What with the banging and honking for the government we see in some newspapers and the attacks and defamation we see in others, the real reader who merely seeks documented information and objective analysis, finds himself completely at a loss.
A journalist friend of mine complained to me in anger at how the media refers to him as “the prominent thinker, which he said has become such a widespread phenomenon that now indiscriminately includes every Tom, Dick and Harry.
“You’re right, I told my friend, “a journalist, like the man of letters or the artist doubtlessly deals with strains of thought but that does not make him a thinker in the proper sense of the word, because a thinker is intrinsically a philosopher who espouses theories that are unique to him. This is certainly not the case with our journalists, especially not in this day and age.
In the developed world, thinkers belong to a sublime class of intellectuals and so are a source of pride for their communities, but this isn’t true of our society. In fact, the opposite is true. For us, thinking has almost become a kind of psychological illness that leads to depression and can culminate in suicide. This explains the common Arabic saying why when someone is depressed, “he has some thought .
Just try to imagine the state of a thinker who supposedly has a lot of “thought – thought he must deal with day and night and which may lead to all those disasters.
Besides, where we come from, thoughts can’t feed us. A reporter, for instance, can blackmail people for a lot of money, but a thinker is useless to any newspaper or cultural or non-cultural institution of any sort because there’s no demand for the product he’s selling. Even the publishing houses don’t want it because if they end up getting roped into printing it, they usually do not know what to do with the volumes left around to collect dust.
That’s why this class of intellectuals has become extinct after our society decided to dismiss them and give their title to other groups, especially journalists.
My friend tore up the letter which addressed him as a prominent thinker and said, “I hereby, before you, officially forfeit a title that renders me useless and can even lead to disasters.
“A real thinker is an outcast, represented in soap operas along with the genius scientist, as a madman, an object of ridicule. But I am not mad; I’m a very reasonable person who denies the accusation of ‘thinking’ which, in the past, often led to imprisonment.
“Some thinkers in the past were leftist communists while others in the present are right-wing and religious. Both met the safe fate behind bars. But I don’t belong with any of them, nor do I belong with any other thought current of any kind.
“But Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’, I told him.
“But every human being has the right to peg his existence to anything other than thinking, he said. “Perhaps French seductress Brigitte Bardot was right when she played on Descartes’s famous words in her 1960s song, changing “je pense [think] to “je danse . Here I am, dissociating myself from thinking and using journalism as an example of the way things should be. ‘I bang and honk, therefore I am’ and banging and honking don’t require thinking of any kind.
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writer’s Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
