public intellectual vs academic intellectual
Does academia have a monopoly over the world of ideas? Does an intellectual need to be an academician to be taken seriously?
The answer to both of these questions is negative. One reason is due to a trend taking place outside academia and the other reason is due to a trend taking place inside academia.
Outside. Thanks to the rise of the digital technologies, it has become dramatically easier to access and distribute information. You do not need to be affiliated with any university to participate in high quality lectures, freely access any journal or book, and exchange ideas.
Inside. Einstein considered Goethe to be “the last man in the world to know everything.” Today academia has become so specialized that most academicians have no clue even what their next-door colleagues are working on. This had the side-effect of pushing public intellectuals, and therefore a portion of intellectual activity, outside academia.
I have written a lot about the rise of the digital before. In this post I will be focusing on the second point.
Many of you probably do not even know what it means to be a public intellectual. Don’t worry, I did not neither. After all, we have all gone through the same indoctrination during our education, subtly instilling in us the belief that academia has a monopoly over the world of ideas, and that the only true intellectuals are those residing within it.
Before we start, note that the trends mentioned above are not some short-term phenomena. They are both reflections of metaphysical principles that govern evolution of information, and have nothing to do with us whatsoever.
First trend is unstoppable because information wants to be free.
Second trend is unstoppable because information wants to proliferate.
A Personal Note
A few readers asked me why I have not considered pursuing an academic career. I actually did, and by doing so, learned the hard way that academia is a suffocating place for people like me, who would rather expand their range than increase their depth.
This is the main reason why I wanted to write this piece. I am pretty sure that there are young folks out there, going through similar dilemmas, burning with intellectual energy but also suffering from extreme discomfort in their educational environments. They should not go through the same pains to realize that the modern university has turned into a cult of experts.
The division of labor is the very organizational principle of the university. Unless that principle is respected, the university simply fails to be itself. The pressure, therefore, is constant and massive to suppress random curiosity and foster, instead, only a carefully channeled, disciplined curiosity. Because of this, many who set out, brave and cocky, to take academe as a base for their larger, less programmed intellectual activity, who are confident that they can be in academe but not of it, succumb to its culture over time.
… It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual. For a great many academics, the impulse to break free, to run wild, simply comes too late for effective realization.
Jack Miles - Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual
There is of course nothing wrong with developing a deep expertise in a narrow subject. But societies need the opposite type of intellectuals as well, for a variety of reasons which will be very clear by the end of this post.
When I look back in time to see what type of works had the greatest impact on my life, the pattern is very clear. Without any exception, all such works were produced by public intellectuals with great range and tremendous communication skills. In fact, if I knew I was going to be stranded on a desert island, I would not even bring a single book by an academic intellectual. (Of course, without the inputs of hundreds of specialists, there would not be anything to synthesize for the generalist. Nevertheless it is the synthesis people prefer to carry in their minds at all times, not the original inputs.)
This post is a tribute to the likes of David Brooks (Sociology), Noam Chomsky (Politics), Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Finance), Kevin Kelly (Technology), Ken Wilber (Philosophy), Paul Davies (Physics) and Lynn Margulis (Biology). Thank you for being such great sources of inspiration.
Anyway, enough on the personal stuff. Let us now start our analysis.
We will cycle through five different characterizations, presenting public intellectuals as
Amorphous Dilettantes,
Superhuman Aspirants,
Obsessive Generalists,
Metaphor Artists, and
Spiritual Leaders.
Thereby, we will see how they
enhance our social adaptability,
push our individual evolutionary limits,
help science progress,
communicate us the big picture, and
lead us in the right direction.
Public Intellectuals as Amorphous Dilettantes
Enhancing Our Social Adaptability
Every learning curve faces diminishing returns. So why become an expert at all? Why not just suffice with 80 percent competence? Just extract the gist of the subject and then move onto the next. Many fields are so complex that they are not open to complete mastery anyway.
Also, the world is such a rich place. Why blindly commit yourself to a single aspect of it? Monolithic ambitions are irrational.
