My life as a scientist (which continues) places me at several removes from this exceptional book. Nonetheless, the authors insist that I am implicated. They are, it is true, winners of an enduring Ontario prize for literature, with which I have a distant link. That is my good fortune since from this volume I learn, as will any reader, what it means to be professionally literate. It is an enviable condition of ebullience; enquiry; and, at times, eloquence. But that description does not do this book justice since, above all, it has a purpose.
The purpose is to be found in the title, which is, in fact, an essay. At the outset it addresses itself to “The Public Intellectual.” This is a term unknown in my profession, but that is our loss. For what the term describes is a fundamental contract between society’s creative class and its consumers. The contract extends back to the time, thirty thousand years ago, when cave painters were accorded time off from the hunt. It has endured because humanity demands food for the mind, as well as the body. The precise terms of the contract remain, however, a matter for negotiation.
The rest of this book’s title makes a still more subtle point, since it conjoins the bargain between the intellectual and the public with the need for a “Culture of Hope.”
What does that mean? We are provided with a clue in the opening phrase of the Introduction, which attributes to Aristotle the proposition that “Hope is a waking dream.” This brings us to the heart of the problem faced by the Public Intellectual: who among the public will exchange a tangible good – a portion of bison – for a waking dream – a painting on the wall? Clearly it must be someone in whom the anticipatory joy that we term “hope,” is strong.
But is that such an exceptional condition? The authors of this book think not, nor do I. Rather than being rare, hope is better described as a condition for life. It is evident in the infant who must engage in feats of discovery that would give pause to Isaac Newton. Similarly the adult committed to creative endeavour nourishes the hope that order can be made out of chaos, and, as a professional, makes a promise to deliver on that hope.
It is the purpose of the teacher (all the authors of this book are teachers) to foster hope and deliver on the promise of enlightenment. This too was the purpose of the Province in planting the seeds that led to this book. It did so liberally, since it did not ordain the outcome. In acting as it did, and as it resolutely continues to do, it has become a notable subscriber to the “Culture of Hope.”
John Polanyi,
University of Toronto