| Hackers and Philosophers |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sick | ] |
| [ | music |
| | David Bowie, "Little Wonder" | ] |
Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
--The Wizard of Oz (as portrayed by Frank Morgan) Our society has very few public intellectuals. I have long lamented this fact, but I should be careful to immediately add that this does not mean that our society has few intellectuals at all; a public intellectual is not simply an intellectual, but an intellectual able to gain public access--an intellectual to whom the public wants (is willing?) to listen.
As a sociological overgeneralization, we could say that, in any society, the public intellectuals tend to come from the dominant intellectual field in that society. And so, in the Enlightenment, the public intellectuals were philosophers, scientists, and authors. ("And" in this case is a true conjunction: Enlightenment public intellectuals tended to be all of the above, not simply any one of the above...) America, over at least the last sixty years, has been a society dominated by the sciences; our public intellectuals--few and far between, to be sure--have thus followed suit. (Noam Chomsky might seem like the obvious counterexample; and yet, remember, his actual "field" is linguistics!) In the mid-twentieth century, physics was the dominant field; and so our public intellectuals were people like Richard P. Feynman, Albert Einstein, and--to a lesser extent--Stephen Hawking. Over the last thirty years or so, physics has been slowly eclipsed by biology within the hard sciences; and so our more recent public intellectuals have been people like Richard Dawkins. (Yes--I know, he's British. And yet his popularity is not constrained to the British Isles; in an age when America is outsourcing so much of its labor, should we be at all surprised that we're outsourcing our public intellectuals as well?)
While biology has certainly not yet been knocked from its position of dominance, especially within the inner circile of "hard sciences," there is a newer trend in America over the last ten years or so: More and more of our (still very few in number!) public intellectuals are hailing from the field(s) of computer science. Witness last year's best-selling "The Last Lecture," a guide to life, the universe, and everything by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. The latest--for me, anyway--in this new trend is Paul Graham, programmer/venture capitalist (founder of Viaweb) and essayist-at-large.
( The Epistles of Saint Paul ) |
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