Remarks
of Alan Lightman and Stephen Pinker
at a
colloquium to discuss the thematic issues within this volume
Presented to the MIT
Communications Forum
December 2,
1999
Alan Lightman,
John Burchard Professor of
Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Over the years, my wife and
children have grown accustomed to seeing me drift off into the world of my own
thoughts -- it might be during a car ride or listening to my daughter tell me a
story, or I might even be talking myself -- when, I'm told, my face dissolves,
my eyes get glassy, I'm gone, useless to them, an absent father and husband.
Being a person who works with ideas and
books, an academic or a writer, is a terribly selfish activity, because it's
hard to turn your mind off -- you're always at work, to the suffering of your
family and friends. So I'd like to say a few things in justification of this
kind of life, put it in larger perspective. In short, what is the role of the
intellectual in the world at large? I wish my long suffering family and friends
could be in this room at this moment to hear my defense. I'll begin with some
remarks by a famous intellectual of the past, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a famous
intellectual of the present, Edward Said. I then want to describe a sort of
hierarchy of categories of the public intellectual and the increasing
responsibilities as one moves up the hierarchy. I'll finish with a few remarks
about the extraordinary recent phenomenon in which people trained in the
sciences have become some of our leading public intellectuals.
Over 150 years ago, Ralph
Waldo Emerson considered the meaning and function of the intellectual in his
great essay "The American Scholar," delivered not far from where we
sit now. [Address to the Phi Beta Kappa society, 1837]. Emerson put forth the
idea of the "One Man," by which he meant the complete person, or the
person who embodies all dimensions of human potential and actuality -- the
farmer, the professor, the engineer, the priest, the scholar, the statesman,
the soldier, the artist. (If Emerson had lived today, surely he would have used
the term "The One Person.") The intellectual is this whole person
while thinking. Emerson's intellectual, while enriched by the past, should not
be bound by books. His most important activity is action. Inaction is
cowardice. Emerson's intellectual preserves great ideas of the past,
communicates them, and creates new ideas. He is the "world's eye."
And he communicates his ideas to the world, not just to fellow intellectuals.
And finally, Emerson's intellectual does all of these things not out of
obligation to his society, but out of obligation to himself. Public action is
part of being the One Man, the whole person.
A more political tone to the
concept of the public intellectual was suggested a few years ago by Edward Said
of Columbia University, in a series of lectures called Representations of the
Intellectual (1993 Reith Lecture). According to Said, an intellectual's mission
in life is to advance human freedom and knowledge. This mission often means
standing outside of society and its institutions and actively disturbing the
status quo. At the same time, Said's intellectual is a part of society and
should address his concerns to as wide a public as possible. Thus Said's
intellectual is constantly balancing the private and the public. His or her
private, personal commitment to an ideal provides necessary force. Yet, the
ideal must have relevance for society. Said's ideas raise some interesting questions:
How does the intellectual stand both outside society and inside society? How
does the intellectual find common ground between what is of deeply personal and
private interest and also what is of public interest? How does the intellectual
engage him or herself with the changing issues of society while at the same
time remaining true to certain unchanging principles?
Let me now define what I mean by the public intellectual today "Such a person is often a trained in a particular discipline, such as linguistics, biology, history, economics, literary criticism, and who is on the faculty of a college or university. When such a person decides to write and speak to a larger audience than their professional colleagues, he or she becomes a "public intellectual."
Level I: Speaking and
writing for the public exclusively about your discipline. This kind of
discourse is extremely important, and it involves good, clear, simplified
explanations of the national debt, the how cancer genes work, or whatever your
subject is. A recent book that illustrates this level is Brian Green's
excellent book The Elegant Universe,
on the branch of physics called string theory.
