Public Intellectuals and the Common Good

Christian Thinking for Human Flourishing

Todd C. Ream, Jerry A. Pattengale, Christopher J. Devers, Todd C. Ream, Jerry A. Pattengale, Christopher J. Devers

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830854820
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Evangelical Christians are active across all spheres of intellectual and public life today. But a disconnect remains: the work they produce too often fails to inform their broader communities. In the midst of a divisive culture and a related crisis within evangelicalism, public intellectuals speaking from an evangelical perspective have a critical role to play—within the church and beyond. What does it look like to embrace such a vocation out of a commitment to the common good?Public Intellectuals and the Common Good draws together world-class scholars and practitioners to cast a vision for intellectuals who promote human flourishing. Representing various roles in the church, higher education, journalism, and the nonprofit sector, contributors reflect theologically on their work and assess current challenges and opportunities. What historically well-defined qualities of public intellectuals should be adopted now? What qualities should be jettisoned or reimagined?Public intellectuals are mediators—understanding and then articulating truth amid the complex realities of our world. The conversations represented in this book celebrate and provide guidance for those who through careful thinking, writing, speaking, and innovation cultivate the good of their communities.Contributors: - Miroslav Volf- Amos Yong- Linda A. Livingstone- Heather Templeton Dill- Katelyn Beaty- Emmanuel Katongole- John M. Perkins and David Wright

1

On Being a Christian Public Intellectual

Miroslav Volf

We live in a time of disorienting change. Around the end of the twentieth century, many things we long took for granted about our common life started to become questionable. Institutions and practices in many domains of life are undergoing rapid transformations. That is partly because accelerating technological developments are transforming all domains of life, from what we wear to how we wage wars, from how we play to how we work. But the disorientation is tied also to our deep values, to the “gods” that legitimize and orient our action in public space. Our gods are at war with one another. As we watch them strut around with puffed-out chests, charge at each other, or stagger bruised and bloodied, we are not sure which ones will be left standing.

To negotiate all these changes, we need at least three things: (1) to understand the seemingly chaotic world around us; (2) to discern, articulate, and commend visions of the good, flourishing life in diverse and largely pluralistic contexts; and (3) to find navigable paths to reach together the goals aligned with those visions. All three requirements are daunting. We can grapple with none of them without the help of public intellectuals, those among the knowledge workers who address matters of common concern and whose intended audience is the larger public.

Understanding Our World

Consider changes in four significant domains of our lives: environment, economy, politics, and cultural imagination about the character of humanity. The four domains are interconnected, but I will have to leave these enmeshments aside here and concentrate on the distinct challenges in each.

Environment. The kind of modernization our major institutions are all designed to serve, and with which most humans today strongly identify, is proving unsustainable. The most basic reason is, as Bruno Latour puts it, the “lack of a planet vast enough” to accommodate the dream of rapid and unending expansion that propels modernization.1 Earth’s ecosystem is straining to withstand human assault and is hitting back in the form of extreme weather events, for instance. In response, some, mostly the superrich and techno-geeks, are laying the foundations of a possible escape into paradisiac space colonies; others, mostly the poor and religious, are counting on the second coming to rapture them out of the coming desolation. The challenge before us is to rediscover a vision of a shared world as the home for the entire community of creation.

Economics. It is hard to miss the scandalously yawning gap between a small group of the superrich and the vast sea of the ultrapoor, both within and among the nations. But with regard to wealth generation, a bigger challenge than crass inequality may turn out to be the violence, oppression, and exploitation that the current world economic system seems to require for no greater return than marginally lowering the cost of comfort for the growing middle class. One of the crassest examples of this is the violence against children and women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo driven by the search for profits from coltan, cobalt, and gold. It is not clear that such violence would diminish if the ultrarich gave away 90 percent of their wealth. Other troubling features of the finance-dominated current phase of capitalism are less obvious, perhaps, but deeply disconcerting, partly because they are at the root of both unconscionable wealth differentials and the violence toward the poorest of the poor.2 For instance, this form of capitalism encourages a kind of social bond–dissolving meritocratic imagination that turns out to be nothing more than a sham.3 It also seduces us to sever our idea of wealth from any connection with the entirety of the goods of creation, tangible and intangible, created or made, possessed individually or in common.4

