Intellectuals by Paul Johnson is a series of biographical sketches of intellectuals whose influence during the twentieth century has been strong. He includes Rousseau, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy—all the way to Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. Their lives are often shocking and embarrassing, and in many cases Johnson makes a strong argument that their intellectual contributions are seriously undermined by certain personal details. Rousseau, for example, based much of his argument on his presumption to be the most moral and loving person in the history of humanity, but the record reveals that he was a contemptible, perverted monster. Marx argued that socialism and communism were scientific doctrines, but the record reveals that he performed no research, never observed an industrial concern—never went to a mine or a factory in his life—falsified facts in many important places, and flew into a tyrannical rage whenever he was challenged for these things. Thus, Johnson’s book is not just a bunch of juicy ad hominem—although it is understandable that leftists might regard it as such.
The problem with the book is that Johnson isn’t talking about intellectuals, really—or even about influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. For instance, he talks about Marx, but not Nietzsche or Freud, so we rather have one leg of the twentieth century tripod. And throughout the book he seems to contend that the basic problem with intellectuals is ideas per se—not the content of the ideas, or the methods these intellectuals have chosen. Only in the last chapter does Johnson get down to the essence of what is really wrong with the intellectuals he talks about: namely, that they abandoned reason and substituted physical force (in various guises) in its place. This is the problem—not so much that Bertrand Russell cheated on his wife or that Marx had illegitimate children. Those flaws result also, one might strongly argue, from the intellectuals’ abandonment of reason and virtue (or reason as virtue). But it doesn’t show that intellectuals are bad because they are intellectuals, which is what Johnson seems to say in the previous chapters. And he leaves out what might be called conservative intellectuals—there is no profile of Mencken, or Buckley, or even Ayn Rand, who would be an easy target, given Johnson’s style. It’s understandable that he would leave these people out, because in the twentieth century, “intellectual” has generally meant socialist, but it would have at least provided a little balance. If Lillian Hellman deserves a chapter of her own—a particularly startling one at that—then certainly H.L. Mencken does, as well.
But then, one can play that game for a long time. What’s important about Intellectuals is that it reveals the extent to which the ideological “leaders” of modern culture have been willing to lie, cheat, and steal—literally—in the pursuit of anti-rational modern ideologies like socialism, communism, and the regulatory welfare state. Johnson critiques “the curious paradox that intellectuals, who ought to teach men and women to trust their reason, usually encourage them to follow their emotions; and, instead of urging debate and reconciliation on humanity, all too often spur it towards the arbitrary use of force,” and he concludes with a perfect diagnosis of the “Vietnam Syndrome” in his discussion of James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky:
Now here we come to the great crux of intellectual life: the attitude to violence.... They may renounce it in theory, as indeed in logic they must, since it is the antithesis of rational methods of solving problems. But in practice they find themselves from time to time endorsing it--what might be called the Necessary Murder Syndrome—or approving its use by those with whom they sympathize...[and] simply transfer the moral responsibility, by ingenious argument, to others whom they wish to attack.
In the case of the Cold War, and particularly of Vietnam, it should have been clear that, bad as American foreign policy undoubtedly was, it was a péche mignon compared to the crimes of Communism (which cannot be imagined; only described). But instead, the intellectuals attacked America for daring to oppose communist aggression: “The attempt of the United States to impose its will, and particular patterns of social, cultural, and political development on the peoples of Indo-China [Chomsky argued] was an atrocious instance of...cruelty.” But, as Johnson writes, it is communism--or other types of social engineering—that is responsible for the bloody hands of the twentieth century, and social engineering “is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason. It is the birthright of the totalitarian tradition. It was pioneered by Rousseau, systematized by Marx and instituted by Lenin.... American intervention in Indo-China, imprudent though it may have been, and foolishly conducted as it undoubtedly was, was originally intended precisely to save its peoples from social engineering.” One could—and should—say exactly the same thing of the present war in the Middle East.
Intellectuals is more a description than a diagnosis, but in a world where Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky are still taken seriously throughout the academy, it’s important to have at least one such reference.
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