How to be topp
Hmm. Topp intellectuals is it.
Number 1, Fethullah Gülen –
An Islamic scholar with a global network of millions of followers…an inspirational leader who encourages a life guided by moderate Islamic principles…a threat to Turkey’s secular order…fled Turkey after being accused of undermining secularism.
Number 3, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Number 6, Amr Khaled –
…rock-star evangelist, Khaled preaches a folksy interpretation of modern Islam to millions of loyal viewers around the world. With a charismatic oratory and casual style, Khaled blends messages of cultural integration and hard work with lessons on how to live a purpose-driven Islamic life.
Number 8, Tariq Ramadan. Hmm.
Not all bad. Muhammad Yunus fine, Orhan Pamuk fine, Aitzaz Ahsan fine. I don’t know of Abdolkarim Soroush but he sounds good –
Soroush, a former university professor in Tehran and specialist in chemistry, Sufi poetry, and history, is widely considered one of the world’s premier Islamic philosophers. Having fallen afoul of the mullahs thanks to his work with Iran’s democratic activists, he has lately decamped to Europe and the United States, where his essays and lectures on religious philosophy and human rights are followed closely by Iran’s reformist movement.
Shirin Ebadi fine. Hirsi Ali of course terrific, Sen terrific. But 1, 3, 6 and 8…hmmm.
The next time that they hold a poll, we’re going to organize a campaign to write in your name, Ophelia. In any case, I bet that some smart guy can program a super-computer to vote and to vote, often and early and even more often, for the same name. It’s a question of whether my software can beat their software. Seriously, considering the possibility that Charles Taylor might win the next time, I’ll manage your campaign. All that I can remember is that I voted for Chomsky, Nussbaum, Dawkins, and two others.
No one told me about this ‘election’. If they had, I would have voted for Alan “Howlin Laud” Hope, leader of the UK Official Monster Raving Loony Party, worthy successor to its founder Screaming Lord Such – motto “If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving isn’t for you”. (Among his policies ignored by the conventional Parties was the abolition of January and February, which would save a fortune in gas and electricity bills.)
In the recent Henley by-election the OMRL party obtained 242 votes, but Loony insiders tell me the voted was rigged. Talk about Zimbabwe…
http://www.omrlp.com/index.php?page=home
The OMRLP also campaigns for a return to a more rational currency: Two shillings in a florin; three groats in a shilling; four farthings in a penny; five shillings in a crown; twelve pence in a shilling; twenty shillings in a pound. As they say on their website, what on earth could be more simple or logical than that?
What’s the point?
>about a week into the process, Fethullah Gülen rocketed to the top of the list overnight — and stayed there. Something had clearly happened: votes were pouring in for Gülen at a staggering rate, and continued to do so for the duration of the poll. Initially we were convinced that a tech-savvy member of the Fethullahçi — the collective noun for Gülen’s millions of worldwide followers — had hacked into the system and set about auto-voting for his hero. We would identify the culprit, discount his votes, normal business would be resumed and Chomsky would grind his way to another victory.
>The truth turned out to be more interesting. On 1st May, Zaman — the highest-selling newspaper in Turkey, with a circulation of over 700,000 and a string of international editions — ran a story on its front page alerting its readership to the appearance of Gülen on the Prospect/FP list, and to the fact that we were inviting people to vote. Zaman is known to be close to the Gülen movement, and over the coming weeks the paper made regular reference to the cleric’s appearance on our list. The poll was also noted in other Turkish newspapers, as well as on every single Gülen website, official and unofficial, we were able to find.< http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10262
Yes that’s in the FP version too – hence I was careful to say it was a poll in the news headline. Kind of makes one think FP and Prospect should find a better way of running the poll, or choose the topp people themselves.
Darwin, Marx, Mill, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were roughly contemporaries. Why can’t we today produce a list of similar figures?
In the the 1950’s, we could have voted for Sartre, Arendt, Heidegger,
Russell (old, but still functioning) and, say, Lionel Trilling, among others. Has humanity become, on the one hand, too politically correct to think clearly and, on the other hand, too dogmatic or is it the water we drink?
>In the the 1950’s, we could have voted for Sartre…< If only in hindsight, I suspect many would now prefer Albert Camus, Raymond Aron and Arthur Koestler!
Yeah and you can keep Heidegger, too. And Russell and Trilling, for that matter. They’re all right (R and T), but they’re not such giants that they tower over today’s public intellectuals.
