READ AN AMAZING 1987 ESSAY BY PAUL JOHNSON: “THE HEARTLESS LOVERS OF MANKIND”
http://www.washingtonreb.com/2010/11/14/the-heartless-lovers-of-mankind/
The Heartless Lovers of Mankind
Why Do You Think We Call Them Warm, Fuzzy Liberals?
From Rob De Witt, a Paul Johnson piece, The Heartless Lovers of Mankind (reprinted in full, just in case):
THE HEARTLESS LOVERS OF HUMANKIND [[[[[[[[[[[[[
by Paul Johnson
From the Wall Street Journal, 5 January 1987
(Kindly uploaded 9/4/88 by Freeman 10602PANC)[Note: Dates in square brackets are not in the original.]
In the past 200 years the influence of intellectuals has grown
steadily. It has always been there, of course, for in their
earlier incarnations as priests, scribes and soothsayers,
intellectuals have laid claim to guide society from the very
beginning. From the time of Voltaire [1694-1778] and Rousseau
[1712-78], the secular intellectual has filled the position left
by the decline of the cleric, and is proving more arrogant,
permanent and above all more dangerous than his clerical version.It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who, in his 1821 tract “In Defense
of Poetry,” first articulated what I might term the Divine Right
of Intellectuals. “Poets,” he wrote, “are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.” This claim is now taken for granted
by the large if amorphous body that sees itself as “the
intellectuals” or “the intelligensia.” The practical influence
of intellectuals has expanded enormously since then. As Lionel
Trilling [1905-75] put it, “Intellect has associated itself with
power as perhaps never before in history, and is now conceded to
be itself a kind of power.”I believe the reflective portion of mankind is divided into
two groups: those who are interested in people and care about
them; and those who are interested in ideas. The first group
forms the pragmatists and tends to make the best statesmen. The
second is the intellectuals; and if their attachment to ideas is
passionate, and not only passionate but programmatic, they are
almost certain to abuse whatever power they acquire. For,
instead of allowing their ideas of government to emerge from
people, shaped by observation of how people actually behave and
what they really desire, intellectuals reverse the process,
deducing their ideas first from principle and then seeking to
impose them on living men and women.Almost all intellectuals profess to love humanity and to be
working for its improvement and happiness. But it is the idea of
humanity they love, rather than the actual individuals who
compose it. They love humanity-in-general, rather than
men-and-women-in-particular. Loving humanity as an idea, they
can then produce solutions as ideas. Therein lies the danger,
for when people conflict with the solution-as-idea, they are
first ignored or dismissed as unrepresentative; and then, when
they continue to obstruct the idea, they are treated with growing
hostility and categorized as enemies of humanity-in-general.
Thus the way is opened for what W.H. Auden [1907-1973], a typical
hard-nosed intellectual of his day, approvingly called “the
necessary murder.” “The liquidation of class enemies,” to use
the Leninist expression, and “the Final Solution” as the Nazis
put it, are both the terminal point of intellectual process.Insensitivity to the needs and views of other people is,
indeed, a characteristic of those passionately concerned with
ideas. For their primary focus of attention is, naturally, with
the evolution of those ideas in their own heads; they become, in
the full sense, egocentric. The intellectual’s indifference or
hostility is not directed merely towards those who do not fit
into his schemes for humanity-in-general but also those in his
own circle who, for one reason or another, refuse to play their
allotted roles in his own life.THE SKILLFUL EXPLOITER
The more I study the lives of leading intellectuals, the more
I perceive the ravages of a common, debilitating scourge, which I
call the heartlessness of ideas. The rise of the new secular
intellectual has produced some notable specimens.Shelley (1792-1822) was the prototype, so far as Anglo-Saxon
countries are concerned, of the modern, Western progressive
intellectual. He coined the notion of the right of intellectuals
to influence public events. The poet, and by extension the
intellectual class as a whole, was the true legislator because he
had a purity, in his devotion to ideas, not open to men of the
world, the common clay: He was disinterested. But Shelley
exhibited, in his own life, what can be seen as a characteristic
failing of progressive intellectuals: the inability to match his
general benevolence to his particular behavior. His treatment of
virtually every human being over whom he was able to exercise
some emotional or physical power was, by the standards of the
common clay he despised, atrocious.Any moth than came near his fierce flame was singed. His
first wife, Harriet, and his mistress, Fay Godwin, both committed
suicide when he deserted them. In his letters he denounced their
actions roundly for causing him distress and inconvenience. It
looks as though he was about to desert his second wife, Mary (the
author of “Frankenstein”), when his death by drowning ended his
power to hurt. His children by Harriet were made wards of the
court. He erased them completely from his mind, and they never
received a single word from their father. Another child, a
bastard, died in a Naples foundling hospital where he had
abandoned her.Shelley was particularly skillful at exploiting women and
servants. He wrecked the life of a schoolmistress, Elizabeth
Hitchener, by seducing her both to his bed and his political
schemes, got her in trouble with the police, borrowed 100 pounds
from her savings (which was never repaid) and then abandoned her,
denouncing her narrow vision and selfishness. He left a trail of
other victims, mostly humble landladies and tradesmen. He always
