The Corruption of Intellectuals
through Political Infatuation
We should be tolerant (i.e., tolerant to genuine opinions, - to lies,
no!) and need to benefit from human interaction as much as we can.
However, while being tolerant, we also must be aware that many leading
intellectuals have been terribly naive and foolish in their opinions
and political actions during the last centuries. It is not a new
problem; a cause can be suggested in the education of “mind
workers”.
It is a key problem, now more than ever because of the profound role of
social communication. People are most susceptible to the opinions of
their peers and role models. Due to their highly regarded reputation,
well earned in their field, but irrelevant outside of it, leading
intellectual and professional personages nevertheless exert a
dominating influence on other intellectuals and on public
opinion. Their example has shaped the intellectual intercourse, but it
has also contributed to widespread folly with the most serious
consequences. We cannot exonerate them of the effects of their behavior
and must be on our guard; today more than ever because political
follies have been magnified by the great power of a modern state into
outright disasters. When we search for reasons why highly intelligent
minds can be so wrong we should look at well known cases.
A typical example was the incomprehensible admiration for the Soviet
system by the noted Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as
described in Ray Monk (1990), Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius
(Penguin). Wittgenstein expressed his desire to become a workman in the
Soviet Union because he admired the system as a new and effective
religion! So much for his judgment in the face of millions who, as it
was well known, were desperate to escape their “paradise”. Wittgenstein
obviously did not see this, or did not want to see it. In order to
understand what is going on, and get a taste of his intellectual
environment, we need to know the final sentence of
his noted Tractatus , “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one
must be
silent”. This has been hailed by experts as a highly metaphysical
remark that
attempts to convey the unsayable, unthinkable doctrine that there is a
realm about which one can say nothing! Of course, for a sound mind,
this is ridiculous nonsense. The unknown cannot be discussed, because
we do not know it, period. However, this truism had to be seen
as sophisticated philosophy, worthy to be pronounced by a famous
philosopher. One is forced to accept the statement as a disastrous
failure of common sense by all concerned.
One can suspect
that there must be something like a hole in these, otherwise highly
gifted minds.
In Germany, the nobelist Philipp Lenard, a physicist with many
accomplishments, became an ardent
Nazi and wrote a Physics textbook titled Deutsche Physik, as if
a valid
German Physics would be different from any other. For this, and his
polemic against Einstein's Relativity theory, he received a prize from
the Nazi party. Also in Germany, the noted philosopher Martin
Heidegger, the world-famous exponent of existentialism, joined the Nazi
party in 1933, achieved a leading position in Academia and was a
propagandist for the Nazis until he was expelled from the party when
they realized that his philosophy had nothing to do with Nazism. In
Austria, the non-Jewish part of the intellectual circles, particularly
most teachers and university professors, provided the core of the Nazi
support which contributed to the fateful Anschluss in 1938. In
Cambridge and Oxford, England, the influence of the communists in
academic circles became so pervasive during the 1930s that a Soviet spy
ring could be formed. In France, the famous existentialist philosopher
Jean Paul Sartre was one of many communists within the
intelligentsia. He had a substantial following among students even
though, in the Soviet Union, he would have been promptly put into the
Gulag for his philosophy which was fundamentally opposed to materialism
and Marxist Leninist communism. Similar things came to pass in Italy
and in the United States where, what really happened, continues to be
obscured by a relentless leftist propaganda.
As one of my pertinent experiences, a professional friend of mine, a
fine man and former professor of physics at NYU, to my surprise
expressed to me in the early seventies his great admiration for Lenin.
He was flabbergasted when I was able to show him writings of Bertrand
Russell who had visited Lenin and had reached a disastrous judgment
about the man and the whole system. My friend could hardly believe his
eyes when he read this. In his mind, Russell was too great and too
respected an authority to be disregarded. But the writings of Russell
about Lenin have never been widely discussed. They are almost unknown,
as it was also unknown that the nobelist Albert Camus was severely
criticized for having denounced the Soviets for their inhumanities. The
reason for all this is an astounding silence of the dominant part of
the world literati and leading journalists about the crimes and
disastrous failures of all things socialist in the world. The latest
example is the case of the socialist dictator Saddam Hussein who was
staunchly protected by the socialist minded in all countries who
disregarded his heinous crimes and cruel exploitation of his people.
