Book Review
“PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL”:
The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Richard Falk
Clarity Press, 2021
©2022 Hazel Henderson
I read closely this deeply-informative autobiography of Richard Falk, pre-eminent global scholar/activist, whose life has often provided me with inspiration.
I won’t forget Richard Falk’s influence during the time I lived in Princeton in the 1970s. I was pursuing my own activist passion to confront the ecological devastation caused by financial globalization. Professor Richard Falk in his heyday dominating Princeton University’s then Woodrow Wilson School, actually invited me, a lowly un-credentialized citizen, to give a lecture on my efforts to one of his classes!
No other member of Princeton University’s August faculty ever invited me as an upstart citizen-activist operating from my house I dubbed “The Princeton Center for Alternative Futures”. From our home, a stone’s throw from the University, I and my former spouse, a dropout from IBM and former journalist eked out a precarious living from my articles, lectures and student campus rallies. Yet we hosted pro bono, global public intellectuals in our spare bedroom and in our back yard for discussions on alternative futures for the human family —already becoming a possible endangered species thorough its own limited cognitive awareness. These included: E.F. Schumacher, the German author of “Small is Beautiful” (1973), Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of “Future Shock” (1970) , now updated with input from 200 futurists in “AfterShock” (2020); Newt Gingrich who became US Congress Speaker; Richard Falk and Princeton University President, William Bowen, as well as Harlan Cleveland, US Ambassador to NATO.
Thus, Richard Falk’s powerful life recounted personally in “Public Intellectual“ allowed me to follow his amazing career beyond Princeton, and his courageous opposition to the Vietnam War to his commanding global influence that followed, as he was constantly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. From Princeton, Richard Falk followed his own pilgrimage to the University of California at Santa Barbara, the European Union, Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, South Africa – always connecting with key leaders in all these places, who sought his advice and academic research.
Reading this wonderful book, I see how much our paths continued to align around these same planetary goals, and whether the human family could enhance its cognitive horizon to become aware of our true planetary situation, as one species among many others, all totally mutually-interdependent and relying on those free photons daily from our mother star, the Sun. I have promoted the vision of our possible common future in all my books and most recently in my “Can the USA and China Find Paths to Common Prosperity?”
In this personal autobiography, Richard tells of his childhood, growing up in a typical middle-class Jewish family. He recalls how long it took to overcome these cultural norms, class and patriarchal expectations of entitlement. I realized how lucky I had been as an immigrant to this fragile experiment in self-governance —embracing its dream in my US citizenship conferred in 1963. I marveled on my good fortune in finding my precious vote was leveraged manyfold by the number of native-born US citizens who did not bother to vote. I was raised in a typical patriarchal British family under a violent authoritarian father and loving mother beaten into submission by psychological intimidation and control of money. Leaving this home at age 16, I also left Britain for the promise of the “shining city on the hill“ and the American dream.
Comparing Richard Falk’s life in “Public Intellectual” with my own, I saw advantages in my parents’ strict atheism — leaving me free to explore my own spiritual purpose. They also provided my experiential understanding of the dynamics of power relationships, greed and ambition and how these human motivations led to social power dynamics, and often conflicts, and even the Cold War rivalries between ideologies of capitalism and socialism —and the environmental exploitation of both systems. This led to my world travels, especially in China where I found so much that Western societies could learn.
As I learn from Richard Falk today of his newfound doubts in the wisdom of universal suffrage without massive investments in education and social infrastructure, these too, reflect my own fears for the future of the USA and all its self-inflicted wounds now exposed to the world. I shared with my late second spouse, computer pioneer, Alan F. Kay, this faith in democratic self-governance. We collaborated in many global conferences, UN summits and his public interest polling, summarized in his “Locating Consensus for Democracy“ (1998), published by Americans Talk Issues, Alan F. Kay, and www.ethicalmarkets.com.
Now in his nineties, Richard Falk sums up the human dilemma: still based on our inability to expand our awareness of planetary realities. We have no choice but to grow up and reach maturity as a species, understanding that global cooperation at all levels is now the only key to our survival. Although my path diverged from that of Falk, as I chose to become a science-policy advisor on technological assessment, and to confront the forces of finance, developing ethical guidelines for markets — our goals remain the same.
This book is must reading to remind us all how much higher the stakes are today for avoiding the Sixth Great Extinction which we ourselves still drive with our consumer societies. I hope all aspiring global citizens will learn as much from this book as I have.