Yes, it may be the experts who do the actual work to carry the society to greater heights. But while doing so, they end up failing to elevate themselves high enough to see the progress at large. That voyeuristic pleasure belongs only to the dilettantes.
Dilettantes are jacks of all trades, and their amorphousness is their asset.
They are very useful in resource stricken and fast changing environments like an early-stage startup which faces an extremely diverse set of challenges with a very limited hiring budget. Just like stem cells, dilettantes can specialize on demand and then revert back to their initial general state when there are enough resources to replace them with experts. (Good dilettantes do not multi-task. They serially focus on different things.)
They can act as the weak links inside innovation networks and thereby lubricate into existence greater number of multidisciplinary efforts and serendipities. Just like people conversant in many languages, they can act as translators and unify otherwise disparate groups.
They are like wild bacteria that can survive freely on their own at the outer edges of humanity. An expert, on the other hand, can function only within a greater cooperative network. Thus, evolution can always fall back on the wild types if the environment changes at a breakneck speed and destroys all such networks.
It is a pity that the status of dilettantes plummeted in modern age whose characteristic collective flexibility enabled more efficient deployment of experts. After all, as humans, we did not win the evolutionary game because we are the fastest or the strongest. We won because we were overall better than average, because we were versatile and better at adaptation. In other words, we won because we were true dilettantes.
Every 26 million years, more or less, there has been an environmental catastrophe severe enough to put down the mighty from their seat and to exalt the humble and meek. Creatures which were too successful in adapting themselves to a stable environment were doomed to perish when the environment suddenly changed. Creatures which were unspecialized and opportunistic in their habits had a better chance when Doomsday struck. We humans are perhaps the most unspecialized and the most opportunistic of all existing species. We thrive on ice ages and environmental catastrophes. Comet showers must have been one of the major forces that drove our evolution and made us what we are.
Freeman Dyson - Infinite in All Directions (Page 32)
Similarly, only generalist birds like robins can survive in our most urbanized locations. Super-dynamic environments always weed out the specialists.
Public Intellectuals as Superhuman Aspirants
Pushing Our Individual Evolutionary Limits
Humans were enormously successful because, in some sense, they contained a little bit of every animal. Their instincts were literally a synthesis.
Now what is really the truth about these soul qualities of humans and animals? With humans we find that they can really possess all qualities, or at least the sum of all the qualities that the animals have between them (each possessing a different one). Humans have a little of each one. They are not as majestic as the lion, but they have something of majesty within them. They are not as cruel as the tiger but they have a certain cruelty. They are not as patient as the sheep, but they have some patience. They are not as lazy as the donkey—at least everybody is not—but they have some of this laziness in them. All human beings have these things within them. When we think of this matter in the right way we can say that human beings have within them the lion-nature, sheep-nature, tiger-nature, and donkey-nature. They bear all these within them, but harmonized. All the qualities tone each other down, as it were, and the human being is the harmonious flowing together, or, to put it more academically, the synthesis of all the different soul qualities that the animal possesses.
Rudolf Steiner - Kingdom of Childhood (Page 43)
Now, just as animals can be viewed as “special instances” of humans, we can view humans as special instances of what a dilettante secretly aspires to become, namely a superhuman.
Humans minds could integrate the instinctive (unconscious) aspects of all animal minds, thanks to the evolutionary budding of a superstructure called the consciousness, which allowed them to specialize their general purpose unconsciousness into any form necessitated by the changing circumstances.
Dilettantes try to take this synthesis to the next level, and aim to integrate the rationalistic (conscious) aspects of all human minds. Of course, they utterly fail at this task since they lack the next-level superstructure necessary to control a general purpose consciousness. Nevertheless they try and try, in an incorrigibly romantic fashion. I guess some do it just for the sake of a few precious voyeuristic glimpses of what it feels to be a superhuman.
