El Intelectual Mexicano – para que sirve??
An intellectual class marginalized from the digital and genomic revolutions can help preserve the past, but it will be hard presses to help build the future.
I have only admiration for these great individuals and thousands of other Mexican intellectuals. But I am concerned that as a class, they have almost completely ignored science and technology.
The role of an intellectual class subsidized by a poor society should be, at least in part, to interpret, develop, and transmit key knowledge. Mexico should continue to support and revere great historians, musicians, painters, poet and writers. But the inteligencia as a whole has to wake up and foster the development of science and technology within its rarified realm.
Intellectuals must be among the first to understand, debate, create and transmit a new dominant language. Today the dominant language is Microsoft. Tomorrow’s will be genetics.
Juan Enriquez en Revista, Harvard Review of Latin America, Fall 2001