Totalitarianism And The Intellectuals

One of the most intriguing manias exhibited by intellectuals consists of projecting onto liberal societies the very defects they refuse to discern in totalitarian societies. We have seen how this mechanism for inverting roles functions in American intellectuals. In Europe one of the thinkers in whom this trait was most surprisingly apparent was Michel Foucault, for Foucault, unlike Sartre and so many others, was never a communist, nor a sympathizer, nor even a Marxist. In his work the "progressive" bias intervenes when he interprets open societies through his theory of confinement, particularly developed in Surveiller et punir ("To Supervise and Punish").* Here Foucault described liberal societies as being founded on the principle of generalized confinement: the child at school, the soldier in the barracks, the real or presumed delinquent in prison, the madman or pseudomadman in a psychiatric hospital. When he crammed so many diverse forms of confinement into the same basket in order to accuse democratic societies of totalitarian tendencies—at a moment when they were offering an unprecedented degree of freedom and of liberalization in all of the above-mentioned sectors—one can't help thinking that Foucault in reality was describing another society, a society that fascinated him but which he did not name: communist society. In what other society, indeed, at the time he was elaborating his theory, did confinement reign in such a universal and sovereign fashion? The confinement of the child at school, as everywhere else; of the soldier in his barracks, even more so than anywhere else, with the longest period of compulsory military service on the planet; of the madman, and above all of the phoney "madman," in psychiatric hospitals used for political repression; the confinement not only of common-law criminals in prison, but of many innocent souls in concentration and hard-labor camps; confinement of the population as a whole, thanks to restrictions on free movement, on domestic travel without an internal passport, and on the free choice of one's place of residence; and finally, confinement of the entire population of the country within the frontiers of the USSR by the prohibition imposed on its citizens, who were not allowed to leave the country even for a brief trip abroad, unless they could obtain— always as a special favor, not as a right—an (exceedingly rare) exit visa.

One of the essential components of the totalitarian system, as opposed to liberal civilization, is the vocation to which it lays claim: dominating the world, regenerating it, imposing the type of society it incarnates and which it considers superior to all others. Hence the reigning ideology and the central place it occupies in all those systems and consequently grants to docile intellectuals, who are charged with "supervising" the orthodoxy of society. Totalitarianism alone grants intellectuals this kind of monopoly. In a liberal civilization each intellectual is simply an individual who addresses himself to other individuals, who are free to listen to him or to ignore him, to approve or disapprove him. Each day the work of persuading the public must be started all over again. How wearying, how anguish-inducing! Who among us has not dreamed of exchanging this precariousness for the comfort of a Lysenko or a Heidegger, of receiving the support of the state apparatus in neutralizing all of his contradictors?

We may, according to our temperament and makeup, be either amused or saddened to find Diderot and d'Alembert, editors of the eighteenth-century Encyclopedie (theoretically the matrix of so many modern freedoms), intervening with Malesherbes, the magistrate to whom Louis XV had entrusted the administration of printed matter, and asking him to censor and seize the pamphlets of authors who criticized the Encyclopedic. In his Memoires the Abbe Morellet, whom d'Alembert had asked to intervene with the magistrate on his behalf, quotes the letter of reply Malesherbes sent him, asking him to transmit it to d'Alembert: "If Monsieur d'Alembert, or any other, can prove that it is against the interest of law and order to allow such critiques to subsist as those by which the Encyclopedic has been mistreated in the latest brochures, if any author finds that it be unjust to tolerate such periodical pamphlets, and if he claim that the magistrate himself should judge of the fairness of such literary criticisms before allowing them to appear, in a word, if there is any other part of my administration which is found to be reprehensible, those who complain thereof need but speak out their reasons to the public. I bid them not to name me, for such is not the usage in France; but they can designate me as clearly as they wish, and I promise them every permission thereto. I hope at least that, having exposed myself to their declarations and being unable to impede them, I shall no longer hear of particular complaints, of which I must admit I have had enough."