Of course, a suppression of information, as a deliberate act, is a more
serious dereliction than the naive foolishness of people such as
Sartre, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, even though, ignorance in such
important matters is no excuse. These cases are much too numerous; they
can be taken as the rule, and cannot be dismissed as curiosa. They show
a social and political problem of capital importance because there is
indeed a very strong tendency among intellectuals to favor collectivist
and systemic solutions, at whatever cost! In their mind, the
envisioned
social benefit that their beloved social revolution promises is so
important that the loss of life of mere individuals and their tragedies
must be accepted as the necessary price for progress. A depressing
documentation for this can be found in Robert Conquest’s Reflections
on
a Ravaged Century (Norton). Robert Harris (National Review,
November 8,
1999, pp. 36 -37) illuminates the point made above. See also Brian
Crozier (1999), The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (Forum),
as well
as the noted Black Book of Communism. As all these cases show,
the
judgment of intellectuals can be most tragically erroneous.
That the judgment of many intellectuals is usually wrong is attested by
George Orwell in his Notes on Nationalism: "It is, I think, true to say
that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the
war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan
feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance,
that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun
Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands
they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was
making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because
his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that
British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can
be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I
have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American
troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush
an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to
believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Why? What is the reason for these alarming failures of thought
and critique? The cause, I suggest, cannot be found in any deficiency
of intelligence, because we are dealing here with top experts in their
specialties. It can only be seen in a character weakness, brought about
by the one-sidedness of their education. Without solid convictions and
principles that can only be based on early education, good values
and experienced insight - many modern intellectuals lack a
sufficiently firm character that would enable them to reach the
disinterested judgment that is needed for seeing things as
they are. Such minds are too easily confused and fall prey to
emotionally charged doctrines (Bacon’s idols). By surrendering to
half-conscious desires and superficial, simplistic, or outright wrong
notions (such as “social justice”, “racial/class superiority”),
these intellectuals fail in their proper role as defender of the
eternal, objective and unbiased values of mankind, i.e., truth,
justice, and objective reason. This is the reason for the paucity
of good leadership at the grass roots in our modern society. Yet
we have a large number of highly trained intelligence and their
leadership role would be their natural mission. Julien Benda has called
this The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des
Clercs, 1927,
Augmented Edition, 1946, Grasset, Paris). In this important study, B
gives many examples for the negative feelings, cynicism and hate of
many intellectuals for their democracy. In this attitude, they go back
to their spiritual forefather Plato as Karl R. Popper has described it
in his noted work, The Open Society and its Enemies
(1945).
Benda discusses in detail the profound shift in intellectual attitude
which came with the arrival of Romanticism. Hegel was one of the
originators of the blind adoration of the absolute state, the opposite
of what a higher civilization needs. In his convoluted thinking, he
became the intellectual grandfather of the type of modern intellectual
who is attracted to everything statist and centralist. By serving
passionately his various political engagements, he abandons the eternal
and disinterested ideals of a higher humanity: truth, justice, reason.
In view of this, B sees the future with pessimism because he believes
that our civilization is an accident due to the fortuitous
circumstances that allowed the Greek “miracle” and the later
Renaissance to occur. If humankind loses this incomparable jewel of
cultural heritage, a loss that is accelerated or even caused by the
neglect of classical education as Schopenhauer had warned, mankind will
not be able to recover it. Of course, we can question whether we have
not already lost it because very few people today value this heritage
at all (see the infantile claims of the cultural relativists). I
believe, this view is too pessimistic, however. Our culture is not the
exclusive product by the intelligentsia, almost the contrary. Their
contributions have become less and less important for the real
achievements of our Faustian culture. Today, we can even suggest, that
they are in a retarding or hindering, certainly in a confusing role
because their great influence through the media leads to social
turbulence and friction.
It will be up to us to recover our magnificent heritage by becoming
aware that we should be masters of our fate. Therefore, Benda’s
pessimism could be premature. History does not follow a law. Our fate
is not predetermined! No, we are the ones who make the decisions out of
our free will, decisions that become the cause of what happens. We do
not need to repeat forever the errors of the past. I still trust, while
we have been terribly confused about the means how to reach them, we
have not yet abandoned our ideals. The key for progress can only be a
self-education of each intellectual which must include training for
discipline, without which intellectuals remain almost inevitably
members of an intellectual mass proletariat. Therefore, we must call
for the intelligentsia to drop their poor cynicism (a sign of weakness)
and their mistaken political activism. While these weaknesses are the
direct consequence of the vastly increased ranks of a lower grade,
incompletely educated intelligentsia due to the enormous productivity
that released many persons from an otherwise necessary physical work,
the new but terribly unwise activism has caused
real catastrophes.