Note that, it will be the silicon-based life - not us - who will complete the next cycle of differentiation-integration in the grand narrative of evolution. As I said before, our society is getting better at deploying experts wherever they are needed. This increased fluidity of labor is entirely due to the technological developments which enable us to more efficiently govern ourselves. What is emerging is a superconsciousness that is coordinating our consciousnesses, and pushing us in the direction of a single unified global government.
“Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. The connections and pathways of the internet could be seen as the pathways of neurons and synapses in a global brain” - Wikipedia
Nevertheless there are advantages to internalizing portions of the hive mind. Collaboration outside can never fully duplicate the effects of collaboration within. As a general rule, closer the “neurons”, better the integration. (The “neuron” could be an entire human being or an actual neuron in the brain.)
Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams - they were less likely to produce a smash hit - but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres.
David Epstein - Range (Pages 209-210)
Notice that there is a pathological dimension to the superhuman aspiration, aside from the obvious narcissistic undertones. As one engulfs more of the hive mind, one inevitably ends up swallowing polar opposite profiles.
“The wisest human being would be the richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all kinds of human beings - and in the midst of this his great moments of grand harmony.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a sense, reality is driven by insanity. It owes its “harmony” and dynamism to the embracing of the contradictory tensions created by dualities. We, on the other hand, feel a psychological pressure to choose sides and break the dualities within our social texture. Instead of expanding our consciousness horizontally, we choose to contract it to maintain consistency and sanity.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson“Do I contradict myself? Very well. Then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
- Walt Whitman
Recall that humans are an instinctual synthesis of the entire animal kingdom. This means that, while we strive for consistency at a rational level, we are often completely inconsistent at an emotional level, roaming wildly around the whole spectrum of possibilities. In other words, from the perspective of an animal, we probably look utterly insane, since it can not tell that there is actually a logic to this insanity that is internally controlled by a superstructure.
“A human being is that insane animal whose insanity has invented reason.”
- Cornelius Castoriadis
Public Intellectuals as Obsessive Generalists
Helping Science Progress
If a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, a generalist is unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more. Both forms of knowledge are genuine and legitimate. Someone who acquires a great deal of knowledge about one field grows in knowledge, but so does someone who acquires a little knowledge about many fields. Knowing more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing less and less about more and more tends to breed humility.
Jack Miles - Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual
The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything.Dorion Sagan - Cosmic Apprentice (Page 2)
What separates good public intellectuals from bad ones is that the good have a compass which guide them while they are sailing through the infinite sea of knowledge. Those without a compass do not at all display any humility. Instead, they suffer from gluttony, which is an equally deadly sin as pride, which plagues the bad academic intellectuals whose expertise-driven egos easily spill over to areas they have no competence in.
The compass I am talking about is analogical reasoning, the kind of reasoning needed for connecting the tapestry of knowledge. Good public intellectuals try to understand the whole geography rather than wonder around mindlessly like a tourist. They have a pragmatic goal in mind, which is to understand the mind of God. They venture horizontally in order to lift themselves up to a higher plateau by discovering frameworks that apply to several subject areas at once.
By definition, one can not generalize if one is stuck inside a single silo of knowledge. But jumping around too many silos does not help neither. Good public intellectuals dig deep enough into a subject area to bring their intuition to a level that is sufficient to make the necessary outside connections. Bad ones spread themselves too thin, and eventually become victims of gluttony.
As I explained in a previous blog post, science progresses via successful unifications. Banishing of generalists from the academia therefore had the effect of slowing down science by drowning it in complete incrementalism. In the language of Freeman Dyson, today, academia is breeding only “frogs”.
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.
Freeman Dyson - Birds and Frogs (Page 37)
Without the “birds” doing their synthesizing and abstracting, we can not see where the larger paradigm is evolving towards, and without this higher level map, we can not accelerate the right exploratory paths or cut off the wrong ones. More importantly, losing sight of the unity of knowledge creates an existential lackluster that sooner or later wears off everyone involved in pursuit of knowledge, including the academic intellectuals.
