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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 10 March 2013

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Despite an abundance of ‘talking heads,’ a nation in need of wisdom finds

the public intellectual missing from action.

Photo: Financial Timers

“Today the thinker is an endangered species. All our universities are turning into book-balancing business schools or results-driven scientific research centres, treating students as client-customers who deserve to see an investment return in the form of increased living standards and higher salaries in exchange for spending their student loans, and funded by patrons and public bodies wanting to see practical results. Once you joined a university to service the global advancement of ideas. Now you employ it to make you more employable. The notion that thinking about abstract ideas like art and life might be an end in itself is being priced out of existence and legislated into oblivion.”

Never mind endangered animals – it's the thinkers that we need to save

“Once thinkers were everywhere, like butterflies, sparrows and bees, which have also virtually disappeared.

As late as the early 1980s, you'd still come down in the morning and find some Marxist literary theorist had been on the doorstep and pecked off the top of the milk. But no one under 40 can be expected to remember the ubiquitous abundance of pure thought that once characterised our culture. It has disappeared incrementally, like roadside wildflowers and sticklebacks in streams, as if it never were.

In the early 50s, everyone was happy because there was only one TV channel and it was programmed by patronising and benign paternalistic liberals. Their crazy beliefs were encouraged by the hoary establishment buffers who held the purse strings and who saw arts, thought and culture as hallmarks of a civilised society, even as they retched in secret at the increase in downwardly angled thought ducts like cheap Penguin paperbacks, red brick universities and Play for Today.

In those halcyon days, the entire nation would sit down with bottles of stout and plates of dripping to watch a programme in which an enthusiastically cigarette-smoking Bertrand Russell, or someone of similar super-intelligence, sat motionless in a chair and discussed for hours the finer points of philosophy in incredible detail with an equally un-televisual man.”…Continue to read