Public Intellectuals

After ten years as a national correspondent, Ta-Nehisi Coates is leaving The Atlantic. In a memo to his staff, Coates’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg explained that “the last few years for [Coates] have been years of significant changes. He’s told me that he would like to take some time to reflect on these changes, and to figure out the best path forward, both as a person and as a writer.”

Coates’s writing for The Atlantic in “The Case for Reparations” and “My President Was Black”—along with his books—has shaped our national conversation on race. Although he's been surprised to find himself famous, his departure from The Atlantic is about much more than unease with sudden fame. Instead, it reflects a growing crisis for public intellectuals in the digital age.

We’re forced to ask: Is our hyper-connected culture driving to extinction the most thoughtful among us? Put otherwise, are the conditions of our times intemperate to the work of public thinkers like Coates?

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Coates fits the description, even if he rejects the moniker. In an interview with podcast host Krista Tippett at the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival, he explained his particular hesitations with being a public intellectual. First, he wants to demarcate the boundaries of his expertise. “One of the things that annoys me is that people act like they know everything,” he told Tippett. “You don’t know. Be clear about what you know and what you don’t.” Second, he rejects the activism expected of the public intellectual. “I’m a writer. I prefer solitude,” he explained, speaking of his preference for a certain “distance from the struggle.”

With these statements, Coates put his finger on two key concerns: It’s not simply the haste with which public intellectuals—including Christian thought leaders—are asked to speak, it’s also the breadth of their expected expertise.

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In the context of our finite humanity, the work of public intellectuals is by nature “creaturely” work: limited in scope, limited in effect. Ta-Nehisi Coates is only one of many public figures struggling to live within these boundary lines. In knowing his own limitations, he can demur, as he did at the Chicago Humanities Festival, on questions of the “single most important legal challenge facing us in the next five to ten years” or the most reliable pedagogical methods for teaching history accurately. “I don’t know,” Coates responded. For a man (however wistfully) dismissive of Christian faith, his answer is perhaps the most Christian of responses.

As believers, we affirm one of the paradoxes of the human condition put this way by G. K. Chesterton: We are “chief of creatures” but creatures nonetheless. We are called to do good work courageously and faithfully, and part of our courage and faithfulness involves admitting the responsibilities that do and do not belong to us.  Read the rest here...

-- Jen Pollock Michel