had servants, but few were ever paid.Shelley’s depredations never shook his superb confidence in
what he called “my tried and unalterable integrity.” Criticism,
however well documented, left him cold: “I speedily regained the
indifference,” he wrote, “which the opinion of anything or
anybody but our consciousness merits.” Explaining to a friend
why he was deserting his wife and running off with another woman,
he wrote: “I am deeply persuaded that, thus enabled, [I shall]
become a more constant friend, a more useful lover of mankind, a
more ardent asserter of truth and virtue.”Karl Marx (1818-1883) was another example of a man who became
convinced that it was his duty to put ideas before people. Hence
his relentless and often unthinking cruelty to those around him
became a kind of distant adumbration of the mass cruelty his
ideas would promote when they finally became the blueprint of
Soviet state policy. His father, who was afraid of him, detected
the fatal flaw: “In your heart,” he wrote his son, “egoism is
predominant.” Marx was particularly odious to his mother, who
rebuked him for his financial improvidence and ceaseless attempts
to dun for cash. What a pity it was, she remarked, that he did
not try to acquire capital instead of writing about it.There was an enormous gap between Marx’s egalitarian ideas and
the way in which he actually behaved. In one way or another he
inherited considerable sums of money. He never had less than two
servants. He had a horror of what he called “a purely
proletarian set-up.” He made his wife send out visiting cards in
which she was described as “nee Baronesse Westphalen.” He would
not let his three daughters train for any profession or learn
anything except to play the piano. He kept up appearances by
pawning the silver and even his wife’s dresses. He seduced his
wife’s servant, begot a son by her, the forced Friedrich Engels
to assume paternity. Marx’s daughter Eleanor once let out a cri
de coeur in a letter: “Is it not wonderful, when you come to look
things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practice all
the fine things we preach — to others?” She later committed
suicide.Marx’s whole life was an exercise in emotional or financial
exploitation — of his wife, of his daughters, of his friends.
Studying Marx’s life leads one to think that the roots of human
unhappiness, and especially the misery caused by exploitation, do
not lie in the exploitation by categories or classes — but in
one-to-one exploitation by selfish individuals.Nor is this indifference to others a mere human failing in a
great public man. It is central to Marx’s work. He was not
actually interested in real human beings, how they felt or what
they wanted. He never met a member of the proletariat, except
across the platform at a public meeting. He never made a visit
to an actual factory, rejecting Engel’s offers to arrange one.
He never sought to meet or interrogate a capitalist, with the
solitary exception of an uncle in Holland. From first to last,
his source of information was books, especially government
bluebooks.A GOOD MAN, BUT…
It is no accident, I think, that Lenin [1870-1924] never set
foot in a factory until he became the Soviet dictator, and never,
so far as we know, had any real contact with the workers whose
lives he claimed the right to transform. He, too, was a
library-socialist. Nor did Stalin ever seek out the working man
or the peasant to discover what he actually wanted; he was also a
great devourer of statistical columns. What masses of facts
these monsters ingested before they went on to devour human
flesh! One might say that the road to the gulag is paved with
unwritten Ph.D. theses.Many, of course, have lamented the way that Marxism reflects
its founder’s indifference to people as emotional, living human
beings. If only, it is said, Marx had been able to read Sigmund
Freud! But if we examine Freud’s life, we find the same
dichotomy: and unbridgeable gap between theory and practice,
between ideas and people. Now Freud (1856-1939), unlike Shelley
and Marx, was in many ways a good man — even a heroic one.But this, too, was another case of a man who never allowed his
ideas to penetrate his private relationships or improve his
dealings with people. Unlike Marx, he did not look into
bluebooks; he looked into his own mind, and there found infinite
reasons for righteousness. Freud was the dominant, patriarchal
male all his life. His wife was little more than his servant,
even spreading the toothpaste on his toothbrush, like an
old-fashioned valet. He never discussed his work or theories
with her, and never encouraged her to apply his work in raising
their children. Nor did he himself. He sent his sons to the
family doctor to learn the facts of life. His large household
revolved entirely around his own needs and habits. When a
visitor raised a Freudian issue, Freud’s wife replied pointedly:
“We don’t discuss anything like that here.”There was a strain of exploitation, both in his family life
and still more in his treatment of his followers. Men like Adler
[1870-1937] and Jung [1875-1961] were accused of “treachery” and
renounced as “heretics.” Worse, he wrote of their “moral
insanity.” He could not believe that anyone who had once come
under his influence and then had broken away could be wholly
sane. He thought that heresiarchs like Jung were actually in
need of psychiatric treatment.Modern, progressive intellectuals are similarly frustrated by
those who do not share their ideas. I have been reading a book
by Robert L. Heilbroner called “The Nature and Logic of
Capitalism.” There is no evidence that the author, any more than
Marx, really knows anything about capitalists or what motivates
them. Mr. Heilbroner simply assumes that capitalism is primarily
about the exercise of power over people. This seems to me
complete nonsense. I incline to the contrary belief of Dr.
