This Age of Wonkery - The New York Times - 0 views
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In his book, “The Ideas Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders.
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A public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance.
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A thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming.
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As Drezner puts it, intellectuals are critical, skeptical and tend to be pessimistic. Thought leaders are evangelists for their idea and tend to be optimistic.
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The world of Davos-like conferences, TED talks and PopTech rewards thought leaders, not intellectuals
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When George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir or even Ralph Waldo Emerson were writing, they were hoping to radically change society, but nobody would confuse them with policy wonks.
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In a polarized era, ideologically minded funders like George Soros or the Koch bothers will only pay for certain styles of thought work
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In a low-trust era, people no longer have as much faith in grand intellectuals to serve as cultural arbiters.
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I’m struck by how people’s relationship to ideas has changed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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In an unequal era, rich people like to go to Big Idea conferences, and when they do they want to hear ideas that are going to have some immediate impact
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there was a sense that the current fallen order was fragile and that a more just mode of living was out there to be imagined.
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intellectual life was just seen as more central to progress. Intellectuals establish the criteria by which things are measured and goals are set. Intellectuals create the frameworks within which politicians operate
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Doing that sort of work meant leading the sort of exceptional life that allowed you to emerge from the cave — to see truth squarely and to be fully committed to the cause. Creating a just society was the same thing as transforming yourself into a moral person.