Recently, Malaysians have been treated to comments by and about certain intellectuals and have witnessed a pervading sense of fatalism regarding the possibility of better governance for the country. A net surfer, one of my young critics, puts the dilemma this way:

Why talk . . ., when the wise understand so much . . ., but the unwise who rule the world are not gonna listen?

The above comment reflects the chasm between intellectuals and the politicians or parties they hope to influence. Like Confucius, Plato, Thomas More, Turgot, and the thousands of like-minded voluntary do-gooders before them, Malaysian intellectuals often discover, sometimes too late, the inherently unstable nature of such relationships.

Most intellectuals are inclined to deal with the general and the abstract, whereas politicians must tackle the more mundane exercise of interacting daily with the world at large. It is not surprising, therefore, that intellectuals often accuse politicians of lacking vision, whereas the latter would counter that the former are impractical idealists.

Moreover, despite Plato's "philosopher-kings," history has not been kind to intellectuals who'd attained power. Lenin's idealistic revolution ultimately degenerated into a murderous dictatorship, while Mao's egalitarian vision appeared to have succeeded only in making everyone equally poor. It took Deng Hsiao-ping's unabashedly practical approach, underlined by his absolutely unvisionary slogan "it doesn't matter whether a cat's black or white, so long as it catches mice," to put China back on the path of economic progress.

Role function

The problems of an intellectual lie in the very function of his role. Like the religious prophet who seeks to replace the false beliefs of his flock with true beliefs about the road to personal salvation, the political intellectual sets himself the task of replacing what Marxists call "false consciousness" -- the kind of thinking that limits the social, economic, and political possibilities of disenfranchised groups -- with an explanation showing how the current unsatisfactory situation comes about and how it could be ended. The assumption is that an enlightened people would act on that explanation.

Such a task presupposes that 1) the explanation is true, 2) there is a receptive audience for the explanation, and 3) the enlightened audience will act on that explanation.

Those are highly debatable suppositions. For example, if a society's political and cultural formations are such that the masses could be kept ignorant of their unjust status quo, is it not possible for such formations to influence the intellectual as well?

If, on the other hand, the intellectual argues that years of overseas education have enabled him to escape or overcome past indoctrination, then he is opened to the charge that he has merely replaced domestic indoctrination with foreign indoctrination. The credibility of such a charge is inversely proportional to the extent of his proposed reforms: the more dramatic the suggested reforms, the less credible he is in the eyes of his critics. The more such reforms reflect values promoted by the West, the less seriously is he taken by his own society's conservative forces.

The intellectual might argue that he has mastered critical thinking skills, that he is open to criticisms so long as they're rational.

However, rationality itself is not an impregnable fortress: it could be argued (and has been argued) that emotion, feelings, and experience are also valid ways of verifying truths, and that to insist on only one system of argumentation, that is, a rational, scientific system, is to be exclusivistic.

In other words, normative questions tend to crop up right at the epistemological/ontological levels, long before the intellectual can put forward convincingly a theory of transformative action for the masses.

However, let us assume that the masses couldn't care less about abstract, theoretical arguments. What they want to know is some way to make their lives better. If this is the case, there is still the

problem of getting that information. It is well known that the mass media is government-controlled.

In addition, cultural diversity not only hinders the power of the government's dominant ideology; they also resist counter-hegemonic messages. Thus, messages by both the ruling party and the

opposition must be largely polysemic in order to overcome or reduce the resistances of a heterogeneous population. The varied social, cultural, and political positions of readers ensure that most texts would be negotiated: not all readers are passive receptacles of ideologies, whether left or right. Even those who're generally sympathetic to the intellectual might object to parts of his arguments.

Needs and wants

Another serious impediment to audience reception of any theory of transformative action is the Marxian concept of embodiment. The brain does not exist by itself: it is housed in a physical entity that makes up the human being. Consequently, a person's thoughts depend to some extent on the needs and wants of his body. He has to meet his primary needs - food, clothing, and shelter - before he has the luxury of sitting down in front of the computer reading how he is exploited and why he should vote against the Barisan National.

The body is also affected by the many amenities of modern life. Sports clubs, exercise centers, dance halls and other facilities are not merely locations for physical exertions: they can condition participants to a certain attitude which, as part of the dominant ideology, tends to be unrevolutionary and assists the party in power to maintain the status quo.

The government also uses physical threats to suppress the politically conscious, the people who're enlightened enough to take transformative action. The recent physical attacks on the Reformasi 5 show how BN hopes to limit political defiance by attacking the body.

But the most important factor confronting the possibility of change brought about by political enlightenment rests on the country's socio-economic conditions.

Simply put, people are unlikely to risk their lives or even their meagre material possessions for an ideology unless and until they've no choice but to do so. The enlightened might agree that it's time for a change, but they seldom act upon that agreement. They might say they're behind some intellectual or party, but all too often they stay way, way, behind.

All this shows the limits of reason and rational change within a constitutional framework. It's not surprising, therefore, to find the politicians and the intellectuals who share the same ideals frustrated and fatalistic. Nor to see both sides occasionally playing the blame game, with the former accusing the latter of being impractical and egotistical, while the latter responds with charges of a lack of vision or, during heated moments, a lack of intelligence and even a massive betrayal of the masses.

Both the opposition politicians and the intellectuals who sympathise with them should remember the pressures of struggling under an authoritarian government. The draconian laws and brutal actions of the ruling party have left the opposition with few democratic options. Likewise, attacks on the university's autonomy, typified by the "aku-janji" monstrosity, have made it difficult for academics to sustain a confrontational anti-establishment stance.

In the past, great western intellectuals such as Comte, Darwin, Marx, and Freud played their role outside the academy. The modern undemocratic state, however, is generally intrusive even in the private lives of its dissidents. China's Lu Xin, for example, was a fugitive much of his life, and reportedly had about fifty pseudonyms in order to escape the eyes of the Guomindang's secret police.

Malaysia, mercifully, has not yet sunk to the depths of pre-World War Two China, and between getting punched by the Special Branch and loss of academic positions, dissidents can still keep the government on the defensive with some occasional statements orarticles of protests.

As long as there's life, there's hope. Enlightened people, both within and without the political parties, should at such times of stress steady themselves with a laugh, a shout, and a glass of wine (orange juice if he's a Muslim), and continue to fight the good fight.

L CHUAH is a self-proclaimed literature hog who is interested in applying a multi-disciplinary approach to world affairs.