Thread by @SikotiHamiltonR

NZ has many intellectuals who appear before the public. But since the death of Peter Munz in 2006 we haven't had an old-fashioned 'public intellectual'. Danyl McLauchlan's new book Tranquillity & Ruin seems to me to take up Munz's unfashionable but vital mission. (thread)

2 In NZ, intellectuals of both the left - think of, say, Jane Kelsey, @gtiso, @MorganGodfery - & the right - @PronouncedHare, Michael Reddell - regularly publish articles & speak on radio & TV. They take positions on issues, advocate changes to society. Their work is important.

3 We need intellectuals who advocate for certain ideas & take clear positions on issues. But we also need the sort of 'public intellectual' exemplified in the US by Edmund Wilson, & in NZ by Peter Munz. The public intellectual is not an advocate.

4 Over a long career, Edmund Wilson studied dozens of subjects. He wrote a famous book about literary modernism, but he also published on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cold War, & the American taxation system. Wilson was teaching himself Hungarian when he died at 77.

5 A public intellectual is an intermediary between his or her society & the world beyond it. She or he intercepts important but difficult ideas & events, examines them, & explains them in accessible language, without necessarily linking them to any political issue or agenda.

6 McLauchlan's Tranquillity & Ruin is a book about a middle-age crisis. Struggling with his physical & mental health & feeling uncertain about what he believes, McLauchlan investigates a series of movements & ideas that claim to give meaning to life.

7 McLauchlan stays in a muddy monastery run by a tough & faintly menacing Aussie abbot, goes camping with the utopians of the Effective Altruists movement, reads the notoriously difficult philosophers Martin Heidegger & Derek Parfitt, & meditates until he hallucinates.

8 McLauchlan gives careful accounts of the various ideas & movements he encounters on his journey, analyses them, cracks jokes about them. But he does not finally advocate for or against any of the ideas & people he meets. He leaves doors open for readers.

9 It would be easy to dismiss McLauchlan as a faint-hearted centrist, unable or unwilling to take an unequivocal stance on the subjects he studies. Some would call the lack of resolution in his book a symptom of the midlife crisis it purports to describe.

10 But I think Edmund Wilson & Peter Munz would empathise with McLauchlan's approach. & I think that, in the epoch of Trump, shock jock talkback, & social media flame wars, the equivocal approach of the old-fashioned public intellectual can seem radical as well as necessary.