Universals: “Freedom of expression can not be sought indiviously in one territory and ignored in another.” (89)

There need to be universals otherwise everyone would do what they think is right. ["In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." (90) This sounds very unappealing and distopian to me.] Chomsky’s writing is a great example of this, because he holds all sides to account, where other so-called intellectuals decry the trampling of freedoms in other countries, but defend the USA’s own imperialist actions (e.g. Michael Ignatieff).

Freedom of opinion:

“uncompromising freedom of opinion and expression is the secular intellectual’s main bastion: to abandon its defense or to tolerate tamperings with any of its foundations is in effect to betray the intellectual’s calling.” (89)

A question that I have is whether people should be able to say/write whatever they want? (should intellectuals?) clearly no. (hate speech etc.) But an intellectual for Said, and I agree, is someone who challenges authority; if you are conformist professionalist then you arent an intellectual, which means that Judy Rebick and Chomsky are intellectuals but Ignatieff and Tom Flanagen aren’t. (or is Flanagen? no, because he does not stand up for the weak and non-powerful).

The task of the intellectual:

“What truth and principles should one defend, uphold, represent?” (89)

“The intellectuals representations–what he or she represents and how those ideas are represented to an audience–are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.” (113)

The intellectual represents, “an individual vocation, an energy, a stubborn force engaging as a committed and recognizable voice in language and in society with a whole slew of issues, all of them having to do in the end with a combination of enlightenment and emancipation or freedom.” (73)

Amateurism vs. Professionalism:

“By professionalism I mean thinking o your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behaviour–not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective.’” (74)

“amateurism, literally, an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit  and selfish, narrow, specialization.” (82)

“Amateurism means choosing the risks and uncertain results of the public sphere–a lecture or a book or an article in wide and unrestricted circulation–over the insider space controlled by experts and professionals.” (87)

“the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even a guild of like-minded professionals. IN such situations the temptations to turn off one’s moral sense or to think entirely from within the specialty, or to curtail skepticism in favour of conformity are far too great to be trusted.” (86)

This all reminds me of Chomskey’s argument about people being trained to not feel qualified to comment on political matters because they are seen to be too complex, even though these same people make detailed arguments about, for example, baseball games based on their ability to understand complex statistics, player histories, and probabilities.

“Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For examples, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by rewards nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.” (109)

The Intellectual as an Exile:

“A condition of marginality, which might seem irresponsible or flippant, frees you from having always to proceed with caution, afraid to overturn the applecart, anxious about upsetting fellow members of the same corporation…I am saying that to be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveller rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional byt to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.” (63-64)