Public intellectuals are in significant ways embodiments of society. And they are because they observe conditions around them, especially in their countries, and frame the sort of responses to those conditions expected of them.
A public intellectual, then, is one who focuses on matters needing to be raised in the public interest, the better to alert those who govern and those who aspire to govern of the issues people expect them to get their hands on and neutralize them, in the public interest.
Public intellectuals certainly -- at their individual levels -- have their own political or ideological attitudes to politics. Like any other citizen, they are in their individual contexts supporters or defenders of particular political processes.
They are happy when those they root for, within the silent realms of their hearts, are triumphant at elections. Their hearts develop cracks when those they wish to see in office, because they see in them the idealism and the policies they would prefer to define a country, falter and fall behind.
But that being a given, a public intellectual is the individual who can call forth the courage in himself to scale his way to the top of the mountain and observe from on high the conditions prevailing in his country. From that vantage point, the public intellectual is able to glimpse the good and the bad and the ugly.
And having glimpsed all that, he will make it a point to appreciate the good he sees and condemn the manifest ugliness he observes down there, in forthright language. Ambivalence is not for the public intellectual.
A public intellectual, when he writes for citizens on issues a nation confronts, never hesitates to call a spade for what it is, a spade. In effect, in the public intellectual thrives the man or woman who can say “no” to the powerful and not regret it.
The job of a public intellectual is never to pen panegyrics for the powerful. Nor is it his task to berate or mock them day in and day out only because they might slide into a defenestrated condition. Public intellectuals do not laugh at those whose attention they need to draw to the issues of the day. They are there to remind them of their responsibility, in unadulterated fashion.
The public intellectual is one who speaks on issues with boldness, who has no time or room for sycophancy or towards it but who has the wherewithal to place before the powerful the all-encompassing plight of the poor holding on to life in unmitigated gloom. A public intellectual energizes an ailing society with his prescriptions for its betterment.
A public intellectual breathes life into the banality that often passes for political or social stability. Through opinions, articulated in a diversity of methods, the public intellectual places himself at the service of the masses. For those masses are the public. It is to them but fundamentally about them that the public intellectual speaks.
The public intellectual holds a position, because of the strength of his moral character, his integrity as it were, superior to that of a politician or a bureaucrat or anyone in happy placement in a professional region. And that is where the remit of the public intellectual is to be spotted.
The public intellectual is an individual who spots wrong and then insists on talking about that wrong until those who matter are compelled to listen, must step into the room to be told that they are doing a bad job, that they need to go into self-analysis in order to reinvent themselves as better administrators.
Public intellectuals owe it to the nation, any nation anywhere, to inform on what is going right or wrong with those segments of the social structure whose politics is either here or there or nowhere.
The public intellectual is not afraid to raise questions about social injustice, about the widening social chasm between the privileged and the poor.
The public intellectual will speak out on the smuggling out of money and local products and keep talking about such issues until the state makes a turnaround and restores the values which once propelled it to global significance.
The public intellectual will be polite but ruthless in the drumbeat of his protests until the ruthless, corrupt elements he campaigns against succumb to the power of public opinion.
Neutrality is not an option for the public intellectual as he raises his voice in protest against the iniquities which assail society. He is objective in his assessment of conditions and thereby holds high the banner of truth in his expression of views.
The public intellectual respects the will of the majority, be it in any segment of society. But when the majority goes morally wrong and mutates into the majoritarian, it becomes the ethical responsibility of the public intellectual to scream his denunciation of the arrogance of numbers from the ramparts, to remind those committing wrong that their majority status gives them no right to undermine democracy, to humiliate the minority.
The public intellectual remains absolutely focused on the establishment or continuity of democratic order. But if and when democracy is placed on its head, it becomes the responsibility of the political leadership to restore it to its original state.
The job of the public intellectual, given the nature of public grievances in our times, is two-fold: Hang on to the boat to travel down the river, and on land go on a necessary but useful walk around to take in the measure of reality as it happens to be.
Public intellectuals do not seek power. They speak truth to power. But when public intellectuals slip from the heights because the growth of sudden narrow ambition takes hold of them, because they wish to forfeit their record and go over to where fitful, uncertain glory happens to be, they no more speak for the public. The raiment of the intellectual does not any more sit well on them.
The public intellectual stands sentinel in defense of pluralism and enlightened social order. He will not be shouted down and reduced to a whimpering mass of cowed humanity. He will speak of and defend the rule of law and protest loudly when the law is bent to serve those at a remove from the huddled masses of the land.
The public intellectual, in a broad sense, serves the cause of history through linking past with present and pointing to the future. He does that through defending the values upon which his country is founded, through holding unequivocal faith in the rights men and women in the country and beyond it are naturally expected to enjoy without impediments coming their way.
The public intellectual, because a vocal projection of the truth lies at the core of his belief system, does not flinch in the face of an unbridled exercise of power.
The public intellectual lights the lamp of hope -- here, there, and everywhere.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
