« Hypocrisy is too universal to be interesting, and a book loses none of its value if the author betrays its message. If anything, the message is reinforced. In Benda’s case, though, there is more coherence between his life and work than might first appear. The more closely one reads Treason, the clearer it becomes that Benda’s ideal scribe is not a mere guardian of the temple of truth. He is, by virtue of his very detachment from political life, its only legitimate judge. Benda wants to convince us that a clear, disinterested view of moral and political reality can only be had from on high, not in the thick of things. He then quietly asserts—this is the decisive step—that les clercs who achieve this view have a responsibility to reveal the truth and defend it in public. There is a subtle shift in Treason from the image of the intellectual as truth’s servant, to one of the intellectual as truth’s representative—which is a prophetic, not a clerical, calling. [...]
Take these two passages from Edward Said’s otherwise thoughtful book Images of the Intellectual: “It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo.” and “The intellectual always has a choice either to side with the weaker, the less well represented, the forgotten or ignored, or to side with the more powerful.”
The image that comes to mind is that of an enormous, windowless castle surrounded by a moat, with angry peasants outside with burning torches, fighting to get in. It’s a picture tinged with the romance Said mentions and seems to tell a simple story: An inherently unjust Power is exploiting the Powerless, who have truth and justice on their side. History is full of examples of this basic drama. But it is also full of examples like the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, when hundreds of the forgotten or ignored, in dissent against the status quo, tried to overturn a legal election. In this case the Power was legitimate and the Powerless were spreading lies about imaginary injustices. There is nothing a priori just or reasonable about the wretched of the earth.
But there is a deeper problem with this image of politics, which is basically medieval. It conveys an understanding of power as something monolithic, closed off, uncommunicative, always defensive—and the peasants as having no voice in its operation except through resistance. This was never the case even in the Middle Ages, and it is certainly not the case in modern democracies. There is no single “power elite” that commands the castle. Economic, political, and cultural power are different, are held by different people and groups and institutions at different times, and their interests are never fully aligned. Workers, voters, and consumers all have voices and must to some extent be catered to. Today they may feel they have less power than in the past, but that is not because Power is united against them; it is because power has become so dispersed and decentralized through globalization that it is ever harder to mobilize it to any clear collective end. When the state of affairs that results is unjust, a morally admirable urge to protest, to sound the NO!, surges within. One never wants to lose the capacity to utter that word. But what next? Fight the Power! Fine, but first we need its address. One of the many ironies of the New York Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 was that Wall Street doesn’t live on Wall Street anymore. It lives on servers in air-conditioned bunkers around the globe, hiding as best it can from responsibility. And no one yet knows how to tame it. »
— Mark Lilla, “Treason of the Intellectuals“
