Some more quotes and anecdotes that reflect important political principles.
The idea that intellectuals are essentially conformist but pretend otherwise was best captured in the title of Harold Rosenberg’s 1948 essay “The Herd of Independent Minds;” the idea that they are also especially gullible was captured by George Orwell’s observation that “some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals could believe them.”
And it was for these reasons, among many others, that the late William F. Buckley said he “would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.” The notion that leftist intellectuals in particular tend to be highly insular, in the sense of living in closed-off, her meneutically sealed worlds “(“the ivory tower”), was inadvertently supported by film critic Pauline Kael when she reportedly expressed bafflement that Richard Nixon had been re-elected president in 1972 (by an historic landslide no less) because no one she know voted for him.
If leftist intellectuals have a tendency toward “group think,” it has most spectacularly manifested itself in their infatuation with communism and its various permutations; a tendency perhaps best illustrated by Lincoln Steffens who, after returning from one of the “Potemkin village” tours that Soviet leaders used to set up for “useful idiots” like himself, declared that “I have seen the future and it works.”
Yes, communism worked, all right. In Russia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Bulgaria, China, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Grenada, Cuba and everywhere else it was tried.
If religion was for Karl Marx “the opiate of the masses,” communism was for Raymond Aron “the opium of the intellectuals.” To this day, it remains the guiding light of the left, whether called communist, socialist, social democratic, liberal or progressive. In the end, the differences are less significant than the common collectivist and statist impulses behind them.
As to why communism suffered such a dismal fate, we only have to again consult Orwell, more specifically, Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Which is another way of saying communism can’t be implemented without its would-be philosopher kings becoming a politically entrenched “stratum” (to use Leon Trotsky’s term) or “new class” (to use Milovan Djilas’). That and the fact that it fails to provide any kind of incentives for innovation, hard work or achievement, as in “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” The latest manifestation of the collectivist impulse-the global-warming crusade-hasn’t been faring well, either. Not because the weather has been so cold (weather and climate are, of course, different things) but because there hasn’t been any warming now for nearly two decades and the polar ice is expanding rather than shrinking, which is the precise opposite of what the most prominent warming models so confidently predicted.
The last gasp, though, of a scientific fraud that could well turn out to exceed even that of Trofim Lysenko might have been uttered just a couple weeks ago, when a ship of “warmists” seeking to explore why the polar ice wasn’t conforming to their models got hilariously stuck in the ice, or, as the mission leader put it, “stuck in our own experiment.” For those deploring the Western lack of cultural confidence in confronting primitive practices in foreign lands, there is always the story of Sir Charles Napier’s encounter in India with the Hindu practice of “suttee” (which involved burning widows on the pyres of their deceased husbands). As retold by columnist Mark Steyn (who considers Napier’s response “impeccably multicultural”): “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
As Steyn concludes, “India is better off without suttee, just as Afghanistan would be better off without child marriage, honor killing, death for apostasy, and stoning for adultery.” So why do Western intellectuals have such a difficult time saying those things these days? Maybe because guilt and cultural relativism have robbed us of our capacity to distinguish between civilization and barbarism?
A colleague of mine at a previous institution once gave a public talk on the purposes of education in which he tried to encourage students to resist conventional wisdom and question the smelly orthodoxies of our age. The best part was his concluding line: “the only good education is a politically incorrect one.” Which is obviously true, at least for anyone who wishes to actually think, instead of simply mouthing approved bromides and platitudes.
Finally, what would a collection of pithy quotes be without the great H.L. Mencken? And my personal favorite, addressed to all those members of the “pleasure police” out there who seek to infringe upon our daily pleasures, in this case our ability to enjoy a glass of wine in a restaurant with our steak: “A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.” -
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 01/20/2014