The phrase is French -- La Trahison des clercs”, meaning roughly the treason of the
intellectuals. This particular phrase, launched by Julien Benda in 1927, could
only have popped out of a French head. Benda’s beef was that the intellectuals
of his day were placing the virtue of action above the necessity of lucid
thinking. Opinion makers, Benda feared, were allowing political commitment to strangle
thought. As Roger Kimball put it in a 1992 essay in the New Criterion, "Benda claimed, politics was THE ideal of disinterestedness, the universality
of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when
they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated
the 'desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.'”
When intellectuals abandon “the universality of truth” for
political reasons, they are guilty of intellectual treason. During Benda’s own day,
politicians were wearing convincing but false masks of intellectualism; think
of Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and the choir of
intellectuals who surrounded them. Suitably abased, knowledge yielded to
political force blind to truth.
As viewed by Kimball, Benda’s warning has modern
applications: “Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least
theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences … have now come to
praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the
French soul,’ ‘the immutability of their German consciousness,’ for the ‘fervor
of their Italian hearts.’ In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves
in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, ‘owing to which men rise up against
other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national
passions.’ The ‘rift’ into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed
and threatened to close altogether.”
All around us today are pseudo-intellectuals, traitors to
wisdom and common sense, fairly worshiping at the throne of some political genius,
some over-powering political doctrine, some false devil of the utopian
political imagination. Not content merely to divide people into warring groups,
they grow violently disruptive, as did the Sturmabteilung of Hitler’s day.
Who among us remembers that the largest proportion of Hitler’s Brownshirts were
communists, or that Stalin was a “breaker of nations” because he had perfected
the art of political division, or that Kim Jong-un’s father and grandfather
were worshiped in North Korea as gods, as was Caligula in Rome, or that in
Benda’s France, the most influential
of the intellectuals – but for Camus and some few other heroic exceptions –
were worshipers of political action, fellow travelers in Stalin’s bloody race
to power? Such were the traitorous intellectuals then -- and now.
Yes – now. In
America, atomization into irreducible classes – blacks, women, presumed
oppressed groups, the underprivileged or, as the modern atomizers would have
it, the white privileged and everyone else – have been justified by
intellectuals in academia and the media because, without such divisions, a
desired political action would be impossible. Such was the condition of Europe
during the rise of fascism and communism, both offshoots of socialism. Mussolini
defined fascism this way: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing above the state.” The omnipotent state will need men like gods to
administer it. Nationalism in America rejected such politically opportune
atomization and its attendant evils – the centralized state overseen by a
strongman, the hawking of utopian socialism from every rooftop – and it was the
embrace of tradition, what G. K. Chesterton used to call “the democracy of the
dead,” that saved republican government here from the social revolutionists
wreaking havoc everywhere in Europe, China, Russia, East Asia, and wherever else
the totalitarian urge was not resisted..
These same anarchic
disintegrative forces are now at work in the United States education. The
anarchist is not a man who believes in nothing; he is a man, uprooted from his
culture, who will believe in anything. Deculturation does not lead to an excess
of liberty and freedom; it leads to a multiplicity of cults – and, of course,
deculturated cult figures, every one of whom is worshiped as a minor deity or,
perhaps nearly the same thing, a Hollywood celebrity.
Tradition gives a
voice to the dead. Once viable traditions and supportive cultural forms – the family,
the church, representative political parties, a responsible media, constitutional
government -- have been destroyed, only
the imperious voice of Caesar will be heard in the land, and his message is
always the same: kneel before the throne of power, and power will lift you up.
Comments