Role of the Public Intellectual Joan Chittister, OSB CTA November 2015 I prepared for this afternoon through three filters: First, Boethius, the Roman philosopher, reminds us that “Every age that is dying is a new age coming to life.” Second, the poet Basho said, “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of those of old; I seek the things they sought.” And third, through the eyes of the boss who asked his accountant to make a report, talk about how things were going. Boss: How are things going? Accountant: Well, I’ve got a little good news, a little bad news. B: Let’s hear the good news. A: The good news is that you have enough money to last till tomorrow. B: Good Lord! That’s the good news? What’s the bad news? A: I should have told you yesterday. Point: The information we have determines what we do. In an election year when the country is to be electing a president and in the Church with a Pope who is opening it for questions, ask yourself: What is your role and mine, if we are to live the Gospel faithfully and radically? Or to put it another way, we must ask, What is the role of freelance thinkers, public intellectuals, like you and me, here and now? We who care about topics with deep feelings, personal experience and strong, educated opinions, but who have no power and authority to mandate change where change is necessary; in a society of talking points, public relations managers and political spin, but who nevertheless know we can’t blame God for what we fail to do ourselves; in a country hijacked by extremists, in a church whose vision of future has too long been the past, where possible answers were blocked and half the population is excluded from even thinking about them. Well, the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, in equally serious times, wrote once that, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the speaker, yes, but it violates the rights of the hearer, as well.” Yes, it takes a democratic worldview to create an involved population. But it also takes an involved population to make the democratic worldview real. Point: to be without thinkers, to be without the faithful and committed teachers, visionaries, interrogators of any group or organization or society, to be without public intellectuals, who will stir the waters of thought, who will question the absolutes of a society, who will think out loud–beyond the agendas of institutional authorities–is to leave a people captive to ideas they did not seek, let alone forge, but cannot escape. It is the most deadly and deadening kind of intellectual slavery. A public intellectual is, at base, the itinerant teacher of a society whose people are intent on learning about issues and ideas that are beyond the scope of their own personal, particular professional lives, perhaps, but are vital to them, nevertheless.
Public intellectuals are, in other words, just like you and I, they are average people who have questions and ask them, who recognize problems and analyze them, who discover issues and challenge them, who hear contradictions and confront them. They are people like you who have above average interest in and commitment to the great questions of life. They are people like you who study a subject and speak to it with the interests of the public in mind. Public intellectuals are people, thinkers, in both church and state, like you, who without any real administrative obligation to a particular institution or issue, nevertheless insist on exploring for the rest of us the taboos society has designed to contain this wildfire called thought. Public intellectuals, like you, break down the barriers designed to constrain a people from thinking the unthinkable. They are the Galileos and Luthers of every age, who insist on the public right to be publicly wrong, whatever the cost, until finally, thanks to more thought by more people, they are proven right again. More than that, public intellectuals are the guardians of the marketplace of ideas–like this one–where people not only come to speak, but go simply to listen as well, to ideas they have no other way than this one to investigate themselves in the midst of their otherwise busy lives, as you do. Clearly, the question of the role of the public intellectual, in living faithfully and loving radically–the one who speaks, sometimes uninvited, often even uncertified into the spiritual arthritis of the public arena–is a fascinating one, an imperative one. It is a subject as demanding of attention now as it ever was in the era of the great rhetorical theorists of the Greek and Roman city states on whose shoulders rested then the quality of the political and philosophical discourse of the time. Our own attention to new thought–as well as new technology–is no less important now and no less fraught with tension now than it was then. There are, in fact, two ancient stories that may best demonstrate the poles of thought about the nature and need for dynamic and ongoing social, political and spiritual idea development. The first story comes from the Sufi who tell of a Holy One who had a cat whose antics in the temple irritated the older disciples at prayer. So, to avoid distraction, the Holy One took to tying the cat up during services. When the Holy One died, however, the remaining disciples, intent on preserving the model of the master, continued the practice. Years later when the last of the group of founders had died, a new band of disciples equally intent on following the example of the founder, bought their own cat and tied it up during prayer, too. Then, the generation of disciples after them defined the tying up of cats during prayer times to be a matter of holy tradition. And the disciples after them stressed the need to legislate for the rituals connected with the tying of temple cats. And the disciples some time after that wrote lengthy holy papers calling cats “an element of the faith”! Until, finally more institutional types after them won the vote to make cats one of the items of the Creed–never to be questioned, never to be discussed. And soon after that, the group died out!
