Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Intellectuals v. Celebrities

On a recent road trip, some friends and I were discussing the failure of Americans to view intelligent, smart people as famous. Celebrities known for personalities and looks are more likely to be household names than people who constantly analyze, challenge, and shape the way we think.

Intelligent people should have a more prominent standing in today's pop culture, but a person's intelligence is not proved by their intellectual capabilities alone. In the introduction to their list of the top 20 public intellectuals, Foreign Policy magazine wrote that, "part of being a 'public intellectual' is also having a talent for communicating with a wide and diverse public." Intelligence is useless if you can't communicate your ideas to the public. Not only should you be in open communication with your peers with your findings and ideas, but also with the entire public as well. In order to do this, not only do you need to communicate effectively with the language of the intellectual, but also in a way intelligible to the upper, lower, and middle classes and the various ethnicities that compose our society.

It would be easy to say that the reason there aren't too many intellectuals in US pop culture is because they don't make an effort to explain their thoughts to the general public, but that's not true. Television, radio, and print are all accessible media where academics and intellectuals have presented the views to the public. Not only are there television programs like CNN's Larry King Live and CBS' 60 Minutes, but also shows like The Daily Show and its spin off The Colbert Report that use humor when presenting current events, authors, and politicians. NPR hosts several programs across the country aimed at informing the public of current politics, scientific innovations, and literary criticisms, to name some of their programming. The person with the highest IQ in the world writes a newspaper column, there are new books published every month, and countless magazines for every subject imaginable.

Albert Einstein was an international celebrity in his own time, but would you call Stephen Hawkings a celebrity? Have you read one of his books? Have you ever read one of his interviews or heard him field questions? How many people on Foreign Policy's list have you ever heard of? I'd only heard of three: Muhammed Yunus, Al Gore ,and Richard Dawkins.

3 comments:

Virb said...

I'd heard of 4: Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, Umberto Eco, and Gary Kasparov.

TallE said...

Steven Hawking is a celebrity. I have not read any of his books, but I have not read any books by Einstein either. (Or Paris Hilton for that matter, and she's a NYT Best-selling author.)

I have heard of 8 of the top 20:
Gülen (this one probably shouldn't count as I heard about him in an NPR story about the voting for the top 100 list. Interestingly, Turkey seems to dominate online voting. For example Mustafa Kemal Atatürk nearly won a BBC poll for "Top Entertainer of the Twentieth Century."), Chomsky, Gore, Lewis, Eco, Zakaria, Kasparov, and Dawkins.

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