Posted on 11/10/2001 8:15:53 AM PST by Anamensis
Why Are Deep Thinkers Shallow About Tyranny?
November 10, 2001
Mark Lilla, a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, recently published "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics," about how writers and intellectuals have ended up justifying communism, fascism and other tyrannies. Eric Alterman spoke with him.
Is there a special gene among intellectuals that lends itself to the embrace of tyranny? Are they less sensible than the general populace?
If by "intellectuals" we mean those devoted to the life of the mind, we can see why they face more intensely a problem all human beings face: that of negotiating the distance between ideas and social reality. What intellectuals are prone to forget is that this distance poses not only conceptual difficulties but ethical ones as well. It is a moral challenge to determine how to comport oneself simultaneously in relation to abstract ideas and a recalcitrant world.
Do you think a philosopher's political mistakes, like Heidegger's Nazism or Sartre's infantile Maoism, can destroy the value of their philosophical insights?
I do not think the truth or value of Euclid's proofs are affected by how he may have treated his servants. But philosophy, when it is not a merely formal or symbolic exercise, is ultimately driven by the desire to find the right way to live, individually and collectively. We only take thinkers seriously when we consider their ideas in terms of their deepest motivations and most obvious consequences. We owe it to them, and ultimately to ourselves, to reflect on these connections.
Are American intellectuals any more or less likely to embrace tyranny than European intellectuals?
Twentieth-century continental and American intellectuals have been attracted to tyranny for different reasons. In Europe the issue since the French Revolution has been the legitimacy of the modern age: secularity, democracy, capitalism, and bourgeois culture. There the intellectual temptation has been to seek a return to some imaginary pre- modern idyll or the elimination of one or more aspects of modern life, especially bourgeois capitalism. For 200 years continental intellectuals flirted with tyrants who promised radical alternatives to modern life and heaped contempt on those who engaged in meliorist reforms of that life.
American intellectuals are thoroughly modern and bourgeois. When they embrace tyranny it is usually out of ignorance and a naïve optimism about human nature. We Americans find it easy to assume that political cut-throats are just misunderstood delinquents and that their tyrannical practices are expressions of cultural differences we should tolerate. To read such statements today about the fascists, Stalinism, the East bloc, and third-world dictators is quite chilling. Our own modern democratic and bourgeois convictions are so strong that we have trouble grasping political phenomena not governed by our rules.
You say Americans have misunderstood Michel Foucault's ideas about oppression in everyday institutions and Jacques Derrida's notion about the linguistic construction of reality. Why?
The misunderstanding is bred of American optimism and provinciality. Americans take legitimacy for granted, so they fail to take seriously the illiberal and antimodern implications of certain European ideas they glean from translations and domesticate into English. When Foucault speaks darkly of "power" and Derrida of "deconstruction," they may very well be right. But if they are, that means that most of what their American proponents believe about individualism, freedom, democracy and justice is wrong.
Does terrorism lend itself to an intellectual's embrace as well?
Certainly there has been a fascination with "purifying" violence and terror in 20th-century intellectual life, as we see in the works of Sorel, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. Yet it is also true that certain terroristic acts have woken people up, ending their illusions and their romanticization of the "other." I think here of the Cambodia massacres, the Munich Olympics, the Schleyer killing in Germany in the 70's. [Hanns-Martin Schleyer was head of the German business association and was murdered by the Red Army Faction in the fall of 1977.]
How is it that intellectuals fall prey to what you call "philotyranny," denying the nature of tyranny by romanticizing or excusing it, or denying any fundamental difference between tyrannical and democratic regimes?
Political and intellectual life share a basis not only in reason but in the passions. Passion is not necessarily a bad thing: there are healthy passions for truth and justice that need to be cultivated. But those passions also need to be controlled, since they can make us mistake lies for truth and tyranny for justice.
Is there a useful or proper role for intellectuals and philosophers to fulfill in politics?
Modern democratic life poses a unique challenge to intellectuals because it is prosaic, operates through public institutions, relies on specialized knowledge and respects common opinion. Intellectuals, even (perhaps especially) those on the left, are aristocrats by nature: they have contempt for ordinary opinion and are impatient with technicalities and formalities. Modesty is the most difficult virtue for intellectuals to learn, but it is the most important one in democratic society.
In studying this topic, which modern writers and thinkers strike you as having found the proper balance between thought and action?
The intellectuals of our time I have most admired as models of probity and good sense were Raymond Aron and Isaiah Berlin. Aron, because he punctured the myth of the intellectual as moral critic "speaking truth to power." He understood that thinking responsibly in modern democratic society means mastering the complexities of that society and putting oneself in the shoes of those who must make decisions. Berlin, because he understood the romantic yearnings and discontents of the modern mind, yet also knew that they lay at the root of all the political disasters of our time.
Have you ever felt yourself falling prey to any of the dangers you describe in your book?
I've been tempted - if we don't think passionately we are not really thinking. And if we are not thinking we are not really alive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/arts/10QNA.html?ex=1006413791&ei=1&en=29b2aac17ee5dc4b
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add to your list the book "intellectuals" by paul johnson. it has to be one of the funniest books that i've read. he exposes the left intellectuals for the frauds that they are.
Because the arrogant SOBs all seem to think they are Plato when actually they are closer to Pluto the dog.
Billybob
They are the barnacles on the modern ship of democracy.
In the mid-80s Mark helped to start a neo-conservative policy journal that only lasted a few years and he did some brilliant writing in it. Then I lost track of him. I am glad to see him surface in this kind of forum. I am sure this article will generate a lot of consternation among the literati.
"I've been tempted - if we don't think passionately we are not really thinking.
And if we are not thinking we are not really alive."
Ditto's.
Good point.
This has been my theory too. They feel guilty knowing that they have a better life than millions of third-world peasants who work 10 times harder than they do. Pitying the poor will automatically make them resent the rich, knowing as they must that even THEY are someone's "poor," to be pitied. This makes them feel as though they SHOULD be pitied. They then assuage their guilt and resentment and inefficacy by, as you described, sitting in their dusty offices dreaming of taking from the rich (whom they resent for being crude, unsophisticated brutes who beat them up in high school and have now moved on to be successes) and giving to the poor (whom they fear and respect because they feel those poor are somehow more "authentic" humans than they are.) Yup. That's them. In a nutshell. Where they belong.
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