Consciousness discriminates, judges, analyzes, and emphasizes the contradictions. It's necessary work up to a point. But analysis kills and synthesis brings back to life. We must find out how to get everything back into connection with everything else.
- Carl Gustav Jung, as quoted in The Earth Has a Soul (Page 209)
True, academic intellectuals are occasionally allowed to engage in generalization, but they are forbidden from obsessing too much about it and venturing too far away from their expertise area. This prevents them from making fresh connections that could unlock their long-standing problems. That is why most paradigm shifts in science and technology are initiated by outsiders who can bring in brand new analogies to the field. (Generalists are also great at taming the excessive enthusiasm of specialists who often over-promote the few things that they are so personally invested in.) For instance, both Descartes and Darwin were revolutionaries who addressed directly (and eloquently) to the general public, without any university affiliations.
Big picture generalities are also exactly what the public cares about:
There are those who think that an academic who sometimes writes for a popular audience becomes a generalist on those occasions, but this is a mistaken view. A specialist may make do as a popularizer by deploying his specialized education with a facile style. A generalist must write from the full breadth of a general education that has not ended at graduation or been confined to a discipline. If I may judge from my ten years' experience in book publishing, what the average humanities academic produces when s/he sets out to write for "the larger audience" is a popularizer's restatement of specialized knowledge, while what the larger audience responds to is something quite different: It is specialized knowledge sharply reconceptualized and resituated in an enlarged context.
Jack Miles - Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual
While nitty gritty details change all the time, the big picture evolves very slowly. (This is related to the fact that it becomes harder to say new things as one moves higher up in generality.) Hence the number of good public intellectuals needed by the society is actually not that great. But finding and nurturing one is not easy, for the same reason why finding and nurturing a potential leader is not easy.
Impostors are another problem. While bad academic intellectuals are quickly weeded out by their community, bad public intellectuals are not, because they do not form a true community. Their ultimate judge is public, whose quality determines the quality of who becomes popular, in a fashion that is not too dissimilar to how the quality of leaders correlates with the quality of followers.
Public Intellectuals as Metaphor Artists
Communicating Us the Big Picture
As discussed in a previous blog post, generalizations happen through analogies and result in further abstraction. Metaphors, on the other hand, result in further concretization through the projection of the familiar onto the unfamiliar. That is why they are such great tools for communication, and why it is often pedagogically necessary to follow a generalization up with a metaphor to ground the abstract in the familiar.
While academic intellectuals write for each other, a public intellectual writes for the greater public and therefore has no choice but to employ spot-on metaphors to deliver his message. He is lucky in the sense that, compared to the academic intellectual, he has knowledge of many more fields and therefore enjoys a larger metaphor reservoir.
Bad academic intellectuals mistake depth with obscurity, as if something expressed with clarity can not be of any significance. They are often proud of being understood by only a few other people, and invent unnecessary jargon to keep the generalists at bay, and to create an air of originality. (Of course, an extra bit of jargon is inevitable, since as one zooms in, more phenomena become distinguishable and worth attaching new names.)
The third difference between an intellectual and an academic is the relative attachment of each to writing as a fine rather than a merely practical art. "If you happen to write well," Gustave Flaubert once wrote, "you are accused of lacking ideas."
… An academic is concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.
Jack Miles - Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual
While academic intellectuals obsess about discovery and originality, public intellectuals obsess about delivery and clarity.
Academic intellectuals worry a lot about attaching their names to new ideas. So, in some sense, it is natural for them to lack lucidity. After all, it takes a long time for a new born idea to mature and find its right spot in the grand tapestry of knowledge.
“To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.”
- Abraham Pais
It is also not surprising for professors to prefer to teach from (and refer to) the original texts rather than the more clear secondary literature. Despite the fact that only a minuscule number of students end up staying in academia, professors design their courses as if the goal is to train future professors who, like themselves, will value originality over clarity. Students are asked to trace all ideas back to their originators, and are given the implicit guarantee that they too will be treated with the same respect if they successfully climb the greasy pole.
