A public intellectual

It was a long journey to this space. A very long journey.

The journey took me through about two dozen periodicals, incarceration, persecution, two uprisings, the acquaintance of many heroic men and women, major and minor crusades, great loves won and lost.

When The STAR asked me for a name for this column, I went through a long episode of panic.

The last time I had an English-language column with a name, it was a disaster. I called my column at the now-defunct Who Magazine "Colon," referring to the punctuation mark that allows us to specify or to qualify a statement just made. That, I thought, captured the constraints of writing under a dictatorship. Most of my readers, however, thought my column was named after a body part through which waste is expelled.

After much thought, and on the advice of a very dear friend, I decided to name this column First Person.

I thought this apt, not only because it is positioned as the first commentary in this op-ed spread. I do intend to write flagrantly in the first person, veering away from the formality of traditional journalism and hewing closely to the more personal, more transparent and less stilted maxims of new journalism.

Editorial columnists ought to make no bones about representing themselves. They should not be peddlers of gossip or gladiators of special interests. They should aspire to be responsive and responsible public intellectuals, critics of our communal soul, spokesmen of large constituencies.

Writing is, in the last instance, a most solitary craft. In the smallest hours, the writer struggles with a blank page, disciplines his prose and clarifies his own thoughts alone. The effort becomes unbearably lonely if he writes for no one in particular and espouses no cause to speak of.

Friends often ask why I persist in writing editorially. The pay is meager, the risks are high. The hours are long and, when newsbreaks happen, the schedules are chaotic.

Editorial writing cannot be merely a hobby. It is a craft one must organize his life around, breathing in the news around the clock. If it cannot be done with absolute passion, it will have no life.

The demands notwithstanding, I could not imagine myself not writing.

Jean-Paul Sarte introduced the concept of l’homme engage – a man totally engaged with his time. Since I encountered that concept in high school, I have been completely enamored by it. It is with this concept that I defined my life. My writing is my engagement with my time and my place.

As engaged writing, it must be both analytical and political. It must address my milieu, in the same instance, with both involvement and detachment. It must simultaneously be an act of freedom and an act of cognition.

If it is not all these, then the romance is broken. The tediousness will have no justification. The effort no merit.

Writing editorially will become a chore without passion. A public act bereft of private compassion.

I do understand that writing is a sharp instrument. With a dangerous weapon. Analysis is a higher order of truth.

Because of that, they must all be handled with delicacy. With a great sense of responsibility for the public good. With a great deal of love for a people many times over tormented by demagoguery.

Our politics is poisoned daily by doses of irresponsible utterance. I commit not to add to that.

Our communities are torn apart by men of malice. I commit to pressure good faith to the extent that is possible.

Our civic culture has been impoverished by diminished trust. I commit to transparency.

This is not to say, however, that the writing in this space will be timid. On the contrary, it will be passionate and unremitting. It will be forthright and uncompromising. It will be all these with a jealously guarded standpoint on intellectual independence.

I do know, from three decades of political writing, that intellectual independence can only be sustained by a sufficient resource of courage. I am prepared to muster that resource when required so that a spade may be called a spade and a crook denounced as such.

Relocating my editorial writing to The STAR opens an opportunity to reinvent my own editorial writing.

By making it more personal, I will exercise greater responsibility for what is written. By writing unabashedly in the first person, I hope to bring greater transparency to the standpoint taken by the prose that will fill this space.

It is, after all, more challenging to write "I" than to write "we". The entire burden of responsibility for taking a stand falls on the writer.

When a strong position is taken by this column on any burning question of the day, it will be taken with the intellectual discipline of a social scientist – not on the basis of whimsical opinion alone.

I think I owe this to the reader: a level of discourse that is benefited by analytical clarity and conceptual refinement.

Our public life has been cluttered by so much uneducated chatter. That has produced a haze over the issues we must collectively resolve. That has made national consensus as elusive as it is today.

Part of the responsibility of writing editorial is to keep the reader explicitly informed of where the writer is coming from. The relationship between writer and reader ought to always assume the mode of a conversation, propelled by clarity and familiarity. I will try to keep that responsibility constantly in mind.

It will not be possible to completely define a permanent standpoint. That is a sure formula for intellectual rigidity.

As an intellectual, I have journeyed from the far Left, the orthodoxy of unyielding historical laws, to what I would rather not call the "Center" but a position of empathy for people struggling for freedom within the context of inescapable constraints.

Of the passions that govern my conduct of this vocation, I find it best to borrow Bertrand Russell’s words: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have go-verned my life – the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind."

And so let this conversation begin.