The main fault of Turkish intellectuals
by
ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ

This newspaper has an interesting questionnaire on its back page. It includes 20 personal questions and was inspired by the famous questionnaire of Marcel Proust, a French philosopher and writer. Every day an academic, an artist, a journalist or one person from well-known Turkish intellectual circles appears on this page and answers these questions. When this survey first started to be published, I looked at just a few of the results and shortly thereafter lost interest in them. However, I later realized that two Turkish sociologists have been watching, recording and analyzing these answers quite closely to draw a picture of Turkish intellectuals. These two sociologists, Ms. Esra Sarıoğlu from Binghamton University and Mr. Barış Ünlü from the University of Ankara published an article about their findings (Radikal, Oct. 25, 2009) on the answers of Turkish intellectuals to this questionnaire.

These two sociologists focused on the answers to one question in particular: What is your main fault? In answering this question, many intellectuals gave reasonable answers. But the answers of 30 percent of participants are quite thought provoking! They have very interesting “faults.” It goes without saying that this question tries to provoke some self-criticism, but the answers show that these intellectuals found some features which are generally accepted as good qualities as faults. They found the following faults: being candid, honest, humble, a perfectionist, emotional, courteous, principled, altruistic and so on. Some “faults” these intellectuals found they had are very interesting: Some “disturb the routine in every situation they are in,” some “give excessive importance to their promises,” some “immediately detect the fools,” some “have no tolerance for foolishness and rubbish,” some “become angry at hypocrisy,” some “always renew their opinions,” some “have made criticism a reflex,” some are “straight forward,” some “do not have a bad bone in their body,” some “have a heart of gold” and it continues like that.

This is quite surprising, is it not? What were your answers? Were they anything like this? I am very curious about what I would see if this questionnaire was conducted on intellectuals in another country. We can, of course, understand a kind of performance anxiety on the part of these intellectuals. Their answers were going to be read by hundreds of thousands of people, after all. Nevertheless, they still give us some ideas about their mindset.

Had these answers been given by men on the street I would not have been surprised, but when it comes to intellectuals, I would have expected some real criticism. How can we explain this level of blindness? While writing these lines, French philosopher Louis Althusser came to mind. He was seen as one of the biggest post-Marxist thinkers in his time, but he also killed his wife. As a person who appreciates his academic work, I was very surprised when I read his memoirs. He was very egocentric and alienated from his own feelings.

Did I remember this to justify the Turkish intellectuals’ egocentrism? I do not know. Mr. Ünlü and Ms. Sarıoğlu also ask, how can we possibly rely on these intellectuals’ analyses, outcomes and so on? These are legitimate questions, ones I asked about Turkish intellectuals even before I read the analyses of these academics.