Jeremy Rifkin & The Future of Public Intellectuals

Jeremy Rifkin is an economist, a political advisor, a bestselling author, and a lecturer at the world’s number one business school, just to name a few. His ideas in his book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World are actually being implemented as a long-term economic sustainability plan in many European countries. He is also applying these ideas in his Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable to help cities, regions, and even national governments transition to post-carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures. There is no question Jeremy Rifkin is an intellectual and he has spread his ideas in ways that could not only be easily accessed by the public but also in ways that will likely directly affect it. Yet the question remains - is he a public intellectual?

First, it must decided what a public intellectual actually is. The obvious comes to mind quickly, he or she must be an intellectual. Is this an intellectual outside of the academic setting? Within it? Can a religious intellectual be a public intellectual regardless of the certainty that many in the “intellectual community” would not accept the ideas behind religion? It is because of all of these questions and many, many more that it is hard to define what a public intellectual is.

I agree most with a description by Christopher Hitchens in his article entitled, How to Be a Public Intellectual:

“One might do worse than to say that an intellectual is someone who does not attempt to soar on the thermals of public opinion. There ought to be a word for those men and women who do their own thinking; who are willing to stand the accusation of “elitism” (or at least to prefer it to the idea of populism); who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth; and who are willing and able to nail a lie. If such a person should also have a sense of irony and a feeling for history, then, as the French say, tant mieux. An intellectual need not be one who, in a well-known but essentially meaningless phrase, “speaks truth to power.” (Chomsky has dryly reminded us that power often knows the truth well enough.) However, the attitude towards authority should probably be sceptical, as should the attitude towards utopia, let alone to heaven or hell. Other aims should include the ability to survey the present through the optic of a historian, the past with the perspective of the living, and the culture and language of others with the equipment of an internationalist. In other words, the higher one comes in any “approval” rating of this calling, the more uneasily one must doubt one’s claim to the title in the first place.”

Christopher Hitchens also says that the title public intellectual is a “title that has to be earned by the opinion of others.” I completely agree. I think a huge part of being a public intellectual is being able to relate your ideas to the public. With as many pundits out there with the ability to relate their ideas to the public, though, what sets apart the public intellectual? I believe that not only is a public intellectual an intellectual that is able to relate his or her ideas to the public, but is someone who also relates ideas that are useful to the public or have the public in mind. A public intellectual, I think, should be altruistic in a way and have a bigger picture in mind. I can’t say it any better than as Hitchens puts it, “to be a public intellectual is in some sense something that you are, and not so much something that you do.”

Under these parameters, I would say Jeremy Rifkin is a public intellectual. He is certainly an intellectual. He graduated from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania with an economics degree and from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University with a degree in international affairs. He certainly is available to the public through his numerous books and appearances on television, but he also has adapted with new technologies to make his ideas available all over YouTube. He is certainly thinking with the public in mind as seen in his many contributions to struggling European governments by helping to shape more modern public policy, his book The Empathic Civilization (in which he urges for a global compassion and an ability to empathize in order to change the way we live on this planet before our own demise), his “Roundtable” to help the world transition into the future, and even in his eagerness to share his ideas with young intellectuals at several universities including his old “alma mater.”

Hooray! Jeremy Rifkin is a public intellectual! But how many are left? As John Donatich said:

“The very words "future of the public intellectual" seem to have a kind of nostalgia built into them, in that we only worry over the future of something that seems endangered, something we have been privileged to live with and are terrified to bury."

Richard Posner compiled a list of “public intellectuals” based on a system of citations in scholarly articles, media attention, and website hits. For the very reason some of these people were assessed as being public intellectuals, I would disagree that they should be classified as such. With the Internet acting as a barrier between the user and what he produces, the person behind the computer could be anyone and moreover could be pretending to be anyone else. That’s the whole power of the anonymous; it can make anyone’s opinion appear on the same level as anyone else’s. The Internet has created a level battleground for ideas and opinions. Though this can be a great thing for democracy in that now more than ever people can voice what they believe and what they think is best, it can also be a horribly detrimental thing for the exact same reasons; and detrimental to public intellectuals as well. It makes it harder for the public, if the public is even interested in doing so, to sift through the uneducated rants and raves to find material that should be considered intellectual. On the flip side, however, it has also made it easier for public intellectuals and rising intellectuals to share their ideas and scope out new ones.

Now, as scary as it is, this may be true, the public intellectual may be dying out as it has been defined in the past (and I blame the ease of saying whatever you like on the Internet). However, this may just be another shift in the planes of existence of the public intellectual. In fact, with more knowledgeable people and a faster way to communicate, the public intellectual may be thriving more than ever. The problem is now it will be more difficult to find them, like finding a needle in a haystack (if the needle were actually someone sharp [pun intended] and the hay were all of the dull, impulsive people who voice their opinions on the Internet). That leaves the choice up to us, the public (not Richard Posner), in deciding who the world’s next public intellectuals will be. Choose well.