It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
Pankaj MishraRead
The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the challenges faced by public intellectuals in a complex, modern society.
Pankaj Mishra laments the decline of the public intellectual in contemporary society, attributing it to a barrage of complex information that overwhelms individuals, a culture that prizes specialized expertise over broad understanding, and socio-economic conditions that inhibit free thinking and discussion. The quote critiques the structures that stifle open intellectual engagement and challenges the role of thinkers in a world where public discourse is influenced by financial and institutional pressures.
Themes
Public IntellectualInformation OverloadExpertiseSocietyDiscourse
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of thinkers in society at a university seminar.
More from Pankaj Mishra
All quotes βGovernments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
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As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
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Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.
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The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
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Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.
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