The key point for this self-education is that reliable objective
judgment requires a silencing of personal interest, i.e.,
some degree of self-denial. To be able to do this, the mind must have
acquired the facility of telling the “lower personality” to shut up and
be obedient to the commands by the highest level of the Self. This
power can be assisted by making it into a habit that is maintained by
rigorous daily mental and physical training; the latter with workouts
every day for half an hour or more. The conditioning
of the monks, who played the role of the intellectuals in prior times,
was done by different means, i.e., by hours of prayer sessions and an
austere life style under the command ora et labora. It had as
its goal
the very same capability: to suppress the body's wishes and
concentration on the important goal. The way how to
achieve this can be different today; the mind must be able to control
the subtle influence of half conscious interests of which we are almost
never fully aware. In other words, the frequent type of the blatantly
undisciplined
“mind worker” can be expected to be perhaps very creative, but
disciplined and objective he is probably not! In his special area, a
lack of objectivity is quickly corrected by the critique from the
colleagues, while his other opinions remain unchecked. They remain
unduly esteemed and can cause havoc in the intellectual life of the
public!
Of course, the problem of reaching realistic judgments is immensely
complex, can be successfully approached only piecemeal, and has many
other aspects. Nevertheless, in view of its very great importance, the
problem deserves the understanding and study by every genuine
intellectual. We
cannot remain passive and observant, but must lead by pointing to what
position
to take, and what action would be right. Here, we can only take into
account a major aspect.
A factor that is always vastly underestimated is the congenital desire
of every mind to conform with the environment. “Group think”
affects everybody, today more than ever due to the mass information
technology. This creates a thick intellectual atmosphere around us
which prevents us from “breathing” anything else. A noteworthy example
for someone who suddenly realized his affliction is David Horowitz, a
formerly committed Marxist. His book The Professors documents
amazing examples that go beyond the infatuation problem as such
and address the corruption of the academic selection process as a
secondary problem. Another case is Pilar Rahola, a Catalan from
Barcelona who is a former left wing parliamentarian in the national
legislature in Madrid. She said recently in an interview with
Procheorient (LeMonde):
“I believe that if the left has failed as a world ideology, it is
because the left did not succeed in breaking with the worst of its
dogmatic thinking. The left has been very progressive, but it became
infatuated with such infamous dictators as Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin,
and now it is in love with Arafat. The left should be self-critical. We
have been influenced by the great ideologues like [Jean-Paul] Sartre
and [Albert] Camus, and also by May 1968. That is to say, the overall
thinking of the Spanish left comes from France. Now, France is
fundamentally anti-American, from which (comes) our anti-Americanism,
that at times borders on the pathological, an anti-Americanism which is
also anti-Semitic.” [translated].
Here, we have it in all clarity: the group think! It is a real shame
that it affects the so called educated people as much as anyone. More
examples are everywhere, as, e.g., the hysterical fear of nuclear power
that has been created in many countries. France has not participated in
this fear campaign that has swept through Europe and to a lesser degree
also America. Or take the Global Warming issue where informed reason is
apparently powerless to prevent shortsighted changes in the national
policies. These hysterical fears in their combination hinder the
implementation of a sustainable solution to a real problem. The cost of
this affects the poorest people on earth more than others because a
delay in the transition to a sufficient and clean energy source and
improved technology for the modern societies causes an enormous global
economic loss.
Can any true intellectual agree with an “ideology” that involves no
critical judgment because it is pure group think? How has any of this
helped
the people? The bitter truth is that ideologies have not only not
helped, but
have caused immense mischief. We must not forget the terrible lessons
of
the 20th century! Intellectuals, we should tell them, you must remember
your true role! It is definitely not to be found by pushing an
ideology. One is unable to reform himself unless each
one of us remembers that, unless he is subject to an incapacitating
disease, he has an obligation that derives from the education that he
has received from society. The only way to pay back this debt is to
fulfill the unique role as a defender of truth, and objective
reason, the eternal values of mankind, exactly as Albert Schweitzer (in
his prophetic work on culture: Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur,
München, 1923), Benda, and others after them, have urged us to do.
Copyright © 2003, Gernot M. R.
Winkler
Last Correction 12/30/2008