By Stefan Schindler
Terry Eagleton’s British article on the public danger of “The Death of the Intellectual” (Red Pepper Magazine; October 13, 2008) is lucid, astute, and right on target. It applies even more to America than Britain.
The demise of the public intellectual as a partner in civic discourse is symptomatic of social decay, and points directly to the fact that the primary function of American education and the mainstream news media is to ignorate, not educate, liberate, stimulate. How else did we end up with Reagan through Cheney-Bush to Trump and company?
Eagleton mentions Noam Chomsky as a courageous and virtuous paradigm of the public intellectual; that is to say, of the philosopher as concerned citizen, writing with the fervor of Thomas Paine. Another such example for the last half-century was Howard Zinn, whose courage of conscience echoed that of Emerson and William James.
I was honored to co-present The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award to both Zinn and Chomsky, and to nominate Michael Parenti for the same – public intellectuals in the like-minded company of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, John Pilger, Victor Wallis, Lewis Lapham, Abby Martin, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and of course Terry Eagleton – all names utterly unfamiliar to most Americans.
Meanwhile, the corporate negation of net neutrality follows close upon the heels of the corporate takeover of American colleges and universities, now bloated with high-paid bureaucrats, slave-waging adjuncts, and debt-ridden students in hock to the banks who are the prime culprits in America’s economic apartheid and neoconservative slide toward unrepentant fascism. And, of course, the primary function of the American military is, as it long has been, to make the world safe for the depredations of the Fortune 500.
Hence Parenti’s observation: “Third-world nations are not under-developed. They’re over-exploited.”
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