‘The intellectual act today has no prestige whatsoever’

Inevitably, he is known as BoJo, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Among other inevitabilities predicted by those who know him is the dumbing down of political and intellectual discourse. The three great democracies of India, the U.S. and Britain now worship at the altar of anti-intellectualism.

To be an intellectual in these countries today is to invite derision, to be looked down upon. And since they contain nearly a quarter of the world’s population, that should worry us.

Intellect is a form of neither power nor privilege, but the anti-intellectual politician thinks it is; or at least tells his supporters that it is and sets out to ‘protect’ them, when in reality he is protecting himself and his little patch.

The tactics range from outright lying to deliberately misunderstanding an idea, reducing it to something ‘obviously’ anti-government or anti-national (which is one and the same in the politician’s eyes). For extra effect, he can claim it is anti-religion too, and complete the trifecta.

You can try to call out the lie, point to the logical and factual errors, or simply urge people to think for themselves. But as BoJo’s hero Winston Churchill once said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. And what is delaying the pant-wearing process further is the friendly media that exist merely to echo the master’s voice. Orange is the new black-and-white; either on the head or in the heart.

“It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals,” wrote Richard Hofstadter in his

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , “for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.” That was published in 1963, and any resemblance to persons living is not coincidental. Today’s intellectual is all that, as well as ‘anti-national’.

At a talk he gave in London some time ago, the author Alberto Manguel responded to an audience question thus, “The intellectual act today has no prestige whatsoever.” This is not an unfortunate accident as a deliberate political ploy. Manguel was talking of the consumer society, but it applies equally in the political society too. Truth is what the politician says it is.

Why does anti-intellectualism as a political tool (and not necessarily a social condition) survive? Here is Hofstadter again, “A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.”

The philosopher John Searle has defined intellectuals as “people who take ideas seriously for their own sake. Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical application it may have”.

Our politicians who have made a laughing stock of themselves for their so-called ‘scientific’ theories take ideas seriously (the ones they propound, that is), but it doesn’t matter to them whether a theory is true or false, and the only practical application they seek is that it furthers their own careers.

Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu