The last intellectual

I don't often find myself agreeing with Chris Hitchens, but his "funeral oration" for Susan Sontag is worth reading. He gets both her polymath brilliance and her sometime annoying self-assuredness.

I haven't read much of her work, but I always enjoyed watching her in debates on TV or listening on the radio. She was provocative, incredibly well read, and important. What she said on the matter, mattered. I can't think of another figure not affiliated with government or a think tank who has the kind of influence she had. A lot of that had to do with her bravery, whether directing "Waiting for Godot" in a besieged Sarajevo, or in pricking the sanctimoniousness of much of the mainstream media post Sept. 11. In fact, those latter comments -- discussed here in a Salon interview -- were used by the idiots on TV to try to marginalize and cow her. They failed.

And it is the rise of those idiots" that leads me to the conclusion that she may well be the last public intellectual. Public discourse seems to no longer permit restrained reason or to allow a public figure to change her mind with time or to take a stand that seems contrary to what is expected (her support of the war in Kosovo). Without that permission, "debate" becomes no more than taking positions and then humming "lalalala" while your "opponent" takes the opposite position.

A public intellectual, seems to me, is someone who after laying out her argument leaves you thinking, not just angry. It is someone who can accept the validity of the opposing viewpoint and still limn its failing (I don't think Chomsky meets either of those requirements because of his moral equivalency, fact bending, and condescension). I can't think of anyone else in the public sphere who is able to do that right now, and I don't think the format of public "debate" currently permits it. Leaving people angry -- whether anger in support or opposed to one's position -- seems the goal for most commentators these days.