Samuel Johnson [1709-84] when he observed, “Sir, a man is seldom
so innocently employed as when he is getting money.” Johnson’s
opinion was shared by John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946]. “It is
better,” he wrote, “that a man should tyrannize over his bank
account than over other human beings.”Both Johnson and Keynes were among the many intellectuals who
did not succumb to the desire to push others around, a desire
that can also affect intellectuals on what most would call the
right. For example, Ayn Rand [1905-82], the novelist-philosopher
who championed the dignity of man and the individual’s right to
be free of control by others, humiliated and dominated many who
came to know her privately.But there are good reasons why most intellectuals share common
ground with socialists. Keynes gets to the heart of the matter,
for avarice is far less dangerous than the will to power,
especially power over people. It is not the formulation of
ideas, however misguided, but the desire to impose them on others
that is the deadly sin of the intellectual. That is why they so
incline by temperament to the left. For capitalism merely
occurs, if no one does anything to stop it. It is socialism that
has to be constructed, and as a rule, forcibly imposed, thus
providing a far bigger role for intellectuals in its genesis.The progressive intellectual habitually entertains Walter
Mitty visions of exercising power. Freud, for instance, often
described himself as a would-be conquistador (it was the word he
used), wielding the pen rather than the sword and changing
history through armies of followers rather than soldiers.
Precisely, perhaps, because they lead sedentary lives,
intellectuals have a curious passion for violence, at any rate in
the abstract. A few, of course, actually embrace it in practice.
More characteristically, though, intellectuals, with much uneasy
diffidence and many weasel words, support and justify violence in
order that ideas with which they agree be imposed on unconforming
humanity.APPLAUSE FROM THE ARMCHAIRS
In the 20th century, building upon 19th century foundations,
the appetite for violence in the pursuit and realization of ideas
has become the original sin of the intellectual. Consider, for
instance, the repeated expression of admiration by intellectuals
for ruthless men of action, and their long succession of violent
heroes: Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Ho Chi Minh.Intellectuals occasionally demur at the quantity of the
slaughter, the sheer number of the “necessary murders”; they
nearly always have accepted the principle that socialist utopias
must, if necessary, be erected on violent foundations. I well
remember my old editor, Kingsley Martin, writing in the New
Statesman, by way of a gentle rebuke to Mao Tse-tung, who had
just massacred three million people, “Was it really necessary for
the Chairman to kill so many?” This provoked a letter from his
old liberal friend Leonard Woolf. Would Mr. Martin kindly inform
the readers, he asked, “the maximum number of deaths he would
have deemed appropriate?”While the armchair men of violence in the West applauded and
condoned, intellectuals elsewhere participated and often directed
the great slaughters of modern times. Many helped create the
Cheka, the progenitor of the present KGB. Intellectuals were
prominent at all stages in the events leading up to the Nazi
holocaust. The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between
one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or
murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who
were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre
[1905-80] — “Sartre’s Children,” as I call them.Wherever men and regimes seek to impose ideas on people,
wherever the inhuman process of social engineering is set in
motion — shoveling flesh and blood around as though it were soil
or concrete — there you will find intellectuals in plenty.
Pushing people around is the characteristic activity of all forms
of socialism, whether Soviet socialism, or German National
Socialism, or, for instance, the peculiar form of ethnic
socialism, known as apartheid, we find in South Africa; that
sinister set of ideas, it is worth noting, was wholly the
invention of intellectuals cobbled together in the
social-psychology department of Stellenbosch University. Other
African totalitarian ideologies are likewise the work of local
intellectuals, usually sociologists.So one of the lessons of our century is: Beware the
intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the
levers of power, they also should be objects of peculiar
suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice. Beware
committees, conferences, leagues of intellectuals! For
intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and
nonconformist people, are in fact ultra-conformist within the
circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. This
is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, because it enables
them to create cultural climates, which themselves often generate
irrational, violent and tragic courses of action.Remember at all times, that people must always come before
ideas and not the other way around.———————————–
Mr. Johnson is author of the forthcoming “A History of the
Jews” (Harper & Row [meanwhile published]). This is based on
a recent talk for the Institute for Contemporary Studies.
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