Clearly, without intelligent listeners as well as speakers, without those who ask questions as well as those whose role it is to preserve old answers, the most vital of traditions is in danger. Because there is another way to keep tradition alive: According to the stories of the Hasid, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, went always into the depth of the forest to pray for God’s grace. He sat under a special tree there, said a special prayer, and God enlightened him. When he died, however, his disciples realized that they did not really know exactly what spot in the forest had been his special place, but they did know the right kind of tree, so they found one of those, said the special prayer, and God enlightened them, too. The generation after them, however, did not know the place in the forest and also could not remember what kind of tree it had been, so they simply recited the special prayer and God enlightened them, too. Those two stories are a study in the process of social change. The first group, the people with the cats, held tightly to the system that had given them direction. In fact, they idolized past ways to such a degree that they obstructed the blessings the future could bring if it had been allowed to become the future rather than simply a poor replica of the past. The second group, on the other hand, also honored the tradition but they did not reify it. They left it open to review and so they opened it to possibility and the fulfillment of its fundamental purpose, relevance and meaning under every and all conditions to come. And that's exactly where you, where today’s public intellectuals come in. Public intellectuals are people who come unbidden to the review of essential ideas. They are often unwelcomed by the establishment and uncertified by its norms. But they bring to old ideas an explorer’s excitement and to new ideas an artisan’s energy to sift them and shake them, to freshen them and firm them up again in new ways so that what is worth keeping from the past is not lost and what is obsolete cannot become its undoing in the present. Public intellectuals take a society beyond the danger that comes with the institutionalization of speech. They know that when nothing new can be said, when no new questions can be asked, a society has stopped living faithfully, that community has stopped loving radically and that society, that ecclesiola, spiritual community is in danger. Instead public intellectuals press the domains of thought. They expand the boundaries of the normative and they expose old ideas to the bright light and morning air of current reality. And so must we. They stretch the unassailable beyond its corporate and commercial, its clerical and political givens, even beyond its social and moral absolutes. And so must we. They broaden the conversation beyond the culture of the time in which it first appeared to include the people on whose back it falls harshly and meaninglessly in the here and now. And so must we.
They are the heroes of today who keep one eye on yesterday and the other eye on tomorrow at all times so that our futures are not shrunk to fit the vision of the past. Responsible leaders–the officially commissioned keepers of tradition–see that the accretions of the past not be allowed to suppress the dynamism of the spirit in the name of “tradition.” As the great Benedictine theologian, Godfrey Diekmann, put it–and the Sufi cat demonstrates– “Tradition is not the stuff we pass on; tradition is the passing on of the stuff,” in all its variations with all its nuances–not to destroy growth but to meet its continuing challenges with the same spirit with which it first leavened the life of the world. Real leadership depends for its authenticity on bringing to every age–like the Baal Shem Tov and the disciples who came after him–more than simply the practices of the age before it. It depends, instead, like Boethius and Basho, on preserving the vision that drove them. Real leadership protects the right, the responsibility of speakers to speak a new word at a new time so that our past may not overtake us. Like the great prophets of old, like Isaiah who challenge the militarism of Israel, and Jeremiah who questioned its Jerusalemite theology, and Ezekiel who argued for inclusiveness in nationalist Israel, and Amos who challenged Israel’s false prosperity, all must be allowed to speak, all must be allowed to be heard now, today, here, and yet. Valid and authentic institutions do not die stillborn. They live and adapt daily so that the best of them can live on in every age. Let me give you an example of the kind of tradition where age-old practices have been reshaped century after century so that the old can be preserved but always in new ways. In the Benedictine tradition, now over 1500 years old, and still strong, the constant rethinking of what it means to be a Benedictine here and now has been the lifeblood, the hallmark, of the tradition for century after century. Benedictines learned early that sometimes an institution has to change in order to remain what it was. Benedictine communities changed with the changes around them: the Benedictine order called out of itself by the needs of the world around it then challenged the Dark Ages with education and they argued against the temptation to withdraw into human isolation and devoted themselves to community development everywhere, in every age. Benedictines answered the breakdown of the social order that came with the disappearance of the Roman legions by building hospices in every monastery so that pilgrims could travel the now unprotected roads of Europe and be sheltered every night in another Benedictine abbey along the way. Point: We opened the first Holiday Inns of the world! Finally, in 1852 Benedictine women came to the United States bringing 1400 years of tradition with them and when they got here, they did it differently than Benedictine women had ever done it before them. Why? Because they were being re-shaped by listening to the public intellectuals of this new world whose needs were different than the needs of 19c Germany. And they are still being reshaped today.