Politics. Nationalisms are burgeoning everywhere; bridges between communities and nations are collapsing and walls are going up, all in the name of cultural, ethnic, or national identities defined in highly oppositional terms.5 At the same time, the practice of democracy is rapidly losing legitimacy. Citizens in nations with long democratic traditions, such as the United States, no longer act as “partners in self-government.” Instead, politics are “a form of war,”6 as Ronald Dworkin put it in 2006, before the American political scene turned into the mud pit of incivility and demagogy that it has become since Donald Trump rose to political power. Even worse, both the political right and the political left are in crisis. The plutocratic and populist new-right has all but swallowed the conservative movement that rested on a moral vision (a contested one, to be sure, but a moral vision nonetheless). The factions on the left seem to agree on little more than the need for more equitable distribution of benefits.

Humanity. With the privatization of the goods characteristic of modern societies, many seem to have lost a sense of what it would mean to live lives that are worthy of our humanity, however divergently construed those visions of humanity may be. We work for resources so we can each pursue our unique dreams, but those dreams are unstable because they depend on our fickle tastes, while the resources have a way of morphing from means to ends themselves. When it comes to living a life worthy of our humanity, we are like those among frustrated painters who are so obsessed with the quality of their tools that they never actually get to painting.7 We seem to have forgotten how to be authentically human, having even lost the sense that there is such a thing as true humanity.

As it turns out, we are uncertain about not only the how of humanity, but the what of it as well. For one, on both the progressive left and the radical right, doubt is spreading about the very idea of a common humanity.8 Many consider shared biological roots, shared language, shared customs or practices, shared territory—in a phrase, a shared social identity—to be ontologically and not merely epistemologically prior to common humanity.9 Concurrently, advances in science and technology continue to generate questions about what kind of a being a human is and who counts as one. Where are the lines separating humans from other animals on the one side and from likely future cybernetic “organisms” on the other?

The fundamental questions we face over our humanity, politics, economics, and environment cannot be addressed without rigorous scholarly work and deep reflection. Unless we adopt some form of nondemocratic authoritarianism as the preferred mode of governance, none of the answers that we may come up with will be embraced by citizens without what they consider to be compelling reasons. It will take public intellectuals to articulate and communicate these reasons. Public intellectuals are likely to be even more important in the future than they are today.

Two Challenges

Public intellectuals are indispensable, but today they face important, perhaps even unsurmountable, challenges. Let me name only two.

Gap between knowledge and opinion. The first challenge is to bridge the gap between reasonably established knowledge and popular opinion and, consequently, between scholars and the general public. Consider, first, the relation between public intellectuals and knowledge generators or scholars. We live in a time of specialized research and exponential growth of knowledge. As a result, we know a great deal about minute aspects of reality, but we are unsure how to organize this ever-growing knowledge into a unified whole. Given the astounding rates of knowledge production—knowledge is now said to be doubling roughly twice each day, and the rate is increasing exponentially—it seems impossible to pull highly specialized knowledge into the kind of unified vision needed to guide decision making in both personal and public domains.10 It is just this impossible task that public intellectuals have to take on themselves. As a consequence, scholars often disdain public intellectuals as dilettantes. Those among scholars bold—or foolish—enough to wade into matters of common concern think of themselves often as amateurs in this task, their expertise in their own subfields notwithstanding.

