If world history is essentially a process based on change, and change has cultural meaning which stems from a “cultural apparatus” to borrow from Mills, that cultural apparatus which prompts change and explains the cultural meaning of change is the intellectual class or the intelligentsia. To borrow from Mills:
“Intellectuals are now living in a world that drifts and is being thrust towards World War III. Both the drift and the thrust depend upon ideas: upon definitions of world reality and upon the acceptability of policies and lack of policies among elites, publics, and masses. Intellectuals deal with ideas – with recollections of the past, definitions of the present, and images of possible futures. By intellectuals I mean scientists and artists, ministers and scholars; I mean those who represent the human intellect; those who are part of the great discourse of reason and inquiry, of sensibility and imagination that in the West began in Jerusalem and Athens and Rome, and that has been going on intermittently ever since.
Mills added:
“They are the organized memory of mankind, and such cultural apparatus as it has they create and maintain. If they write, paint, speak, if they create and distribute images and ideas, their work is publicly relevant. In so far as it is attended to, it focuses the views of men; and it distracts attention from that which it ignores. It justifies authority or criticizes it.”
Hence, the importance and significance of the role of the public intellectual and the cultural apparatus which is shaped and formed by the intellectual alongside the whole of government and society. The intellectual is the one who escapes the “drift” towards disaster and global war through discourse and intellect and reason. Aside from the public intellectual, everyone else is either deliberately or unconsciously leading the world towards global war at the moment. The “common denominator” of global war is the liberal worldview, as Mills noted. And while this worldview may exist in small circles in certain rich countries, it does not represent the worldview of the world’s majority. The liberal worldview is merely a reflection of the liberal’s “self-image.” These small circles represent only “a fraction of mankind” and “the period during which such a view has been assumed is very short indeed.” Mills added: “To speak in such terms of much of Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Soviet bloc, is ludicrous.”
The liberal worldview is in fact “provincial.” To borrow from Mills: “It is a consensus of provincials about their own immediate and provincial position.” There are “NATO intellectuals” on one hand, and there is everyone else on the other hand. It is also about fashion and style as well. To borrow from Mills: “But the most important thing about all this is that it is merely a fashion. And fashions change.” These “provincials” are to be “ignored” along with “their several fashions which have already come and gone during our own short lifetime.” But they cannot be ignored completely either. To borrow from Mills: “We cannot altogether do so because the terms they use, the feelings and the denial of feelings they embody, stand in the way of our efforts to communicate.” Patience is virtue.
Adam A. Azim 