Public Intellectuals and the Modern Path Towards Positive Change

Society has made tremendous advances due to the progressive work of the most prominent public intellectuals throughout history. In a less openly outspoken world, those whose work was focused on advancing society took risks and made sacrifices to get us to the level of equality and tolerance we enjoy today, and we are lucky institutions like the church and our most revered leaders were there to harbor the movements that got us here. But times have changed. Although we’re not perfect, we now live in a country where voicing opinion is accepted, there is an advocacy group for every cause imaginable, we have unions, non-profits, and so forth.

Most of the dangerous and severe discrimination issues like slavery, the lack of women’s rights and civil rights, have thankfully been eradicated. Thus there has been a gradual shift to dig deeper into societal problems to reason out how we can go farther. Furthermore, a shift towards research and evidence-based arguments has accompanied this movement. Combined with all of the biased information on the internet today, the fight to get past the remaining social issues we face begs public intellectuals to try to influence people with informed, reasoned opinions, taking a stance on what is just without personal bias.

Erwin Chemerinsky, prominent legal scholar, author, and current dean of UC Irvine Law, exemplifies reasoning and the analysis of both sides without concern for personal convictions or status endorsements. He is a prominent voice in the field of law and comments on legal issues for the media, but the general public could benefit more directly from his work with a closer affiliation and a larger following. In his article, “The 'Decline' of the Public Intellectual?”  Stephen Mack refutes an argument based on American anti-intellectualism and narrows in on the concept of a public intellectual:

... Any argument for the public intellectual that, like Donatich’s, rests the assumption that common citizens are forever childlike and must be led by a class of experts is politically corrosive and historically dangerous.

So, is there any way of conceptualizing something called the public intellectual that is consistent with democratic values? Of course there is, but it needs to begin with a shift from “categories and class” to “function.” That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.

As the world becomes more aware and education and research continue dominating intellectualism, the effect is the work of public intellectuals being more critically scrutinized resulting in new job responsibilities.

Crippled by the wicked transformation of big business and political parties, public influence has labeled and separated the population. Like Mack says, intellectualism needs to make the shift from “categories and class” to “function” among public intellectuals—and in turn, across people. Although most of his views would be considered liberal, labeled affiliations should not be the focus of Chemerinsky’s—or any other intellectual’s—contributions to society just because he is a voice in the legal and political fields. Intellectuals should now be more concerned with the level of reasoning that their opinion exemplifies and exactly how it contributes to the public good, not how it promotes any political or religious group’s wishes. Therefore, it becomes the people’s responsibility to try to focus less on whether a source is arguing the liberal or conservative side of issues, and less on whether the arguments are consistent with religious values, but the focus should be on whether the arguments make sense for positive changes, helping cause less harm to people or protecting people’s rights or promoting equality. Chemerinsky’s form of work illustrates the notion of reasoned solutions to society’s major issues. Ironically, this seems to be more consistent with democratic values than the childish battle of our two political parties.  

While writing law reviews and having his Constitutional Law textbook widely used among law schools across the nation, Chemerinsky voices strong opinions on the highest legal workings of the system and its corruption. His 2014 book titled The Case Against the Supreme Court argues that the courts have overall failed the people throughout American history, claiming justices have too often than not ruled in favor of crooked forces ranging from wealthy corporate executives to slaveholders.

In a 2014 NY Times opinion piece on unlawful police conduct, Chemerinsky explains how local governments protect themselves and their officers from liability for unlawful conduct within the criminal justice system. He cites various cases with questionable outcomes, to say the least. In a 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, where the district attorney’s office withheld crucial evidence to the defense, a man wrongfully spent 18 years in prison until being acquitted and the Supreme Court ruled the local government would avoid liability. In another example, the Supreme Court denied damages to a man who spent 16 days in a maximum security prison and 14 months on supervised release, even though the government had no probable cause to arrest him or use him as a material witness, another clear violation of the Constitution. Chemerinsky goes on to explain, in layman's terms, the legal technicalities behind the difficulty of holding government entities and its officers accountable for unlawful police conduct within the courts. It’s worth noting that the knowledge of similar policies and workings of the system are useful for the public to correctly analyze surrounding issues like police brutality.

In December 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban of all Muslims trying to enter the US. Chemerinsky’s opinion on the proposal is made clear in his piece in the Orange County Register: enacting this policy would be horribly wrong because it goes against the Constitution for the government to use only religion to decide who is a danger to society. He cites the only precedent in history, Korematsu v. United States during World War II, where the government placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, none of whom ever ended up being convicted of any crimes or found to be affiliated with the war in any way, and many of whom had family members serving in the US military. This case is widely regarded as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history. He calls out Trump for actually trying to use this precedent to justify the ban he proposed. Chemerinsky makes a strong point against him.

