Intellectual life
I write these words from the Café Rustica, a delightful neighborhood coffeeshop where all the employees know my name, and the tables spill out onto the sidewalk during the precious months of the Boston summer. I come here often to sit at a corner table, with a view out the bay windows onto Beacon Street, and think and write random thoughts in my journal. For me, this is one of the most sublime joys in the world, to have time to ponder and muse and just stare out the window and let my thoughts gestate. I realize that for some this meditative space would seem insufferably boring and clichéd, but I’ve always had this sort of brooding, introspective streak. In high school I was fortunate to have a couple friends of the same temperament, and it seemed totally normal at the time to talk about existential philosophy and beat poetry, those subjects so friendly to teenage angst. We are all scattered across the country now, doing various things, but I think we all kept our belief in the importance of an intellectual life, in our own way.
By an intellectual life, I mean nothing more than the “examined life” of Thoreau, the sense that there is wisdom and pleasure to be found by reading and thought and discussion. In America today, this conception of the intellectual is viewed as hopelessly idealistic and elitist, and perhaps it is, for it is certainly out of step with a culture that spends inordinate amounts of time gossiping about Brittany Spears’ baby. I can’t say that our belief in an intellectual life has always lead us to make wise career choices, and indeed I know it has lead me to make choices that have not lead me to the most stable or profitable career I could have chosen. We’ve all stayed away from the corporate world, as not having enough mental space for original thought, although recently I’ve begun to reconsider this position. Even in the academic world, where we’ve all ended up in one capacity or another, this conception of the intellectual is unwelcome, for academia is thoroughly (and perhaps appropriately) focused on the outcome of thought, and not its pleasures. While it may just be my stubbornness, I still believe in an intellectual life, and cultivate it as one of the most important things in my life, although by now means the only or most important thing.
Somehow I found my way into science, and now I do science research for a living. I love science, the sense that by a careful examination of empirical evidence something thorough and lasting may be learned, a sense lacking from more abstract philosophical pursuits. I love ecology, my chosen discipline, and deeply believe it can help with some of the profound environmental challenges facing our society. I’m happy with my career, and optimistic I can do some decent work. But there’s still a tension within me, between the safe work of scientists, what Thomas Kuhn called puzzle-solving, and new, difficult work that might help guide our society through its environmental predicament. My generation of young ecologists, who are just now receiving their degrees, deeply want to work on the latter, at least some of the time, and not leave it until “after you have tenure,” as one senior ecologist notably advised me.