Level II: Speaking and
writing about your discipline and how it relates to the social, cultural, and
political world around it. A scientist in this Level II category might include
a lot of biographical material, glimpses into the society and anthropology of
the culture of science. For example, James Watson's The Double Helix. Or Steven Weinberg's essays about science and
culture or science and religion in The
New York Review of Books. Gerald Early's book, The Culture of Bruising, with essays on how racial issues are
played out in prizefighting, would fit into this category. Or Steve Pinker's op
ed piece in the The New York Times a
year or so ago about the deeper meaning of President Clinton's use of language
in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Level III: By invitation
only. The intellectual has become elevated to a symbol, a person that stands
for something far larger than the discipline from which he or she originated. A
Level III intellectual is asked to write and speak about a large range of
public issues, not necessarily directly connected to their original field of
expertise at all. After he became famous in 1919, Einstein was asked to give
public addresses on religion, education, ethics, philosophy, and world
politics. Einstein had become a symbol of gentle rationality and human
nobility. Gloria Steinheim has become a symbol of modern feminist thought. Lester
Thurow has become a symbol of the global economy. Some other contemporary
people I would place in this Level III category include: Noam Chomsky, Carl
Sagan, E.O. Wilson, Steven Jay Gould, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Edward Said,
Henry Louis Gates, Camille Paglia.
Of course, these various
levels and categories are not as distinct as I have made them, boundaries are
blurred, etc. One can move slowly and even unconsciously upward through these
various levels I have described. But I would argue that one should be conscious
of the movement, and especially the increasing degree of responsibilities. In
particular, Level III should be entered with caution and respect. Here, there
is the greatest responsibility. The public intellectual is often speaking about
things beyond his or her area of expertise. Some people will refuse such an
invitation, others will accept the responsibility that has been given them.
Einstein, an inward and essentially shy person, but at the same time a man of
great self confidence and awareness of his stature, and accepted the
responsibility of the Level III public intellectual. Such a person must be
careful, he must be aware of the limitations of his knowledge, he must
acknowledge his personal prejudices because he is being asked to speak for a
whole realm of thought, he must be aware of the huge possible consequences of
what he says and writes and does. He has become, in a sense, public property
because he represents something large to the public. He has become an idea
himself, a human striving. He has enormous power to influence and change, and
he must wield that power with respect. When Steven Jay Gould is asked to speak
about the recent Kansas ruling that Creationism must be taught along side
Evolutionary Biology in science classes, or when Salman Rushdie is asked to
speak to the National Press Club about freedom of speech, these people have
been asked to accept a great responsibility. They are private citizens but they
are also public servants, they are individual thinkers but their individuality
also dissolves and rises and merges with the spirits of all the men and women
who have thought and imagined and struggled before them.
I want to end with a few brief remarks about a recent new feature in
the geography of the public intellectual: many more such people, these days,
have come from the sciences. I think I have a part of an explanation. For many
years, it was considered a taboo, a professional stigma, for scientists to
spend any time at all in writing for the general public. Such an activity was
considered a waste of precious time, a soft activity, even a feminine activity.
The proper job of a scientist was to penetrate the secrets of the physical
world. Anything else was a waste of time, it was dumbing down. The tide began
to change in the 1960s with the books Silent
Spring by Rachel Carson, The
Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, and The Double Helix by James
Watson. Then the big sea change occurred in the 1970s. I think of such books as
Migraine and Awakenings by Olive Sacks, Lives of a Cell by Lewis
Thomas, Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould, Dragons of Eden by Carl
Sagan, The Ascent of Man by Jacob Brownoski, Disturbing the Universe by
Freeman Dyson, The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. These popular books,
written by major scientists with unquestionable stature in their scientific
fields, had the effect of legitimizing public discourse as a worthwhile
activity for scientists. When I myself began publishing essays in the early
1980s, and I know that I was influenced by the examples of Thomas, Gould, and
Sagan. In the last ten years, we have seen an explosion of popular books
written by scientists, and a fraction of these authors will move into the
Levels II and III that I have described. Just a few words about my own case: My
professional career began as a physicist, but I was always passionate about th
humanities and the arts as well, from a young age. After becoming an assistant
professor of astronomy at Harvard, in the mid 1970s, I started in the late 1970s
writing popular articles about science, magazine pieces, encyclopedia articles.