That being said, the true benefit of his work lies in the informative explanations of the potential justifications for the other side of the argument, even when the proposal came from a guy like Donald Trump. In his same opinion piece, he precedes his personal thoughts by stating, “Discrimination on the basis of religion will be upheld by the courts only if it is shown to be necessary to achieve the government’s compelling interest in protecting national security.” Although it’s an opinion piece and he still believes we cannot let religion decide who to bring into our country, Chemerinsky explains how a suggestion that sounds terribly wrong to many people could potentially be justified according to the government.

It is now up to the reader to form an opinion on whether it is necessary to go to such measures for the purpose of national security. And it is up to researchers and government intelligence to figure out if there are nondiscriminatory alternative legislatures such as allowing more individual screenings.

Trump can be quoted in a November 2015 interview stating there is ‘absolutely no choice’ but to close mosques. If people’s thoughts weren’t so clouded by the media and more people could form their opinions off of evidence-based sources, Constitutional interpretations, and what we learn from historical decisions of our politicians, perhaps more people would be outraged to hear the suggestion of a blatant violation of basic human rights presented by a potential presidential candidate. Chemerinsky’s work contributes to this vital cause of awareness.

This unique type of objectivity is achieved due to the absences of political influences and religious motivations. Chemerinsky does not seem to let a certain religious conviction influence his opinions when it comes to law and the courts, and neither should other public intellectuals striving for influence in their non-religious fields.

In his article, “The Cleric as a Public Intellectual,” Stephen Mack brings up a counterargument to an opinion by Peter Beinart of The New Republic calling for public arguments to be grounded ‘in reason and evidence, things that are accessible to people of different religions, or no religion at all’: 

Beinart’s call for “dialogic neutrality” (as it’s sometimes called) certainly seemed reasonable. But Reason has its own set of problems: First, there is America’s own liberal history. In many ways, American political history is the history of activist theologians from the right and the left. These men and women have been intellectuals of a special kind—people whose religious training and experience shaped their vision of a just society and required them to work for it. They have been key players in some of our most important reform movements, from abolitionism, the labor movement, and civil rights to the peace movements of various generations. And second, there is a kind of absurdity to Beinart’s reason. As Hugh Heclo puts it, the insistence that people of faith sanitize their political rhetoric of any religious assumptions “amounts to a demand that religious believers be other than themselves and act publicly as if their faith is of no real consequence.” It’s not only absurd but unfair, some argue, to ask religious intellectuals to disarm their political speech of its fundamental moral rationale.

We are not always so quick (or always the first country) to bring about a positive change – a prominent example being gay marriage that was just legalized in the US in 2015. Let’s take a moment to compare the influence religion had on two groundbreaking movements: marriage equality and the civil rights movement. This is not to say that the social conditions prior to these changes are comparable, but analyzing the ethical aspects of two movements against the denial of rights might shed some light on the place of religion in intellectualism and in government.

The church played a significant role in the civil rights movement. Major reasons for the movement’s overall success include spokespeople who were considered religious leaders as members of black clergy: Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jesse Jackson, just to name a few. It is no question the church helped these leaders and the leaders of many other early movements gain the desperately needed allegiance of large numbers of people.

On the complete opposite side of the religious push-for-equality spectrum lies the recent gay marriage dispute. In his contribution to the same sex marriage symposium, Chemerinsky attacks an argument to deny marriage equality based on religious liberty. He gets down to the main question of whether society should let religious beliefs justify discrimination. His view is that since religious beliefs about race and interracial marriage exist and are not considered valid exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, people’s rights should not depend on their gender or sexual orientation any more than their race. 

The church was strongly voicing its opinion in a large legal issue, blatantly pushing to deny a group of people that makes up 9 million Americans a basic human right. Radical Catholic extremists have promoted violence on the basis of homosexuality as well, although the church is not directly responsible for this. So although the church blessed the civil rights movement by serving as a foundation, for another group it worked towards their discrimination, victimization, and the denial of their rights half a century later. Referencing Heclo’s quote in Mack’s paper, perhaps there is no need for you to “publicly act as if your faith is of no real consequence”, but instead just realize the consequences of publicly imposing your faith.

A public intellectual in America today advocating for the public good should base their work off of careful reasoning, without biased convictions related to political status or religious beliefs. This is how we can propel society into the most effective social movements in the future. Erwin Chemerinsky’s work showcases these characteristics, making him a unique voice that the public should become more aware of.