Why are Deep Thinkers Shallow about Tyranny?

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.

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

Nonsense, I just picked the book up after watching "The Hanoi Hilton" to get an idea of what the War Tribunal organized by Russel was...Johnson laid it out and didn't mention any personal peccadillos of Russell's. He gave a description of it, and some interesting facts to go along with it.

There are ugly warts talked about in that book, but they fit. Marx was a madman, a foul madman...I;v emet smelly intellectuals just like him...it's good to know the personalities behind the ideas. After all, the Personal is the Political, as they say.

They have "their two feet firmly planted in the air". That is the best description of these airheads. Someone once used that to describe liberals.

While the rest of us go on living and trying to raise a family, these people engage in empty philosophical discussions and add nothing to the quality of our lives.
One question always begets another question with them.
They epitomize the adage "those who can, do, those who can't, teach. They need a "mental enema" to get the crap out of their minds.
But, what do I know, I'm one of their masses.

Johnson laid it out and didn't mention any personal peccadillos of Russell's.

It's been some years since I read it, but I am quite sure I remember Johnson going on at length about Russell's sex life, his halitosis, all this other stuff that is, while interesting at the gossipy level, not really an engagement of his ideas.

One other thing that must be noted. Not only would academics love to be important, love to be the movers and shakers, but then there's also this, which Stefan mentioned obliquely. Conservatism is not very sexy and doesn't have much place for intellectuals. Compare, say, Communism or Naziism with a capitalistic democracy. In one, you have the government's pet intellectuals micromanaging, designing, and organizing every aspect of society. Designing societies is a great program if you're a thinker. I myself confess that I enjoy as a hobby designing what I think the "perfect society" would be (I don't, though, even begin to think that I'd try to force this on people).

Contrast the centrally planned system with a capitalistic democracy. All the intellectual gets to say is, "Leave things alone, the people can generally take care of themselves." That's it. No central planning, no grand schemes to remake the world, just a simple, "let it be." And whereas an intellectual can spend decades trying to mold his ideal society, free-market democracy can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Not at all sexy.

Of course, then you've got rank idiots who talk about the cleansing effects of violence, and speak with glee about the actions of, say, Sandanista executioners. These would-be Genghis Khan's are just a collection of pathetic Walter Mittys who vicariously imagine themselves toting AK-47's and gunning down capitalists because they're pale, skinny men who in an actual fight would get their a**es kicked. Indeed, the impulse that applauds the Vietcong carrying out massacres is the same that causes an alienated teenager to play games in which he imagines himself a barbarian warrior. Okay, done rambling.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.