Ah, media spin! It’s evident in the National Post’s recent headline entitled Only two Canadians make list of world’s deep thinkers.
“Only” two out of one hundred? Statistically speaking, Canada would be lucky to have one such intellectual in the top 200. Canada has one half of one percent of the world’s population, yet it secured 2 percent of the spots for having a top intellectual.
Still, Doug Owram has some points to make about the fact that the two Canadians are Naomi Klein and Michael Ignatieff.
Mr. Owram wondered why Charles Taylor, the prominent philosopher, and novelist Margaret Atwood were not included.
“These things are kind of like beauty contests,” said Dane Rowlands, associate director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
Mr. Rowlands opined that while Mr. Ignatieff is capable of writing intellectually rigorous material, some of the human rights scholar’s writing is light.
“I’ve read a couple of pieces of his that appeared to me to be largely devoid of anything substantive in terms of a contribution,” he said.
Mr. Rowlands was less charitable about Ms. Klein.
“Klein does the communication part, but in terms of deep thinking I find the stuff is mindlessly short of anything that would constitute being persuasive at an academic or intellectual level.”
Mr. Rowlands suggested Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap, and Janice Gross Stein, Provost of the University of Toronto and director of the Munk Centre for International Studies, would have been better candidates.
But is Owram just a cloistered ivory-tower type? Seriously, even though there are likely far more intellectual people out there, many of them can’t tie their shoelaces and climb stairs at the same time. Their interpersonal skills mirror those of sponges.
The poll might not measure the degree of contribution to the academic community so much as it measures the impact of one’s writing outside the academic community. Many of their ideas might just be a re-hashing of what’s already out there, but what matters is the power of an idea. Public intellectuals will always be torn to shreds by their contemproraries, but who are the history books and people going to remember? Doug Owram or Michael Ignatieff?
I mean, Doug Owram is a smart guy and all, but I can’t find any of his books on the best-seller’s list at Chapters.
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