It is actually quite important for a future academician to witness the chaotic process behind an idea’s birth (inside a single mind) and its subsequent maturation (out in the community). In formalistic subjects like mathematics and physics, where ideas reach their peak clarity at a much faster speed, the pedagogical pressure to choose the conceptual route (rather than the historical route) for teaching is great. So the students end up reading only the most polished material, never referring back to the original papers which contain at least some traces of battle scars. They are accelerated to the research frontier, but with much less of an idea about what it actually means to be at the frontier. Many, expecting a clean-cut experience, leave academia disillusioned.
Public intellectuals do not get their names attached to certain specific discoveries. Their main innovation lies in building powerful bridges and coining beautiful metaphors, and ironically, the better they are, the more quickly they lose ownership over their creations.
Effective metaphors tend to be easily remembered and transmitted. This is, in fact, what enables them to become clichés.
James Geary - I is an Other (Page 122)
Hence, while academic intellectuals are more like for-profit companies engaged in extractable value creation, public intellectuals are more like non-profit companies engaged in diffused value creation. They inspire new discoveries rather than make new discoveries themselves. In other words, they are more like artists, who enrich our lives in all sorts of immeasurable ways, and get paid practically nothing in return.
All ideas, including those generated by academic intellectuals, either eventually die out, or pass the test of time and prove to be so foundational that they reach their final state of maturity by becoming totally anonymized. Information wants to be free, not just in the sense of being accessible, but also in the sense of breaking the chains tied to its originator. No intellectual can escape this fact. For public intellectuals, the anonymization process happens much faster, because the public does not really care much about who originated what. What about the public intellectuals themselves, do they really care? Well, good ones do not, because their main calling has always been public impact (rather than private gain) anyway.
The dichotomy between those who obsess about “discovery and originality” and those who obsess about “delivery and clarity” has been very eloquently characterized by Rota within the sphere of mathematics, as the dichotomy between problem solvers and theorizers:
To the problem solver, the supreme achievement in mathematics is the solution to a problem that had been given up as hopeless. It matters little that the solution may be clumsy; all that counts is that it should be the first and that the proof be correct. Once the problem solver finds the solution, he will permanently lose interest in it, and will listen to new and simplified proofs with an air of condescension suffused with boredom.
The problem solver is a conservative at heart. For him, mathematics consists of a sequence of challenges to be met, an obstacle course of problems. The mathematical concepts required to state mathematical problems are tacitly assumed to be eternal and immutable.
... To the theorizer, the supreme achievement of mathematics is a theory that sheds sudden light on some incomprehensible phenomenon. Success in mathematics does not lie in solving problems but in their trivialization. The moment of glory comes with the discovery of a new theory that does not solve any of the old problems but renders them irrelevant.
The theorizer is a revolutionary at heart. Mathematical concepts received from the past are regarded as imperfect instances of more general ones yet to be discovered. Mathematical exposition is considered a more difficult undertaking than mathematical research.
Gian-Carlo Rota - Problem Solvers and Theorizers
Public Intellectuals as Spiritual Leaders
Leading Us in the Right Direction
Question: Who are our greatest metaphor artists?
Answer: Our spiritual leaders, of course.
Reading sacred texts too literally is a common rookie mistake. They are the most metaphor-dense texts produced by human beings, and this vagueness is a feature, not a bug.
Longevity. Thanks to their deliberately vague language, these texts have much higher chances of survival by being open to continuous re-interpretation through generations.
Mobilization. Metaphors are politically subversive devices, useful for crafting simple illuminating narrations that can mobilize masses.
“A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on."
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Charisma. Imagine a sacred text written like a dry academic paper, referring to other authors for trivially-obvious facts and over-contextualizing minute shit. Who would be galvanized by that? Nobody of course. Charismatic people anonymize mercilessly, and both fly high and employ plenty of metaphors.
Question: Who are our most obsessive generalists?