Malesherbes, in other words, was reminding the Encyclopedists that they should reply to the arguments of their adversaries with other arguments, instead of demanding that the secular branch of the law reduce them to silence. But, Morellet goes on, "when I explained to my friend d'Alembert Monsieur de Malesherbes's principles, I could not prevail upon him to listen to reason; the philosopher raged and cursed, according to his evil habit." For, as d'Alembert went on to claim, resorting to the admirable sophistry that men of letters and philosophers have used down the ages, in the Encyclopedie he and his friends "did not transgress the reasonable bounds of philosophical discussion," whereas the accusations of their adversaries were odious personal attacks "which should be prohibited by a government which was the friend of truth and which wished to favor the progress of knowledge." Malesherbes, as is well known, had been openly protecting the Encyclopedists and sparing them trouble with the royal censorship. But this was not enough—in their opinion he should also have had their contradictors placed behind the bars! It was doubtless due to his felonious pluralism and to his pernicious respect for all opinions that in 1794 the disciples of the Encyclopedists, who were then in power, demonstrated their gratitude by having Malesherbes guillotined.

Let me make one thing clear. As far as my personal and relatively unimportant sympathies are concerned, I feel myself to be the distant spiritual descendant of the Encyclopedists, and not of their adversaries. But the point I wish to make is this. As long as intellectuals find it normal to regard "the struggle for the freedom of the mind" and "human rights" as granting them latitude to make abstract pleas on behalf of liberty while refusing the same rights to their contradictors, and as long as they claim to be upholding the truth while in fact cultivating falsehood, the failure of culture and its powerlessness to exert any positive influence on history in the moral sphere will continue on into the future to the greater detriment of mankind.

Still, I venture to hope that we have finally reached the end of an era during which so many intellectuals strove above all to place mankind under their ideological domination, and that we are entering a new epoch in which they will at last settle down to their true vocation, which is to place knowledge at the service of human beings—and not simply in the scientific and technical domains. This transition from the old era, when sterilization of knowledge was regarded as the norm, to a new age is not simply one possible choice among others: it is a necessity. Our civilization is condemned to abide by its underlying principles, or else it will regress toward a primitive stage where there will no longer be a contradiction between knowledge and behavior, knowledge in the meantime having disappeared.

Revel's book The Flight From Truth is one of the all-time great statements on the necessity of accurate information and intellectual honesty in public discourse. I was fortunate to pluck it off the shelves for the first time in years, just yesterday. The excerpt above is the conclusion of the book.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

But the point I wish to make is this. As long as intellectuals find it normal to regard "the struggle for the freedom of the mind" and "human rights" as granting them latitude to make abstract pleas on behalf of liberty while refusing the same rights to their contradictors, and as long as they claim to be upholding the truth while in fact cultivating falsehood, the failure of culture and its powerlessness to exert any positive influence on history in the moral sphere will continue on into the future to the greater detriment of mankind.

And so it goes and will as long as the Earth lasts. Haven't read Revel in years, thanks for the refresher of why I liked him so much.

In the book, "Escape from Red China," by Robert Loh, he describes that after the Chinese Communists were in power in China for a few years and things were not going well, the Chinese Communist government announced that they realized they had these problems and were going to have "The Great Awakening."

They told the Chinese people they needed their help. They wanted their criticism. They wanted to make things better.

At first, the people didn't believe them and were afraid to speak out. Then, slowly, because of the continuing hammering and begging them to criticize the government and make it better, some stepped forward and spoke, haltingly, tentatively. And when they started to speak out the party people said, "See, we've taken this criticism and nothing has happened to Sun Yo. You can criticize us, please help us, tell us more. You are free to speak up. We need your criticisms."

This went on for about six months and then the Communist party rounded up all the people who criticized the government and shot them.

Much of the anti-globalization sentiment among highly educated people is, I believe, simple cultural and intellectual protectionism, designed to preserve a world in which the highly specialized knowledge of intellectuals is still very important. Indeed, at least some of the intellectual motivation of the jihadist movement may well be about mullahs and their fanatic hangers-on realizing that decentralizing forces are eliminating their ability to control their societies.

As technology begets greater demands for liberty worldwide over the next couple of decades, the blowback from those who are used to ruling, be they clerics, intellectuals or ministers, is going to be pretty fierce. The road from here to there is going to be bumpy.

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