It’s probably irrelevant today to speak of the role of the intellectual. In a time when everybody with a Twitter account thinks he is intelligent and clever, the word “intellectual” evokes neither awe nor respect, but derision.
Yet, the fact that intellectuals are not as cool and respected as they were in the past is no reason to just forget about them and believe they have gone extinct.
They’re still around. They tweet and blog, just like you do. But many, I surmise, have forgotten their
function and responsibility: Serving the public, representing the voiceless, the disadvantaged and the
powerless.
I do not intend to pontificate here about what an intellectual is, for I am aware that the authors on the perhaps hackneyed subject, such as Antonio Gramsci, Julien Benda and Edward Said, have comprehensively outlined what intellectuals should be doing and the many problems they are facing.
As a journalist who still believes in the traditional role of the press as it was understood by our patriarch, Tirto Adhi Surjo, during the nation’s formative years — that the press is an agent of change, a gadfly for the powers that be — I am appalled by the fact that Indonesian intellectuals have become, to use Said’s term in his 1994 book Representations of the Intellectual, increasingly professionalized.
For Said, an intellectual should be an amateur for he is part of the public, part of the laymen he represents, not a specific institution or profession with which he is formally associated.
And I have to agree with the Palestinian author, the media is to blame for turning intellectuals into “experts” and “professionals” who are allowed only to speak on their field of expertise. But, that doesn’t mean we can overlook their glaring absence.
My concern begins with tainted milk.
Consumer rights activist David Tobing won a citizen’s lawsuit against the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB), the Health Ministry and the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency, which said they needed to disclose the list of brands of baby formula that, according to university research released in 2008, had been tainted by Enterobacter sakazakii bacteria.
IPB and the two government institutions refused to abide by the Supreme Court ruling. The Attorney General’s Office (AGO), representing the university and the government, challenged the ruling on the grounds that researchers have the right to keep their sources confidential.
The ruling is undeniably problematic. For academics, it is perceived as a threat to their freedom. That is why, apart from the AGO’s plan to lodge a case review request to have it annulled, a number of universities, including the University of Indonesia, have also moved to countersue.
The universities said it is academically unethical to disclose any information that may harm or disadvantage the subjects of scientific research. Forcing researchers to do that, they argued, could hamper science.
That is a solid argument. But the lingering question is whether such a move benefits the public. The move may serve the interests of science and the baby formula industry, but it gives nothing to the community that is left guessing whether what they have been giving their infants is safe.
The dons at UI and other universities are here acting as professionals, not intellectuals. They stand for their profession as researchers.
An intellectual should know that their only allegiance, apart from the truth, is to the public. As Said has it, “The intellectual who claims to write only for him or herself, or for the sake of pure learning, or abstract science is not to be, and must not be believed.”
At the end of the day, everything is political. That is also perhaps why some of our intellectuals decided to join political parties, mainly the Democratic Party (PD).
On the heels of its national congress in Bandung last year, a number of prominent intellectuals — lawyers, human rights activists, Muslim scholars and others — were reportedly invited to join President Susilo Bambang Yudho-yono’s party.
Respected lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis and rights defender Usman Hamid reportedly declined the offer to join the party at the last minute.
This is probably one of the reasons they can effectively serve their function as intellectuals very well.
But, not so much for, say, Liberal Islam Network icon Ulil Abshar Abdalla and other well-known
activists such as former Imparsial leader Rachland Nashiddik, who decided to take the leap and joined the party.
They believe they can do more from “the inside” than from “the outside” as critics who can only bark.
And what has happened in the first year of their activism within a political party is not so much like what they had thought.
Ulil, for instance, was deplorably quick to say that a book bomb sent to him was not linked to any terror groups but to political parties he had criticized, alluding to the Prosperous Justice Party, the Islamist party that, despite its membership in the ruling coalition, has been very critical of the government. His allegations were later proven wrong.
What is most disheartening is his latest comment on a series of damaging graft scandals that have tarnished his party’s image: Our party’s enemies orchestrated the scandals. It’s fine to hear such an evasive comment from outspoken PD official Ruhut Sitompul, but to hear it from Ulil, a top US university graduate, is just reprehensible.
The graft scandals centering on DP lawmaker Muhammad Nazaruddin could only be addressed by providing evidence to prove they were merely rumors and facilitate the antigraft body in probing the lawmakers.
And the intellectuals inside the party, if they stay true to their social responsibilities, should be the first to blow the whistle if the rumors turn out to be true.
In dealing with dirty politics and tainted milk, intellectuals can only come clean if they side with the public.
Failing to do that means they have committed treason, not only against their own values, but also against the people they should have represented.
The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.