And they did those things when no official anywhere, in any public institution, was saying that the privileged of us had a responsibility for the poorest of us. If that vision of possibility and creativity had been ignored or suppressed then, historians today would not be calling Benedictinism one of the key factors in “the preservation of Western culture.” The case is clear: there is no substitute for the role of public intellectuals in any society or organization–public or private, sacred or secular–to call the rest of us to the best of ourselves when inertia and institutionalization threaten to smother us all. Life without voices to animate it is lifelessness without a name. Clearly there is a necessary role for the voice of the public intellectual, for your voice, in both church and society. However universal that commitment may or may not be, what is true is that a new kind of intellectual link to the world around us has arisen, in large part outside the geographical limits of the standard institutional system itself. In fact, far outside university seminars and conferences like this one, bloggers and writers, speakers and citizens groups, interested bystanders and political aficionados–people from think tanks and neighborhood interest groups, journalists and amateur devotees, lurkers on Facebook and tweeters of every subject under the sun–not least among them religious voices–have carved out public platforms for themselves with microphones and keyboards in their hands. They are not speaking as professional purveyors of any one particular organization. They are simply speaking as seekers in search of values and ideals basic to a global an ethical perspective. They have a voice now, and they have an audience. More than that, they have a task and they have a newly emerging vision of the good life. And whether that voice prevails or not, should prevail or not, depends in large part on yours and mine and ours as well. It depends on whether we all make evolution or revolution the method of choice in the face of change. This day’s public intellectuals have, apparently, taken Hansell Duckett seriously when he said, “What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.” The gift of the public intellectual is to raise the disparate voice of disapproval in a society replete with professional organizations but thin on the ground in terms of professional self-criticism or honest oversight. At the same time, the public intellectuals of every ilk often pay the heavy price of dissidence, rejection, excommunication and shunning for the doing of it. Those who bring deep, personal interest and intense personal preparation to a subject but are outside the professional realm of it, find themselves in a very peculiar position. They are not at the table of power or professional decision-making where they themselves might see either the limits or the value of its present form. But they are, at the same time, uniquely prepared as committed observers, researchers and social analysts steeped only in personal experience to offer, uninvited if necessary, critical personal evaluations of the matter at hand.
