My friends and I had an interesting discussion yesterday. Lots of things were said and thrown about. There were talks of lack of intellectual engagement in this country, barring repressive laws. The idea that we are dry of ideas, and intellectual traditions. That our medium of intellectual exchange is non-existent, whether in the mass media or in books. Or even in Malaysian blogs. That most NGOs and political parties work on the dearth of real ideas. And the idea that we are mostly secondhanders, struggling to make sense of of principles that we may never grasp in this lifetime, or which we may grasp and let go many times over. And that S.H. Alatas is a socialist at heart :P
Oh yeah, I brought up the idea of selective intellectualism in some regimes (using the example of the former USSR where materialism is allowed to propagate but opposing forms of philosophy are repressed) and another friend asked "Are intellectuals a chance of nature or a product of nurture"?
And, to create an inquiring society, what call for action fo we need?
1. Space?
2. Conflict?
3. Engagement with conflict?
4. Critical mind?
And how does one define all those four without going into the chicken and egg conundrum?
I think another vital aspect that one has forgotten to include is that different peoples have different ways of working within groups/structures even when it comes to intellectual work, and what works for one group may not work for the other. And the most vital part, that maybe only came in fleetingly in the end, is how class wars now begin to come into play in this struggle for different opinions.
All this in the name of "Intellectuals in Developing Societies" .
And, should an intellectual be a person who has higher moral standards/ higher level of morality than the rest of us? And whose and what morality (this is subjective to whether you believe in God and absolute morality or not) :D
A bientot
P.S. Comments welcomed.