Answer: Again, our spiritual leaders.
Spiritual people care about the big picture, literally the biggest picture. They want to probe the mind of God, and as we explained in a previous post, the only way to do that is through generalizations. This quest for generalization is essentially what makes spiritual leaders so humble, visionary and wise.
Humble. It suffices to recall the second Jack Miles quote: “Knowing more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing less and less about more and more tends to breed humility.”
Visionary. Morgan Housel says that “the further back in history you look, the more general your takeaways should be.” I agree a hundred percent. In fact, the dual statement is also correct: The further you venture into the future, the more general your predictions should be. In other words, the only way to venture into far future is by looking at big historical patterns and transforming general takeaways into general predictions. That is why successful visionaries and paradigm shifters are all generalists. (There is now an entire genre of academicians trying to grasp why academicians are so bad at long-term forecasts. In a nutshell, experts beat generalists in short-term forecasting through incorporation of domain-specific insights, but this advantage turns into a disadvantage when it comes to making long-term forecasts because, in the long run, no domain can be causally isolated from another.)
Kuhn shows that when a scientific revolution is occurring, books describing the new paradigm are often addressed to anyone who may be interested. They tend to be clearly written and jargon free, like Darwin's Origin of Species. But once the revolution becomes mainstream, a new kind of scientist emerges. These scientists work on problems and puzzles within the new paradigm they inherit. They don't generally write books but rather journal articles, and because they communicate largely with one another, a specialized jargon develops so that even colleagues in adjacent fields cannot easily understand them. Eventually the new paradigm becomes the new status quo.
Norman Doidge - The Brain’s Way of Healing (Page 354)
Wise. The dichotomy between academic and public intellectuals mirrors the dichotomy between genius and wisdom. Sudden flashes of insight always help, but there is no short-cut to the big picture. You need to accumulate a ton of experience across different aspects of life. Academic culture, on the other hand, is genius-driven and revolves around solving specific hard technical problems. That is why academic intellectuals get worse as they age, while public intellectuals get better. This, by the way, poses a huge problem for the future of academia:
As our knowledge deepens and widens, so it will take longer to reach a frontier. This situation can be combated only by increased specialization, so that a progressively smaller part of the frontier is aimed at, or by lengthening the period of training and apprenticeship. Neither option is entirely satisfactory. Increased specialization fragments our understanding of the Universe. Increased periods of preliminary training are likely to put off many creative individuals from embarking upon such a long path with no sure outcome. After all, by the time you discover that you are not a successful researcher, it may be too late to enter many other professions. More serious still, is the possibility that the early creative period of a scientists life will be passed by the time he or she has digested what is known and arrived at the research frontier.
John D. Barrow - Impossibility (Page 108)
Question: Who are our best superhuman aspirants?
Answer: Yet again, our spiritual leaders.
I guess this answer requires no further justification since most people treat their spiritual leaders as superhumans anyway. But do they treat them in the same sense as we have defined the term? Now that is good question!
Remember, we had defined superhuman as an entity possessing a superconsciousness that can specialize a general purpose consciousness into any form necessitated by the changing circumstances. In other words, a superhuman can simulate any form of human consciousness on demand. According to Carl Gustav Jung, Christ was close to such an idealization.
For Jung, Christianity represented a necessary stage in the evolution in consciousness, because the divine image of Christ represented a more unified image of the autonomous human self than did the multiplicity of earlier pagan divinities.
David Fideler - Restoring the Soul of the World (Page 79)
Jesus also seems to have transcended the social norms of his times, and showcased the typical signs of insanity that comes with the territory, due to the internalization of too much multiplicity in the psychic domain.
… all great spiritual teachers, including Jesus and Buddha, challenged social norms in ways that could have been judged insane. Throughout the history of spirituality, moreover, some spiritual adepts have acted in especially unconventional, even shocking ways. This behavior is called holy madness, or crazy wisdom.
