French intellectuals don't age well

National Post (Canada) ^ | 27 July 2002 | Robert Fulford

[shrinkermd]

The most famous exports of France have always been cheese, wine, and ideas. The cheese is excellent, the wine has good and bad years, and the illustrious ideas are consistently dreadful. Today, in universities across the West, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) exemplifies the bad French idea at its most brilliant and its most poisonous.

Foucault spent his life proving that the institutions of modern civilization do nothing but disguise one essential truth: the powerful oppress everyone, always. He yearned for revolution, the bloodier the better. In 1971 he said that when the workers take power, they may create a murderous dictatorship: "I can't see what objection could possibly be made to this." When he visited Tehran he praised the Ayatollah Khomeini's movement as a "religion of combat and sacrifice." He paid no attention to data and instead sprayed the air around him with ideas informed by paranoid fantasies. He received his reward: Dissertations on Foucault now fill university archives while armies of art critics, feminist rhetoricians, and post-colonial theorists spend their days quoting him.

He was wrong about everything, which only adds to his stature. He followed the path of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who found excuses for the crimes of all communist despots but considered the United States profoundly evil ("America is a mad dog"). Sartre was so wrong that he was considered truly great. Charles de Gaulle compared him to Voltaire.

Foucault and Sartre won permanent reputations among scholars. Raymond Aron (1905-1983), Sartre's contemporary and university classmate, did not. He's pretty well forgotten now, because of his great flaw: He was usually right, and among political philosophers and social thinkers there are no prizes for being right, particularly when philosophy expresses itself as a commentary on human behaviour and a prediction of the political future. He taught in university and wrote dozens of books and a mountain of journalism; so far as I know, there's nothing in his work that indicates madness or a lack of human decency.

Aron noticed that in geopolitical terms intellectuals consider mass murder justified, maybe admirable, when committed in the name of an appropriate ideology. On the other hand, they are "merciless toward the failings of the democracies." Why? Because, he decided, revolution has poetic charm. Its mythology intoxicates the mind, whereas democracy involves too much prosaic detail. Daringly, Aron used "prosaic" as a term of praise and said that The Opium of the Intellectuals, the book many consider his masterpiece, was an attempt to reduce "the poetry of ideology" to "the prose of reality."

Allan Bloom wrote that Aron for 50 years made sound judgments about the realities of politics: "He was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only hope of mankind." In other words, he was nobody a smart young cultural theorist would want to study. Sartre made fun of him for his dedication to justice, democracy, and other antiquated notions.

The persistent success of French intellectual eccentricity, and the relative failure of French good sense, should terrify anyone who believes that ideas dominate human actions and that intellectuals set the agenda for the future. And that belief is a central part of modern intellectual life. In 1834 the German romantic poet Heinrich Heine said: "Note this, you proud men of action, you are nothing but the unconscious tools of the men of thought." In 1936 John Maynard Keynes wrote: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist ... It is ideas, not best interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." Raymond Aron himself argued that in the long term, "politicians are the disciples of scholars or writers." Irving Kristol, the father of American neoconservatism, wrote "The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can ... twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape."

I've been reading all my life that this is the way societies function, and sometimes also stating it. But events make me doubt what once seemed obvious. Certainly there have been times when it was clearly true. Anyone surveying the ruin of Europe in 1945 might well have decided: intellectuals did this. A platoon of heavy thinkers fuelled fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Marx, Trotsky and other intellectuals shaped Communist dictatorships. The results were more terrible than anyone had imagined possible.

But since then, something else has happened. The form of government most despised among intellectuals, bourgeois democracy, has conquered Europe. Principles that Sartre and Foucault regarded as banal and duplicitous -- civil rights, elections, independent judges, free trade -- have become the goals, even the demands, of Europeans. Today, you could make a rule governing the period 1945-2002: The more respect an intellectual gets in the universities, the less that intellectual matters in the real world. The more brilliant he is, the less he means in public life.

Curiously, the influential political philosophers of Europe in the second half of the 20th century were long-dead democrats like Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and John Stuart Mill, people who never had even one day in the sunlight of fashion between 1900 and 2000. Europe became liberal without much help from living philosophers. European intellectuals went one way, Europe another. We should remember this whenever we hear news of yet another brilliant madman at large in Paris.

[shrinkermd]

FYI. I found this to be an outstanding article that is well written and factual. Foucault and post-modernism dominates most English and Social Studies Departments. Interestingly, this is not true of Departments of Philosophy.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

I think I've just invented something: the French Intellectual truth meter.

A. Find out what a renouned French Intellectual is procliaming as the "truth".

B. The exact opposite is actually the truth.

Anybody know how I go about applying for a patent?

[headsonpikes]

Raymond Aron is definitely worth reading. His books have been translated into English and are quite readable, unlike Sartre's merde, for instance.

[connectthedots]

French intellectuals

Oxymoron

[tracer]

Perhaps they'll do us all a favor and decide to stop aging.....

[headsonpikes]

I also highly recommend the works of Jacob Talman, who rigorously analyzes the French intellectual roots of modern totalitarianism.

[TomSmedley]

European intellectuals went one way, Europe another. We should remember this whenever we hear news of yet another brilliant madman at large in Paris.

Ahhh. Love it!

[Billthedrill]

I think the author mistakes Foucault for a Marxist; he was not. Foucault's conclusion from his study of power relationships was (I am terribly oversimplifying this) that once Marxism was in power it was subject to the same flaws as any entrenched power. Foucault was quoted as believing that his work was, in fact, incompatible with Marxist political theory, and subsequent followers (most of whom are dedicated Marxists) have written entire volumes attempting to reconcile the two.

I think that if one wants to understand the murky underpinnings of current leftist thought regarding class theory and power relationships Foucault is indispensible, but you have to slog through enough jargon to spin your head. At least with Foucault that jargon tends to be consistent and actually seems to signify something, which cannot be said about Derrida and his deconstructionist, "postmodern" (I hate that stupid word) crowd, who tend to use the same jargon to mask imprecision of thought than to communicate precise meaning. I'm pretty far from a defender of Foucault, but I wouldn't lump him in with the rest of the lightweights and poseurs mentioned.

[John O]

French intellectuals

Oxymoron

You are being much too hard on them. France has intellectuals. Can you name someone from any other country that can say "I surrender please don't shoot me" in 47 different languages? Well?

God Save America (Please)