The Heartless Lovers of Humankind

 

 

 

The Heartless Lovers of Humankind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Paul Johnson

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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 and Rousseau, the secular intellectual has filled the position left by the decline of the cleric, and is proving more arrogant, permanent and above all dangerous than his clerical version.

 

 

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.

 

 

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 toward those who do not fit into his schemes for humanity-in-general but also toward those in his own circle who, for one reason or another, refuse to play their allotted roles in his own life.

 

 

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 foundation.

 

 

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 to 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—“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 nothing, 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 lesions 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 ultraconformist 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wall St. J., 1/5/87.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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