HOW COME THEY'RE ALWAYS IN THE HANDFUL?:

Liberal Intellectuals: Then and Now (Byron Matthews, American Conservative Union)

Much about the "liberal intelligentsia" of 1850s Russia seems oddly familiar. Its members were mostly literary types, writers and editors from gentry backgrounds; deeply critical of the inequalities of Russian society, their reform proposals drew heavily on the experiments and theorizing of European socialists. But far from the unfettered celebrity enjoyed by liberal intellectuals in today's America, the Russians were underground critics. Subject to continual surveillance as enemies of the Tsar, their publications censored, their discussion circles infiltrated, Russian liberal intellectuals lived under constant threat of arrest, Siberian exile, or worse. It seems all the more remarkable, then, that attitudes and perceptions among America's liberal intellectuals would so closely resemble those of their earlier Russian counterparts.

During the Crimean War (1853-56), for example, the Russian intelligentsia was firmly defeatist, "even more or less hoping for a victory of [Russia's adversaries] as a blow against the intolerable regime of Nicholas I."* Substitute George Bush II, and versions of this stance toward the War on Terror are not hard to find among our own intelligentsia, even with reference to the attacks of September 11. The Chomskyite litany is numbingly familiar: The list of our nation's crimes is so long, and its current leadership so evil, that the world can only benefit from our injury or defeat. For some of our liberal intellectuals, as with their earlier Russian brethren, there seems to be nothing that promises greater hope than the humiliation of their own nation and its leaders.

In terms of a then-popular distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' types, the Russian liberal intelligentsia of the 1850s was decidedly weak. "Its members always behave in a similarly pusillanimous fashion when the time comes to take some decisive action... faced with the challenge of putting their exalted ideas and feelings to the test of practice, they hesitate, stumble, and fall into confusion." As a current example of such indecisiveness consider the acclaimed Mid-East specialist who, after weeks of eloquently making the case for regime change in Iraq on the editorial pages of his prominent liberal newspaper, suddenly went wobbly just as the invasion die was cast. The episode surely tells us something about why liberal intellectuals have had more success as newspaper columnists than as military commanders.

The indecisiveness of the Russian liberal intellectual was thought to arise in part "because he is burdened with the enlightened values of humanity and civilization and is morally torn by the problem of attempting to live up to them." The burden of superior values is commonly claimed by liberal intellectuals today, also.

Eric Hoffer put it this way in Working and Thinking on the Waterfront:

[Intellectuals] are people who feel themselves members of the educated minority, with a God-given right to direct and shape events. An intellectual need not be well educated or particularly intelligent. What counts is the feeling of being a member of an educated elite.

An intellectual wants to be listened to. He wants to instruct and to be taken seriously. It is more important to him than to be free...

But perhaps, given the focus on Russia, we should turn to Dostoevsky's The Possessed, which Hoffer cites in The Temper of Our Time:

For my part [says a brash young intellectual], if I didn't know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind, I'd take them and blow them up into the air instead of putting them in paradise. I'd leave only a handful of educated people who would live happily ever afterward on scientific principles.

It can hardly be a coincidence that Paul Ehrlich and other scientific elites have adopted exactly that program.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 7, 2004 9:36 PM