Intellectuals?

[Coloow]

Salaama calaykum, For months I have dwelled on the question of what constitutes an intellectual. I have on several occassions posed this burning question to my fellow somalis only to recieve answers that according to me did not quinch my search . Of course, the most obvious answer to the questions would seem to be: a person working with his intellect, relying for his livelihood (or if he need not worry about such things, for the gratification of his interests) on his brain rather than on his brawn.

 

Yet simple and straightforward as it is, this definition would be generally considered to be quite inadequate. Fitting everyone who is not engaged in physical labour, it clearly does not jibe with the common understanding of the term “intellectual.” amongst the human race.

 

Indeed, the emergence of expressions such as “long-haired professor” and “egghead” suggests that somewhere in the public consciousness there exists a different notion encompassing a certain category of people who constitute a narrower stratum than those “working with their brains.” In the Somali sense, expressions such as Somali intellectuals reveal the presence of an all-knower.

 

But this is not merely a terminological quibble. The existence of these two different concepts rather reflects an actual social condition, the understanding of which can take us a long way towards a better appreciation of the place and the function of the intellectual in society. For the first definition, broad as it is, applies accurately to a large group of people forming an important part of society: individuals working with their minds rather than with their muscles, living off their wits rather than off their hands. Let us call these people intellect workers. They are businessmen and physicians, corporate executives and purveyors of “culture,” stockbrokers and university professors. There is nothing invidious in this aggregation, no more than there is in the notion “all somalis,” or “all those that chew qaad”.

 

The steady proliferation of that group of intellect workers represents one of the most spectacular results of historical development thus far. It reflects a crucially important aspect of the social division of labour, beginning with the early crystallization of a professional clergy and reaching its acme under advanced capitalism—the separation of mental from manual activity, of white collar from blue collar.

There is some alienation of the intellectual amongst the Somali society expresses itself not only in the crippling and distorting effect of this separation on the harmonious development and growth of the individual, the nation or the clan—an effect which is not mitigated but underscored by the intellect workers’ getting some “exercise” and by the manual workers occasional partaking of “culture”—but also in the radical polarization of the Somali society into two exclusive and all but unrelating camps.

 

This polarization, cutting across the antagonism between social classes, generates a thick ideological fog obscuring the genuine challenges confronting society, and creates issues as false and schisms as destructive as those resulting from racial prejudice or religious superstition. For all intellect workers have one obvious interest in common: not to be reduced to the more onerous, less remunerative, and— since they are the ones who set the norms of respectability—less respected manual labor. Driven by this interest, they tend to hypostatize their own position, to exaggerate the difficulty of their work and the complexity of the skills required for it, to inflate the importance of formal education, of academic degrees, etc. And in seeking to protect their position, they pitch themselves against manual labour, identify themselves with the intellect workers who comprise the ruling class, and side with the social order which has given rise to their status and which has created and protected their privileges.

 

Not that every intellect worker explicitly formulates and consciously holds this view. Yet he has, one might almost say, an instinctive affinity to theories incorporating and rationalizing it.

Now I submit that it is in the relation to the issues presented by the entire historical process that we must seek the decisive watershed separating intellect somali workers from bogus intellectuals. For what marks the intellectual and distinguishes him from the intellect workers and indeed from all others is that his concern with the entire historical process is not a tangential interest but permeates his thought and significantly affects his work. To be sure, this does not imply that the intellectual in his daily activity is engaged in the study of all of historical development. This would be a manifest impossibility. But what it does mean is that the intellectual is systematically seeking to relate whatever specific area he may be working in to other aspects of human existence. Indeed, it is precisely this effort to interconnect things which, to intellect workers operating within the framework of capitalist institutions and steeped in bourgeois ideology and culture, necessarily appear to lie in strictly separate compartments of society’s knowledge and society’s labour—This principle “the truth is the whole”—to use an expression of Hegel—carries with it, in turn, the inescapable necessity of refusing to accept as a datum or to treat as immune from analysis, any single part of the whole.

 

Whether the investigation relates to unemployment in one country, to backwardness and squalor in another, to the state of education now, or to the development of science at some other time, no set of conditions prevailing in society can be taken for granted, none can be considered to be “extraterritorial.” And it is wholly inadmissible to refrain from laying bare the complex relations between whatever phenomenon happens to be at issue and what is unquestionably the central core of the historical process: the dynamics and evolution of the social order itself.

And this raises a further issue. Interpreting their function as the application of the most efficient means to the attainment of some stipulated ends, the intellect workers take an agnostic view of the ends themselves. In their capacities as specialists, managers, and technicians, they believe they have nothing to do with the formulation of goals; nor do they feel qualified to express a preference for one goal over another. As mentioned above, they admit that they may have some predilections as citizens with their predilections counting for no more and no less than those of other citizens. But as scientists, experts, scholars, they wish to refrain from endorsing one or another of these “value judgments.” It should be perfectly clear that such abdication amounts in practice to the endorsement of the status quo, to lending a helping hand to those who are seeking to obstruct any change of the existing order of things in favor of a better one. It is this “ethical neutrality” which has led many an economist, sociologist, and anthropologist to declare that qua Scientist he cannot express any opinion on whether it would be better or worse for the people of underdeveloped countries to enter the road to economic growth; and it is in the name of the same “ethical neutrality” that eminent scientists have been devoting their energies and talents to the invention and perfection of means of bacteriological warfare.