And so they must speak. The situation has its pitfalls, of course, but it has its public place in the development of academic thought. There are nine ways in which the public intellectual actually serves to strengthen both the quality and the character of a just democratic society and its institutions. Remember this when the establishment criticizes you. 1. First, public intellectuals, like you, bring transparency: Public intellectuals make the invisible visible. They broach the topics official spokespersons of the institution may not be willing–or even permitted–to say. Ironically enough, Eleanor Roosevelt stands as one of the least likely public intellectuals of modern times. After all, she was first lady, the political “little woman,” the helpmate, the silent eternal supporter, except that she wasn’t! The party line was not Eleanor’s best trick. It was Eleanor Roosevelt, not Franklin, and often to his chagrin, who challenged U.S. domestic policies about those left out of the New Deal. It was Eleanor who spoke for women, African Americans and children in a country of rugged individualists. It was Eleanor who cared more for the poor than for an election. Indeed, the willingness to broach topics considered taboo by the officers of an institution makes equality real, makes real growth possible, and, ironically, makes the system itself credible. 2. Public intellectuals expose systemic corruption. Public intellectuals, free of institutional controls, include the public in discussions which would otherwise be hidden from their view. Daniel Ellsberg’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers changed the course of the war. Ellsberg, a military analyst with Rand Corporation, published top secret military documents showing that President Johnson had lied, both to the public and to congress itself, about the war’s future cost in military lives, as well as, the very import of the war to itself. Ellsberg’s exposé of government dishonesty brought judgment to the judges. Exposure like that then, and Edward Snowden’s now, brings to account those who condemn others. Then, the lawgivers are not permitted to be above the law and those on whom the law falls see themselves with as much right to question the system as the system has to question them. 3. Public intellectuals seek evolution rather than revolution. Public intellectuals, some say, simply “preach to the choir,” confirm the choir or worse, say they, simply “stir up trouble.” Yes, perhaps, but most of all, really, they test social trends and fan incipient flames which without them, might never spark necessary change. They bring living proof of the mind and heart of the public by exposing the size of the choir, the strength of its voice, as well as the direction of the wind that’s driving it. They are the protesters and court cases and Wall Street occupiers of the world. They are the picketers for women’s ordination and episcopal accountability for sex abuse. They are faithfully, radically loving lovers!
Thanks to the power of the public intellectual no organization need be surprised by being out of touch. Thanks to public intellectuals they are being warned! 1 Long before officialdom itself even thinks to ask the led what they think about its leadership, or is willing to ask people what they feel about a subject, the public intellectual already knows. And the organization, if it’s wise, is given time to regroup before the revolution. 4. The public intellectual also brings hope. The public intellectual says out loud what is already here, in the substructure of a society, but smoldering underground just waiting for somebody to speak its name. Thanks to the public intellectual leaders are forced to decide, then, whether they will suppress or lead. For years before Vatican II, for instance, the scent of intellectual disaffection with church law had long been in the air. People chaffed under outmoded marriage laws, and medieval liturgy. They questioned the rigid separation of clergy and lay and clerical divisiveness. Public intellectuals only unleashed the elephant that was already sitting on somebody’s chest in the pews of the churches. It was public intellectuals like Hans Kung: infallibility and Andrew Greeley: social science and change; it was theologians, historians, social scientists and lay reformers, Rahner and Schillebeeckx: ecclesiology, Suenens: lay involvement and collegiality, the Crowleys: Catholic Family Movement, who spoke a public voice in a very muzzled time. It was scholars and brave committed nuns and lay people: Mary Luke Tobin, Margaret Brennan, Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Rosemary Ruether, Len Swidler, not ecclesiastical officers, though they were the ones who were supposed to be doing it, who created the expectation of change, who brought hope in the face of decay, who drove the opening of the windows of the church before it was too late to revive the church again. 5. Public intellectuals encourage reflection It is public intellectuals who maintain the spirit of the young and restless avant-garde. They keep society spurred, they press the juice out of old ideas, they heat up the light of the new ones that keep a society moving. In our own time it has been public intellectuals–the Berrigans and the Gloria Steinems, the Maya Angelous and the Elizabeth Johnsons, the Thomas Mertons and the Dorothy Days, the Bishop Gumbletons and the Martin Luther Kings, who brought the light to things like the civil rights movement, light to the farm workers in the fields, light to the undocumented, light to the routine beating of women in their own homes, light to the sexual abuse of children and light to the baptism as well as to the ministries of women. They prodded us out of darkness, they required us to reflect on reality and they roared rather than whispered at us so that both church and state would hear the call to become what they are meant to be. Public intellectuals give advocacy a microphone to be heard from in a chorus of no’s and to the thinking listener they provide a path that is philosophically persuasive and plausible to tread. 6. Public intellectuals bring the gift of courage to social change Public intellectuals are both carriers of yesterday’s wisdom and the banner bearers of tomorrow’s challenges. And, for the most part, they go alone–with little institutional encouragement and even less institutional respect. Indeed, the pitfalls of life lived as a public intellectual are many.