The stigma within the scientific community of this kind of soft activity was
very real at that time, and I could feel it. However, I had spent a couple of
years at Cornell and was inspired by Carl Sagan. In the 1980s, my public
activities drifted into essays about the human side of science, and then in the
1990s, books of fiction based upon the scientific mentality. My next book will
take the final reckless leap, a novel about the American obsession with speed,
efficiency, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our
spirits. The novel has no science in it all, yet I think it has been shaped by
my having lived in that world and its mentality.
Stephen Pinker,
Professor of Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
I sympathize with Alan
Lightman’s account of the effect of book-writing on family life. The only
difference is that in my case, every once in a while my wife will notice me
briefly drifting into contact with
reality.
When I showed a draft of my
first trade book to a colleague for comments, he predicted, accurately, “Your
life will never be the same.” There is the wonderful perk of meeting people
outside the usual academic circuit -- from writers and journalists to minor
celebrities such as Noel Redding (drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience) and
Ken Dryden (goalie for the multiple-Stanley-cup-winning Montreal Canadiens of
the 1970s). But there is also the adoption of an entirely new mindset about my
area of research and about why we in the academy do what we do.
I think of writing trade
books not just as “popularizing science” (which many academics equate with
dumbing down), but as forcing me to take a bird’s eye view of my field.
Academic research, according to the cliché, is the attempt to learn more and
more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. Presenting
one’s field to an audience of nonspecialists is a way to reverse this
progression (though one hopes, not by learning less and less about more and
more until you know nothing about everything). It forces one to remember a
field’s proudest accomplishments -- the ones we often forget about in graduate
teaching because they are no longer controversial and hence become part of the
banal conventional wisdom. It forces one to organize hodgepodges, to
consolidate cottage industries.
It also forces one to
question basic assumptions. Having to explain an idea in plain English to
someone with no stake in the matter is an excellent screen for incoherent or
contradictory ideas that somehow have entrenched themselves in a field. Most
teachers have had the experience of realizing part way through a sentence that
the theory they are in the midst of explaining makes no sense. One sweats, one
pads the sentence with fillers, buying time to figure out how to repair the
theory or offer some alternative, and then, as the full stop approaches, one
speaks quickly and indistinctly and nonchalantly hoping the students won’t pay
attention, all the while praying that no hand shoots up to request a
clarification (and if it does, resisting the temptation to blow it off with the
suggestion that it is a stupid question). That kind of epiphany happens even
more often when explaining a field to a general audience.
I have found that the habits
necessary for writing for a general audience – putting issues in larger
perspective, spelling out background assumptions, writing in a direct, concrete
style – are just as useful in academic writing as in popular writing. I no
longer maintain a sharp distinction between the two styles. My most recent
book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of
Language, reports the results of my research for the past twelve years. It
is written as a trade book but I would not have done it all that differently if
I had written it as an academic book.
Another great benefit of
writing for the public is being forced to explain a puzzle that everyone cares
about except, apparently, the academics
who ought to know the most about it. In the case of my main area of expertise,
language, I have been asked to write or speak (usually on short notice) about
topics such as Politically Correct language, the Boston accent, Bill Clinton’s
testimony about his sexual relationships, the future of English, and the
brouhaha about the word “niggardly.” It isn’t easy to find discussions of such
phenomena in the textbooks or journals, but I enjoy piecing together an
explanation from what is out there, and when the explanation succeeds, it
underlines the soundness and usefulness of the field in general.