The general public is often no more charitable to public intellectuals than is the scholarly community, perhaps for good reasons. Like scholars, but from a different perspective, the general population is scornful of public intellectuals’ ignorance. Public intellectuals are too detached from life as it is lived on the ground; what they say or write may be correct in theory but is of no use in practice, as the saying goes, which was common already almost three centuries ago and to which Immanuel Kant took time to respond.11

When the wider public refuses to give public intellectuals respect and a hearing, public intellectuals lose their audience and, in an important sense, a dimension of their identity. Perhaps part of the problem is that, though public intellectuals are eager to learn from scholars, they are, on the whole, not inclined to think (1) that the broader public has anything to teach them or (2) that having command of the vernacular matters.12 But because the search for common goods is dialogical, it will have to involve paying attention not only to scholarly research but also to the wisdom of ordinary people living in concrete times and places.

Clashing moral universes. The first challenge facing public intellectuals is successful communication across an increasing chasm between scholarly knowledge and public opinion. The second challenge also concerns a chasm, not of knowledge but of moral vision and identity. Earlier, I mentioned a relatively recently formed divide between those who believe the earth is the single common home for all creatures to share and those who, marked by displaying scandalously self-centered exceptionalism, want to exit the earth and leave its denizens to face disaster. Another divide—many divides, in fact—concerns political differences, created after the French Revolution, between the left and the right on the trajectory of modernization and antimodernization.13 Finally, the most ancient and enduring divides concern ethnic, racial, religious, and national identities.

Engaged in simmering or raging conflict across all these divides, participants get trapped in what they experience as alternative moral universes. That holds true for many public intellectuals as well. The more intense the struggles, the worse track record the intellectuals involved tend to have. In such situations, many become “reckless minds,” to borrow a phrase from Mark Lilla’s book on public intellectuals in twentieth-century Europe.14 Celebrated philosophers, literary figures, and scientists who also acted as public intellectuals have been among the most ardent supporters of racism, colonialism, Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. In part this is because public intellectuals tend to identify too tightly with a group or ideology on one side of the trenches. An independent moral ground on which to stand is lost to them.

But it is not just that situations of moral and ideological conflicts generate and attract reckless minds. Such situations also tend to make inaudible and invisible those public intellectuals courageous enough to speak as independent moral agents. Split into blocs, the larger public loses ears to hear the voice speaking from a standpoint outside the moral binary defined by the struggle. Combatants on one side need those on the other side to be enemies, and those who assess the struggle from an independent standpoint and possibly offer mediating alternatives are shut out.15

Christian Public Intellectuals

What would it mean to be a Christian public intellectual in the setting in which public intellectuals are indispensable and find it a challenge to be both respected and heard?

Moral ground. The key question for any public intellectual—for any human being as well, of course—is the moral ground on which to stand. The temptation of a public intellectual is to pander to the desires and interests of their own affinity groups. In ancient Greece, the so-called Sophists sought to acquire skill in rhetoric and debate so they could help political friends and harm enemies; they showed little concern for truth. Admittedly, this is how philosophers, notably Plato and Aristotle, describe the Sophists.16 The philosophers’ ideal was Socrates, a man for whom the search for truth stood above rhetorical skill and attachment to friends: “Never mind the manner, which may or may not be good; but think only of the truth of my words,” Socrates said to the Athenians during his trial (in Plato’s Apology). He was condemned to death because his attachment to truth brought him into opposition with the state and its gods.

Socrates was a philosopher and a public intellectual. It would be hard to call Jesus a public intellectual. Jesus spoke and acted publicly, and he was crucified for reasons not entirely dissimilar to those that led to Socrates’s death sentence. But he was the Word-become-flesh and herald of the kingdom of God, of God’s coming to dwell among the people of Israel and on the entire earth, more of a prophet than a critical thinker. Importantly—and, again, not entirely dissimilarly to Socrates—he did not only speak about God’s coming to make the world into God’s home; he also embodied the very vision he proclaimed. He was, as early church father Origen said of him, “God’s kingdom itself.” Conflict with religious and political rulers of the day got him crucified. But he was condemned to death under the auspice of a broader set of public institutions and agents, such as law and public opinion.17

For Christian public intellectuals, Socrates is a shining example of an intellectual radically committed to truth, but Jesus Christ, his teaching and his life, is the moral ground on which they stand. That moral ground is narrow and often uncomfortable—“the gat...