Letter: Soap opera intellectuals

Sir: What a shallow view of intellectuals Edward Said presents in his first Reith Lecture (24 June). Like characters in a soap opera their actual work is defined almost entirely by the poses they strike and the emotions they evoke. In television soaps businessmen get rich by picking up the telephone, doctors become chief surgeons by breathing heavily through their face masks, and academics grow famous by wearing glasses while in bed with their mistresses.

For Professor Said the art of communication in the political marketplace maketh the intellectual. Had he chosen to focus on another famous piece by C. Wright Mills on the 'art of intellectual craftsmanship' (The Sociological Imagination), he might have shown more respect for the hard graft involved in the search for that elusive thing called truth, so often forcefully suppressed and compromised by those in power.

It was Mills's meticulous, and no doubt often tedious, collection of evidence from Who's Who, from obscure records of corporate board memberships and the social calendars of rich women that made him an intellectual with a powerful truth to tell about the concentration of political might in the United States, not merely his ability and willingness publicly to flaunt his political distrusts.

Turgenev's Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (also discussed) is a scientifically trained doctor in painstaking pursuit of hard, empirical ('positive') evidence about the causes of illness among starving serfs, for centuries told to bear their suffering as an act of punishment by a merciless God. It is the content of this ultimately irrefutable message that is so threatening to the complacent and self-serving community from which Bazarov comes, not his communicative competence in presenting it, with or without telephones, face masks, glasses or public relations experts.

Yours sincerely,

STINA LYON

Principal Lecturer in Sociology

South Bank University

London, SE1