Being accessible to the
general public has disadvantages at well. And obvious one is time. Professors
are supposed to divide their professional time among teaching, research, and
administration. Writing and speaking to the press and public is a fourth major
responsibility – once the word gets out that a professor is willing and able to
communicate, reporters and radio stations from all over the world will call
asking for sound bites, commentary, balance, and other bon mots. Since time is
finite, something else has to give: sleep, mostly, but also some of the time
devoted to the other responsibilities.
Reporters often ask me if
another disadvantage to being a “public intellectual” is a loss of esteem
within one’s own discipline, the result of professional jealousy and an
arrogance of the academic that equates explaining with dumbing down. The
example always presented to me is Carl Sagan, star of Cosmos, the Johnny Carson
Show, and Parade Magazine, who was never elected to the National Academy of
Sciences. (The scientists who blackballed him should realize the harm they have
done to the public image of science by painting us all as petty, arrogant
snobs.)
My answer is that even in the
unlikely event that that popular writing kept me out of the National Academy,
it would be worth it, but that in any case my experience has been different. I
don’t know what people say behind my back, but the reaction from most of my
academic colleagues has been “Thanks for writing the book; I gave one to my
mother and she finally understands what I do.”
(On the other hand, I have found that a tiny number of academics, who
might resent a writer for other reasons, try to compensate for the wide reach
of a popular book the don’t like by increasing their level of vituperation in
proportion.) I also get asked whether the administration looks down on
popularization, as some kind of shirking of professional duties. Far from it,
at least at MIT. All levels of the administration have encouraged me to share
ideas with the public. I am happy to acknowledge President Chuck Vest in
particular, who has unfailingly provided moral support.
If one does decide to write
for the public, how does one go about it? Perhaps the best advice I received
was from an editor who discussed trade book writing with me well before I began
to write my first one. Worried about the obvious pitfall of writing in too
academic a manner, I self-deprecatingly suggested that I had to learn how to
reach truck drivers and chicken pluckers. She corrected me: truck drivers and
chicken pluckers don’t buy many books, and it’s an arrogant academic stereotype
to assume that anyone who doesn’t teach in a university must drive a truck or
pluck chickens. “You shouldn’t be trying to speak to truck drivers, she said;
you should be trying to speak to your college room-mate – someone who is as
smart and as intellectual as you are, but who happened to go into some other
line of work and does not know the jargon or background material.” It was good
advice, extirpating any tendency I might have had to condescend to the reader.
One also has to decide to be
positive about one’s field and colleagues, which does not come easy to most
academics, especially those in controversial fields. What do we do in our
graduate seminars? Pick a paper apart, to show how idiotic the author is, and
then do the same thing the next week, and the next, and so on. This won’t do
with a general audience – they don’t want to hear about a bunch of wrong theories
and bad experiments; they want to learn what we really do know. And that
requires the writer to actually like
something, publicly – a terrifying step for most academics.
Another pitfall is to treat
the writing of a trade book as some kind of holiday from serious writing, or
worse, as a quick way to earn enough money for a new kitchen. Every year I see
dozens of really bad popular science books, which look like undergraduate
lectures written in a hurry in cutesy motherese. A decent trade book requires
as much concentration, brainwork, and sheer time as one’s best research
projects.
A final thought about why I
write for the public. One can think about why we academics do what we do in two
very different ways. On one view, research results are passed from one academic
to another within a closed circle of specialists, with the public occasionally
seeing trickle-downs such as a new laser or a cure for a disease. I have come
to a different view, from seeing how excited ordinary educated people are by
the kinds of issues we study – for many
of them, the idea that one can get paid for studying consciousness, or language
and thought, is an inconceivable luxury.
Most educated people enjoy
science for the same reason they enjoy the opera or going to the Grand Canyon –
they appreciate beauty for its own sake. On this view research results are
always worth sharing with the public, practical applications or no. They pay
for the research with their tax dollars, and they have the interest and the
right to share in the sheer intellectual pleasure of coming to know how things
work. I think it is refreshing to think of the role of an academic as spreading
information not just to colleagues and 18-to-21-year olds but to human beings
in general.