I don’t want to get into one of those “things aren’t what they used to be” discussions. In fact, today’s top public intellectuals are my contemporaries. Allen: that you name Camus, Aron and Koestler gives me three more possibilities to pick for my 1950’s list, very good picks too. The point of a public intellectual may not be whether he or she is right, but whether he or she stimulates debate or critical thinking, and both Sartre and Aron did that, two old friends that never agreed with one another, except at the end, the case of the Vietnamese boat people. However, let’s take Hannah Arendt and Martha Nussbaum, of equal intellectual weight in my opinion. But Nussbaum is so politically correct, while Arendt is politically unpredictable: she surprises you. Is Arendt on the left or on the right? Not that Arendt is intentionally contrarian, as Hitchens is: she goes her way, which opens up new questions in the mind of the reader. Nussbaum, on the other hand, gives politically correct justifications to the same old questions. There seems to be so many Nussbaums among today’s top public intellectuals. The sense of evil, so present in the writings of Arendt or Camus, not to mention Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche, seems so lacking among them. There is a tendency to depict humanity as less evil than it is. Perhaps it’s only a problem of the Foreign Policy list. I often see more critical thinking in a blog than I do among the top public intellectuals.
I agree quite strongly about Arendt and Nussbaum. Nussbaum has that precious respect tender regard thing going that just makes me want to be rude and grind out cigars on the furniture. Arendt does indeed surprise, and set new thoughts going.
But then again, the comparison is somewhat arbitrary. You could compare either of them with lots and lots of other people, and get different results. I think Nussbaum is indeed dreadfully marred by the damp hands approach (kind of a higher level Madeleine Bunting), but there are other people. Some of her colleagues at Chicago for instance – Sunstein, Posner, Obama…(I couldn’t resist.)
Trivial point (in this context):
>Sartre and Aron… two old friends that never agreed with one another…< They certainly ceased to be friends after World War II. Interesting discussion of Sartre vs Aron in *Political Reason in the Age of Ideology*, Chapter 3, online at
http://tinyurl.com/3uut5r
I’m sorry, but any list in which Al Gore is feted as an “intellectual”….
Ack! (as Bill The Cat used to say…)
sorry, I forgot to add…
“thpwfttttt…!!!”
as well.
Frankly, you might as well have had Opus the penguin on that list…
Allen: since you seem interested in Raymond Aron, have you seen his lectures on Marx (published posthumously in French as the Marxism of Marx)? The best explanation of Marx that I have ever read. He certainly understood Marx more clearly and read Marx with more attention than his Marxist-Existentialist pal or ex-pal, Jean Paul.
Ophelia: you could sponsor a contest online about creative forms of rudeness towards Martha Nussbaum. Maybe our Muslim brothers, with their gift for insults and revenge, could contribute. Only non-violent forms of rudeness of course.
amos, I have my hands full coming up with my own forms of rudeness!
Anyway the truth is I also think Nussbaum did terrific work in Sex and Social Justice, and then there’s her book on the Gujarat massacre, and her takedown of Judith Butler…I don’t like her Bunting side, or the rather creepy way she talks about herself, but – well you get the idea.
One small point.
Sen is more than terrific. He is effin’ brilliant.
>Allen: since you seem interested in Raymond Aron, have you seen his lectures on Marx (published posthumously in French as the Marxism of Marx)?< Amos: No, I haven’t. Anyway, my French is not fluent enough for me to tackle such writings, short of dropping everything else for a month or so!
Allen: Aron writes a very clear elegant French, as you might expect. The book is available from Amazon, but expensive (53 dollars). Just to put in a good word for Sartre, while there is the Sartre of the Communists and the Peace and the demented preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, there is also the Sartre of The Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Jewish Question, Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is a Humanism, No Exit, Dirty Hands, the Words, the Sartre, who unlike Camus, supported Algerian independence and unlike Aron, supported the 1968 student movement.
Andy–why shouldn’t Gore be an intellectual? He’s probably the best educator America has. He’s done really excellent work in explaining complex technical matters to a general audience, who would otherwise be completely ignorant of them. I think that’s one of the most important tasks for intellectuals to fulfill.
I like much of this list, actually, though you’re right that there are a few eyebrow-raisers. I haven’t heard of Gulen or al-Qaradawi or Khaled, but Tariq Ramadan? Please.
Actually, I wouldn’t put Hirsi Ali on the list either. I admire her heroism, but I wouldn’t call her an intellectual. It doesn’t seem to me that she’s said anything that hasn’t been said many times before or come up with any new or thought-provoking insights. It’s more like she’s on the front lines defending principles that many people have articulated and explored in more depth than she has. A fighter, not a thinker, in other words.
I had the same thought about Hirsi Ali, but then I thought again. It could be said that she has come up with something new in the sense of new combinations. In particular the combination of her experience with her academic education – I think that could be considered something new. The parts of Infidel in which she discusses her intense interest in political science and how it was rooted in her experience of bad governance are quite compelling. I do think that more than qualifies as a thought-provoking insight. I think she is an intellectual at least in the sense of thinking like one. Life has forced her to be more of an activist than a thinker, perhaps, but she is a thinker all the same.
Good points from both OB and Jenavir. Though I lean more to side of Ali as activist rather than intellectual.
Anyway, she is higher on the list than Sen…hurrumph.