A Critique of Bijan Abdolkarimi’s Remarks in His Debate with Mostafa Mehrayeen — Part One

Aydin Areta

If you have not watched today’s debate between Mehrayeen and Abdolkarimi concerning their respective arguments for voting or not voting in the election and their critiques of one another’s positions, I strongly recommend watching it, because it contains many points worth thinking about and learning from.

Dr Mehrayeen’s remarks were complete, and what I write here is only a footnote to the eloquent points he made during the debate. What follows is a critique of Dr Abdolkarimi’s remarks. Before doing so, however, I want to make clear that I regard his comments not only as arising from genuine and considered concern for Iran’s future, but that I also admire his courage, because there are moments in history when criticising a government is easier than criticising people who are angry with that government. Speaking truth at such a difficult moment is the ethical duty of every intellectual. Despite this, I believe his remarks are open to serious criticism logically, ethically and from the perspective of practical reason.

The substance of his remarks in the debate was as follows:

- The government is not a body separate from the people. Part of the population supports and believes in the government and its ideology. Denying or ignoring this reality and constructing a government–people binary is a false and dangerous dichotomy.

- The government heard the people’s voice in the boycott of the parliamentary election and, taking it into account, allowed a candidate closer to the people’s wishes and further from the government’s maximal preferences to be presented for their vote. This is an opportunity that should be used.

- Overthrow-oriented ideas neither understand the reality of society nor the dangers that threaten the country from foreign powers. They fail to understand the lack of historical awareness and the social underdevelopment of Iran today and, through imaginary thinking, suppose that the fundamental problems of society will be solved if this political structure disappears. They acted in this way before, and the result is the present situation.

- Intellectuals make their living by standing between the middle class and the government and derive an identity for themselves through this position, without understanding their true responsibility, which is to create balance for progress.

There were other points as well, but in my view these four are essentially the core of his defence of the intellectual framework in which he believes.

My fundamental critique of his remarks has several dimensions. Because of the length of the discussion and the importance of each part, I will publish it in several separate sections and writings. The first part of this critique concerns the task of intellectuals and Dr Abdolkarimi’s mistaken reinterpretation of that task.

The Task of Intellectuals

Intellectuals are, before anything else, the wakeful conscience of society. Chomsky, an intellectual who has remained a fierce critic of Western policies from within the heart of Western civilisation, expresses the task of the intellectual beautifully. In his view, the first duty of intellectuals is to tell the truth and expose lies. It is not the task of intellectuals to accommodate the considerations of politicians. Their task is fundamentally ethical and founded upon standing for truth and veracity in society. It is their responsibility to reveal everything that politics does not want to see and sweeps beneath the carpet, so that politics can stop its destructive tendency to evade naked truth under the pretext of more urgent matters.

In my view, this is precisely what an intellectual such as Mehrayeen does in our society. If there is even a trace of rationality in a political system, it should value such critical intellectuals, just as the system of power in the West not only tolerates Chomsky—a fierce critic of its policies—within its universities and institutions of knowledge production, but also values him, because it knows that someone must remain in society who can place, in the clearest language and logic, before power that which no one wishes to tell it and which power itself has neither the tolerance nor desire to hear. In the absence of people like him, the eyes of politics will become blind and the storms of history will destroy its dust-covered structures. Politics, even when it finds change unacceptable and difficult, must remain capable of seeing if it is to survive.

I want to remind the professor of a statement from Kierkegaard: truth is like a trap into which we can only fall and by which we can be caught. We can become truth’s prey, but not its hunter. This is the first lesson an intellectual must learn if they are to awaken the conscience of their society.

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