Why are Deep Thinkers Shallow about Tyranny?

NY Times ^ | November 10, 2001 | Mark Lilla

[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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[Anamensis]

I'd like to staple this interview to Rob Jensen's forehead.

[Anamensis]

Let this be attached to office doors all over America! Especially in universities.

[aruanan]

I'm happy to see this coming from the University of Chicago where, in spite of a few dorks, David Horowitz got a pretty good reception.

[Anamensis]

I am too. At least, since 9/11, people are beginning to awaken to the fact that opinions do indeed matter, and having pet lefties sashaying around our universities in their socks and Birkenfakes is not as harmless as it once seemed. They aren't just mascots at a football game, they are cheerleaders for the opposing team.

[ken21]

good post. i read it in my morning nyt and then re-read it here.

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.

[joeyman]

Why are Deep Thinkers Shallow about Tyranny?

Because the arrogant SOBs all seem to think they are Plato when actually they are closer to Pluto the dog.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

No one ever got a Ph.D or tenure by staking out the position that everything as it is right now is just peachy keen. The academic profession is structured around the premise that things as they are now must be subject to criticism, and that there must be better ideas awaiting discovery. Such a premise is fundamentally at odds with Burke's thesis that society is the product of a long history of social evolution, and that the institutions, manners, customs, etc. of that society exist mainly because they have been found to work, and thus should be conserved rather than discarded. The project of changing society to conform to any of the plans hatched by intellectuals inherently requires that violence be done to that society and its existing institutions and customs. A regime that does violence to the old institutions and customs of a society is almost by definition a tyranny; it is difficult in any case to imagine how a regime can bring about the wrenching transformations of which the social engineers dream without resort to tyranny.

[Congressman Billybob]

This is clear thinking by one intellectual, about the fuzzy thinking of most intellectuals. I'm amazed that the New York Times deigned to print this article, since it applies full well to the editors and reporters of the Times.

Billybob

[Gladwin]

A lot of the people in the intellectual, professional activist community don't produce anything of real value. This causes them immense guilt, and self-hatred. They direct this hatred at the society that lets them live like parasites. So, the sit in their dusty little offices in the basements of their university, dreaming up a fantasy of their importance. They dream that they are really revolutionaries, and their ideas are superior to what currently exists.

They are the barnacles on the modern ship of democracy.

[l33t]

I had the pleasure of taking Mark Lilla's class on political theory in the early 90's, back when he started teaching at NYU. He is somewhat of a "conservative" by academia standards.

[Dems_R_Losers]

I went to graduate school with Mark Lilla. Even then you could tell he was smarter than the average bear and a real deep thinker. The school had a talent show one year, and Mark wrote and performed one of the funniest parody songs since Tom Lehrer, called "Policyman," about the then-fashionable use of quantitative analysis to attempt solutions to real public policy problems. It was so funny that I can remember some of the lyrics 20 years later - one line was "help us, we are in a stew - if you don't have ideas, numbers will do."

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.

[Dems_R_Losers]

An extremely insightful reply. Do you think this inevitably leads to the kind of moral obtuseness that is so widespread in American academia today?

[l33t]

A search of The New York Times archived reveals that Lilla penned an op-ed poem calling for Clinton's impeachment. Here is a link to the abstract: Link here

[Bernard Marx]

This is an informed and lucid comment. Thank you.

[geologist]

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."

Ditto's.

[pt17]

The academic profession is structured around the premise that things as they are now must be subject to criticism, and that there must be better ideas awaiting discovery.

Tis true; however, when all's said and done, a lot of the "deep thinking" turns out to be (as someone once said) "the transfer of old bones from one graveyard to another." Decades ago I taught for five years and found what Gladwin said to be absolutely true about many "educators" and intellectuals. They do sit in their dusty little offices in the basements of their university, dreaming up a fantasy of their importance. This was true in part because of tenure systems, in part because education as a profession didn't have much status and, as Gladwin says, in part because they don't produce much of measurable value. I watched a number of good people become radicalized because of their lowered sense of status and value.

[OWK]

Good post.... (sorry I missed it earlier)

[Anamensis]

Well, I did read Johnson's "Intellectuals" but I hope the Lilla book will be a little better. While Johnson was interesting, he seemed more interested in attacking the intellectuals looks and personalities rather than their ideas. Sartre was ugly and Bertrand Russel had bad breath, therefore we shouldn't give their ideas any credence. I don't agree with that approach, that's no more helpful than trying to denigrate Thomas Jefferson's ideas on the grounds that he owned slaves. I want real arguments, real explorations of the consequences and motives of their ideas, Rand style. I've ordered the Lilla book and hope to get it within the next two weeks.

[Anamensis]

The project of changing society to conform to any of the plans hatched by intellectuals inherently requires that violence be done to that society and its existing institutions and customs.

Good point.

[Anamensis]

A lot of the people in the intellectual, professional activist community don't produce anything of real value. This causes them immense guilt, and self-hatred.

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.