Although generally associated with Hinduism and Buddhism, crazy wisdom has cropped up in Western faiths, too. After Saul became Saint Paul, he preached that a true Christian must “become a fool that he may become wise.” Paul’s words inspired a Christian sect called Fools for Christ’s Sake, members of which lived as homeless and sometimes naked nomads.
John Horgan - Rational Mysticism (Page 53)
Was Jesus some sort of an early imperfect carbon-based version of the newly emerging silicon-based hive mind? A bizarre question indeed! But what is clear is that, any superhuman we can create out of flesh, no matter how imperfect, is our best hope for disciplining the global technological layer that is now emerging all over us and controlling us to the point of suffocation.
Technology is a double-edged sword with positive and negative aspects.
Positive. Gives prosperity. Increases creative capabilities.
Negative. Takes away freedom. Increases destructive capabilities.
What is strange is that we are not allowed to stop its progression. (This directionality is a specific manifestation of the general directionality of evolution towards greater complexity.) There are two main reasons.
Local Reason. If you choose not to develop technology yourself, then someone else will, and that someone else will eventually choose to use its newly discovered destructive capabilities on you to engulf you.
Global Reason. Even if we somehow manage to stop developing technology in a coordinated fashion, we will eventually be punished for this decision when we get hit by the next cosmic catastrophe and perish like the dinosaurs for not building the right defensive measures.
So we basically need to balance power with control. And, just as all legal frameworks rest on moral ones, all forms of self-governance ultimately rest upon spiritual foundations. As pointed out in an earlier post, technocratic leadership alone will eventually drive us towards self-destruction.
Today, what we desperately need is a new generation of spiritual leaders who can integrate us a new big-picture mythology, conforming to the latest findings of science. (Remember, as explained in an earlier post, science helps religion to discover its inner core by both limiting the domain of exploration and increasing the efficacy of exploration.) Only such a mythology can convince the new breed of meritocratic elites to discipline themselves and keep tabs on our machines, and galvanize the necessary public support to give these elites sufficient breathing room to tackle the difficult challenges.
Of course, technocratic leadership is exactly what academic intellectuals empower and spiritual leadership is exactly what public intellectuals stand for. (Technocratic leaders may be physically distant, operating from far away secluded buildings, but they are actually very easy to relate to on a mental level. Spiritual leaders on the other hand are physically very close, leading from the ground so to speak, but they are operating from such an advanced mental level that they are actually very hard to relate to. That is why good spiritual leaders are trusted while good technocratic leaders are respected.)
As technology progresses and automates more and more capabilities away from us, the chasm between the two types of intellectuals will widen.
Machines have already become quite adept at vertical thinking and have started eating into the lower extremities of the knowledge tree, forcing the specialists (i.e. academic intellectuals) to collaborate with them. (Empowerment by the machines is partially ameliorating the age problem we talked about.) Although machines look like tools at the moment, they will eventually become the dominant partner, making their human partners strive more and more to preserve their relevancy.
Despite being highly adaptable dilettantes, public intellectuals are not safe neither. As the machines become more adept at lateral thinking, they will feel pressure from below, just as academic counterparts are feeling pressure from above.
Of course, our entire labor force (not only the intellectuals) will undergo the same polarization process and thereby split into two discrete camps with a frantic and continually diminishing gray zone in between:
Super generalists who are extremely fluid.
Super specialists who are extremely expendable.
This distinction is analogous to the distinction between generalized stem cells and specialized body cells, who are not even allowed to replicate.
“The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”
- Marc Andreessen
In a sense, Karl Marx (who thought economic progress would allow everyone to be a generalist) and Herbert Spencer (who thought economic progress would force everyone to become a specialist) were both partially right.
We need generalist leaders with range to exert control and point us (and increasingly our machines) in the right direction, and we need specialist workers with depth to generate growth and do the actual work. Breaking this complimentary balance, by letting academic intellectuals take over the world of ideas and technocratic leaders take over the world of action, amounts to being on a sure path to extinction via a slow loss of fluidity and direction.