To offer an unwelcome idea and unbidden question, to a society that has no interest in it whatsoever, or worse, has already formed old answers to new questions about it, takes a courage that is beyond the definition of foolishness. It is the courage of a Charlie Curran, the courage of CTA Nebraska, the courage of Sr. Margaret McBride in Arizona who saved a pregnant woman from death in childbirth. Most people are not likely to venture into such dark and wild intellectual forests, where enemies lie in wait to disgrace both the innocent and the ignorant for daring to say something the establishment does not want said and refuses to hear. But it is impossible to live faithfully and love radically unless we do. But with the advent of interactive technology that allows, in fact encourages people to hide under fictitious names, has gone any semblance of civil discourse. Instead, the public intellectual of our time who dares to question the status quo is exposed to ridicule as well as to a minefield of abuse–even here, even in the kind of political environment, ours, that sets out consciously to breed universal participation in democratic discourse and touts a constitutional amendment to assure and protect it. 7. Public intellectuals invite healthy self-criticism The public intellectual shines a light on our own national darkness and so serves to keep us honest and growing. We excoriate cultures in which intellectual differences can mean death, but we ourselves have hounded more than one thinker to eternal disgrace–like Oscar Wilde or Harvey Milk, for instance, over homosexuality, or William Jennings Bryan and health care advocates over economic policy, or both women and men who have had the temerity to argue for women physicians or politicians. Or, here and now, in our own time, we ridicule the deeply sincere who call for the discussion of women rabbis or priests or mullahs or for mandating a living wage or food stamps rather than minimum wage, for the underemployed, or daycare for the babies of working mothers, and paternity leaves for fathers to have the opportunity to get to know the infants they will raise, and certainly those who have the nerve to question the origin and age of the universe or the effects of climate change. Clearly, the spectre of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses is also alive and well in our own institutions as well as in cultures foreign to us whose intellectual standards we ourselves deride. We just call our heretics by other names now: like Betty Friedan or Charlie Curran or Rosemary Ruether or Roy Bourgeois or Matthew Fox for instance. And yet, history is clear, if these kind will only stand their ground long enough, they will be recognized in the not too distant future, as the brave and the bold who took us beyond yesterday to the horizon and new light of tomorrow. 8. Public intellectuals test a group’s moral maturity For those public intellectuals–writers and speakers, thinkers and idea agents–who wander into the mass of absolutes that, history attests, have been developing over the centuries but forever labeled as immutable dimensions of religion–any religion–the fate can be even worse. These people risk the institutional damnation of their own souls, or more immediately, they risk loss of the one dimension of life that sustains them, their institutional faith community. It is the very act of banishment from the spiritual community itself that threatens them.
