I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase "speaking truth to power." I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.
What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.
In general, we should be able to agree that those who have greater opportunities and face fewer impediments have a greater responsibility to do more to help achieve such ends.
Those of us lucky enough to have a share of privilege in the more free societies should not be asking this question, but doing something to answer it.
I wouldn't say that the efforts of academics to critique the media's messages are "half-hearted." As far as I am aware, the efforts scarcely exist: very few even pay attention to the question.
We should therefore be opposed to institutional barriers to that freedom: Military dictatorships, for example. Or states run by a Central Committee.
Unaccountable private power concentrations that dominate economic and social life have the means to seek to "regiment the public mind," and become "tools and tyrants" of government, in James Madison's memorable phrase, as he warned of the threats he discerned to the democratic experiment if private powers were granted free rein.
Since James Madison day (and long before), there have been constant struggles over "democratic governance".
Should people be mere "interested spectators of action," not "participants," restricted to lending their weight periodically to one or another sector of the "responsible men," as advocates of "manufacture of consent" have recommended? Or should their rights transcend these highly restricted bounds?
Sometimes the former forces are in the ascendance, and "democratic governance" is eroded, though anyone familiar with intellectual history would expect that the slogans will be passionately proclaimed as they are drained of substantive content. We happen to be living in such an era, but as often before, there is no reason to suppose that the process is irreversible.
I don't really see what can be said about the role of faculty members, or universities, beyond the truisms voiced earlier, and their elaboration in various domains, ranging from focused intellectual pursuits to the concerns of the larger society and future generations.
About specific social issues, there is a great deal to say that departs very far from truism and is, accordingly, significant and controversial.
There is extensive critical scholarship that provides illustrations in many areas of scholarship. I've discussed many cases myself, while also citing and often relying on academic studies that disentangle these webs of mystification woven for the general public. It's impossible to provide illustrations that would even approach accuracy, let alone carry any conviction, without going well beyond the bounds of this discussion.
That intellectuals, including academics, would become a "new class" of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by [Mikhail] Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century.
Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of "the utility of interpretation," a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege.
[Isaiah] Berlin's observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.
The beam in our own eye is harder to detect, although - or more accurately because - to detect it, and remove it, is vastly more important on elementary moral grounds, and commonly more important in terms of direct human consequences as well. Intellectuals have historically played a critical function in performing these tasks, and [Ivan] Illich is right to observe that claims to scientific expertise and special knowledge are often used as a device.
Those who actually do have a valid claim to such special competence have a particular obligation to make very clear to the general public the limits of what is understood at any serious level; these limits are typically very narrow in matters of significance in human affairs.
I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.
The attack on Social Security is similarly motivated. Social Security is based on the conception is that we should have sympathy for others, not function merely as isolated "rational wealth maximizers."
As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.
In the sciences particularly the large public universities must and do take an active role in fostering creativity and independence; otherwise the fields will wither, and along with them even the aspirations of wealth and power.
In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary.
The focus on creativity and independence exists in pockets of resistance in the educational system, which, to thrive, should be integrated with the needs and concerns of the great majority of the population. One finds them everywhere.
Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.
![I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase speaking truth to power. I had thought it was an](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/noam-chomsky/i-dont-suggest-that-the-observations-are-surprising-or-profound-rather-they-seem-to-me-the-merest-truisms-i-was.jpg)
