progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
discussion of Net Neutrality, as of the time of this writing, shows that there are over
3,000,000 references to Net Neutrality, growing at the rate of about 10,000 new ones per
day! The marketplace of “ideas”, if that is what one calls all of these hits, is massive.
There are only 300,000 hits on the “War on Terror”. Thus, one could assume that Net
Neutrality is ten times more important than the War on Terror! One could look at other
more interesting hits. There are only 1.2 million hits on the Beatles! Yet there are 42
million hits on “God”. Thus, God is by this metric of relevance only seven times more
relevant than Net Neutrality! Yet God has been around a bit longer than Net Neutrality 12 .
Thus, in today’s world, one may assume that the issue of Net Neutrality is having
somewhat the same type of existence in the marketplace of ideas as did the nature,
person, will, essence of Christ in the sixth and seventh Century. For each day there are
hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs opining on what is Net Neutrality and how it should
be treated. Those doing the opining are generally just people “off the street”, in many
ways like the people opining on the nature of God in the sixth and seventh centuries.
The question, however, is there a set of individuals that we, the voters and consumers,
should be turning to in an attempt to seek guidance and advice as to how best to view this
important topic and what we should be demanding of our legal representatives. Is there a
Council of Nicea, a Council of Constantinople, to resolve the issues, to frame them, to
define them, and do we have the equivalent of the learned bishops and patriarchs to assist
us poor folk in determining where we should seek the correct answers.
Are the incumbents like Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision and Verizon to be viewed
as the twenty first century versions of the Huns, the Slavs, the Avars, the Vandals, or are
they just benign businesses who are seeking to maximize their shareholder value in an
open and competitive capitalist market?
The class of people who we would typically turn, an often self appointed group, is what
Judge Posner has recently characterized in some detail as the Public Intellectual 13 . The
Public Intellectual has been around for quite a while in society, this individual is one who
seeks a public platform, the Press, the Courts, certain Government Institutions, to present
their views on a certain topic.
Let me bring in to the discussion a prototypical Public Intellectual, Noam Chomsky. He
is a brilliant professor of linguistics at MIT who takes positions on many global political
issues and does so through his writings and presentations. He is a compelling author and
his positions take to the extreme. Yet, as one reads him in detail, he is in many ways a
classic sophist, and he can take "facts" roll them into whatever result he desires. He all
12 This is the Posnerian approach, which we shall discuss latter, of using Google hits as a measure of societal
importance see Posner, Public Intellectual, Harvard, 2000.
13 See, Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals, Harvard (Cambridge) 2000.
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