And why? Because they have dared to discuss the undiscussable, like male language for God in their prayers or the clothes they wear while they’re saying them or because they seek to see the similarity, as Chardin did, between the findings of science and another sense of the sacred. In too many churches, new ideas don’t even get discussed, just where you would think that a person might be forgiven for thinking that at least here the creativity of God would welcome a little more creativity on the side. No, in most churches of all traditions, new questions merit old answers by return mail. So much for the Holy Spirit! And so it keeps people locked in as well as locked out of discussion and spiritual development while the rest of the world passes them by. Such closed-mindedness divides what should be one. “Don’t even think about it” is a sad answer to the most life-giving questions on earth. It is a sad answer to the intellectual imperative toward spiritual growth. No wonder so few enter the public conversation. No wonder so many leave it for somewhere else. The second largest denomination after Catholic in the U.S. census are unchurched Catholics. But the questions we refuse to ask–like the truth of Galileo’s telescope and Luther’s theology or the value of a woman’s moral agency as opposed to a man’s or the blight of militarism and the sin of sexism–shrink our capacity to deal with the great questions of the time and endangers pluralism, peace and justice in an ever more and more pluralistic world. And finally, the public intellectual brings vision. Public intellectuals, people like you, make the world go round. They refuse to allow a group to confuse stagnation with stability. Age with vision. “Without vision the people perish,” scripture warns us and the truth of that prophecy gets clearer every day. Without a sense of direction, without the awareness that what got us into this moment cannot possibly be what gets us out of it–the future can only be more of the same: more of the poor, more of the violence, more of the polarization, more of the feeling that we have foresworn our roots, lost our way and abandoned our sacred destiny to think, to speak, to act and to change things! We simply cannot trust this day’s issues to the glory of warfare, or to the inerrancy of old social structures or to the equity of global finances or to the presumed morality of international business practices or to the divine role of religion in public life anymore. Each and all those concepts have frayed at best in this evolving and sometimes downright frightening world where neither religion nor race nor culture are any longer regional and the free flow of peoples makes the entire world a new “silk road” of ideas. We need to encourage, to embrace, to engage those purveyors of ideas whose thoughts are fresh, whose minds are free of old chains, and who are committed to the furtherance of the best and most basic ideas of what it means to be fully human now, here, today.
We must honor those who are devoted more to the development of the future than to maintaining the security that comes from clinging to the safe and settled, but suspect ideas of the past. Indeed, this is no time now for tying cats. This is the time for: transparency, exposure, evolution, hope, courage, reflection, self-criticism, moral maturity and vision. This is the time for public intellectuals–for you–for those who will raise the questions, at cocktail parties, in board meetings, at parish and diocesan discussions, on street corners and family dinners that deserve new answers. The purpose of ancient public rhetoric was to raise ideas in the public square, not to spin or smother them, not to deride or deny them the right to be heard. And we must do no less than that today We must allow the public intellectual to give old ideas freshness of thought. We must encourage freedom of insight. We must further the best in the communal vision by honoring the questions and considering insights with an open heart. Why? Because questions ignored go elsewhere, go to disillusionment, go to polarization, go to revolution in search of answers. Instead, they require that we live faithfully, love radically, think deeply and speak freely so that all might be free. The only question now is whether there will go on being thinkers enough, public intellectuals enough, in every club and conference, in every office and casual conversation, in every church and chancery, in every parish board and diocesan synod, to help the world sort and sift ideas that others want only to suppress for the sake of the suppressor. In times of great social change there are listeners aplenty among us condemned for listening for a new word. And there are at the same time speakers out there being orphaned for trying to honor them. You and I must guard the world from that so we may all be wiser because of it. It is you the world is waiting for to see and say what must be done to save the best of the old for the sake of the blessings of the new. And it is surely the role of conferences, discussion groups and public forum everywhere to test ideas against the best information of the time, to open every forbidden topic to public discussion, and to assert the obligation of every institution to welcome the unfettered exploration of the human mind. As Mark Van Doran wrote, “We must all take ideas in and treat them royally, for someday one of them may be king.” Basho warns us not to do what our ancestors did, but to seek what they sought in this new age that is, as Boethius promises, now coming to life.
I am grateful to the brave speakers and listeners everywhere–to you, to each of you–whose very presence here is living proof of your own place and role as serious public thinkers, for being a clear, committed and courageous model of all our hopes for an intelligent, ethical, moral and just society in both church and state, for us and for tomorrow. You are the public intellectuals of our time: it is your role to bell the cat, to yell fire when you see smoke, to stand up and speak out until the cry of the poor is heard, until the questions are faced and these great life issues engage the soul of the public. Thank you for coming and in case you missed the point of all of this, it’s this: If you’re wondering if your work on earth is finished, and you’re still alive, it isn’t. The question is not, what are you doing here, but who you are, what you do when you leave here. Keep asking the questions, analyzing promises, challenging issues and confronting contradictions. Go on. Go on. Go on.
