on principles that had not been exhibited prior. Plato, perhaps the earliest known published Public Intellectual, outlined his vision for the perfect city in Republic (although how perfect that city would be is highly debatable). John Locke, JS Mill, and other liberal thinkers provided the inspiration for the U.S. Constitution.

Fellow blogger Stephen Mack raises up an interesting issue in his essay entitled The "Decline" of Public Intellectuals. In his post, Mack argues against the growing notion of America as being a place of “anti-intellectualism”. Instead of the country being anti-intellectual, perhaps the so-called Public Intellectuals are simply not used to receiving criticism, something that comes along with that title that many have bestowed upon themselves. Mack shoots down the ‘America as the deathbed of public intellectualism’ myth quite well in this passage:

Without replaying the whole debate, two points will suffice: One, the fact that academic institutions wield enormous financial, technological, and cultural power—and the fact that, more generally, education continues to be the centerpiece of some of our most cherished social myths (i.e., “the “American Dream”)—are both powerful reasons to doubt that Americans suffer from some instinctive hostility to intellectuals. Two, what is sometimes identified as anti-intellectualism is in fact intellectual—that is, a well articulated family of ideas and arguments that privilege the practical, active side of life (e.g., work) over the passive and purely reflective operations of the mind in a vacuum.

To expand upon his first point, academic institutions indeed harbor a tremendous amount of influence on virtually everything in American society. All one has to do is to watch any television program dealing with any particular social or scientific problem or read any academic journal and you will find representatives from hundreds of universities who are more than willing to serve the role as ‘expert’ for the masses. These people themselves form the majority of the Public Intellectuals found in this country, vastly outnumbering the few who operate solo or through the press. Who else do we turn to when an issue or topic needs explaining or further exploration? These public intellectuals deal with issues ranging from political unrest in the Middle East, to global warming, to natural phenomena and disasters, all the way to trying to explain the legal process to the masses when our favorite celebrity is arrested for driving drunk for the fifth time while high on cocaine. We as Americans look to these figures to give forth their expert opinions and derive our own thoughts from their views.

Not only do we look to these professors and intellectuals for their input, we flock to these institutions to pursue, as Mack puts it, “The American Dream”. In today’s culture, one cannot hope to find a decent job or role in society without at least a bachelor’s degree from a major university. From the moment a child is born, most parents will do everything they can to ensure their children “goes to a decent college”, and this is reflected in their upbringing. If we as Americans displayed the type of hostility towards intellectualism as claimed here by some disgruntled writers and here by Richard Posner, this obsession with pursuing high levels of education would be frowned upon, not encouraged.

As Mack alludes to, perhaps what is perceived by these pessimists as anti-intellectualism is just an alternative way of living. I would go another step forward and suggest that it may just be criticism. It is very possible that those who fancy themselves to be Public Intellectuals believe so strongly that their words are infallible that, when exposed through public channels, they retreat into their cave of self-justification and label these legitimate criticisms as an attack on intellectualism itself. Instead of behaving like true intellectuals, these commentators shun things that they do not partake in themselves and label it as un-intellectual and therefore just another chink in America’s self-worth and the further decline of society towards the idiotic.

In fact, I would also suggest that this proclamation of America’s intellectual decline is rooted in the common myth of nostalgia. In society, a yearning for the “better days” of the past can be found in every generation. Many people clamor for the days of old when people were of “stronger moral fiber” and the such. The WWII generation was “the Greatest Generation” and each subsequent generation has failed to live up to their lofty status and hopes. This can be found in many aspects of society, as we are constantly reminded by our elders of the days when there was virtually no crime and horrible things that are commonplace supposedly were unheard of. The truth is there were just as many perverts and criminals in the past, but it was simply shielded from the public eye as well as the younger members of the population. Looking at this nostalgic characteristic of the public, we can see that perhaps these intellectuals saying the world is going to hell can be lumped in with this myth of the superiority of the past. In truth, people today are far more educated than they ever have been, and society as a whole is much more in tune with the way things work and trying to look at things from a more intellectual viewpoint.

The decline of public intellectualism is merely a myth that is being spread around by a group of pessimistic and angry individuals who feel they are not being taken seriously enough. Whether it is due to the alternate lifestyles of individuals as Mack points out, or whether they are simply growing bitter with the growing world and their lack of size in it, this angry posturing is getting old. Not everything is bad with today’s society, and there is a lot of intellectualism to be found around the globe.