Intellectuals asks whether the despicable personal behavior of several influential thinkers disqualifies their far-reaching theories about how people should live. I think Johnson makes his case. Indeed, the only flaw I found in this book is that Johnson seems to overly much enjoy exposing the sordid details of his subjects.
The intellectuals examined are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman, with additional comments on others (Dashiell Hammett, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky). Johnson has mostly positive things to say about George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
My understanding of Johnson’s definition of “intellectual” is a person who feels called, and qualified, to formulate and promote theories and schemes for “improving” the human condition, without reference to, and often in opposition to, established traditional and religious norms. To Johnson, it seems rather arrogant for a single human being, limited as we are in our ability to know and comprehend the history of human behavior, to presume to create an ultimate plan for the improvement of humankind. But it is clear that humility was in short supply in these individuals.
These are some of the subtopics listed under “intellectual characteristics” in the index to Intellectuals:
- anger, aggressiveness, violence
- cowardice
- cruelty
- deceitfulness, dishonesty
- egocentricity, egotism
- genius for self-publicity
- hypocrisy
- ingrattitude, rudeness
- intolerance, misanthropy
- love of power
- manipulativeness, exploitativeness
- quarrelsomeness
- self-deception, gullibility
- selfishness, ruthlessness
- self-pity
- self-righteousness
- shiftlessness, spongeing
- snobbery
- vanity
One of the most beneficial aspects of this book is as a cautionary tale for those who aspire to improve the world with their ideas. The flaws of Johnson’s “intellectuals” are common to humanity. Some individuals are blessed or cursed with sufficient influence to see their schemes implemented. Very few are able to resist the abuse of this power. Reading this book, one sometimes catches glimpses of ones own darker side.
As a Christian, I am helped by the examples in this book to see the wisdom of the Gospel. Good institutions cannot create good individuals. Rather, individuals, re-created through the Gospel, can bring goodness to institutions. This path is difficult, slow, and full of messy and often painful interpersonal interactions, but it’s the only path which works in the long run. The various shortcuts devised by clever, impatient intellectuals have invariably resulted in totalitarianism, misery, and death on a titanic scale.
Here are some quotations which I found interesting:
“As the cases of Sartre and Edmund Wilson suggest, there is a common propensity among radical intellectuals to demand ambitious government programmes while feeling no responsibility to contribute to them.” p. 300
“As has been shown repeatedly, the memoirs of leading intellectuals – Sartre, de Beauvior, Russell, Hemingway, Golancz are obvious examples – are quite unreliable. But the most dangerous of these intellectual self-glorifications are those which disarm the reader by what appears to be shocking frankness and admission of guilt. Thus Tolstoy’s diaries, honest though they appear to be, in fact hide far more than they reveal. Rousseau’s Confessions, as Diderot and others who really knew him perceived at the time, are an elaborate exercise in deception, a veneer of candour concealing a bottomless morass of mendacity.” p. 302
“There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge [in Spain] of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been.” p. 309
“What Orwell came reluctantly and belatedly to accept – the failure of utopianism on account of the fundamental irrationality of human behaviour – Waugh had vociferously upheld for most of his adult life. Indeed no great writer, not even Kipling, ever gave a clearer statement of the anti-intellectual position.” p. 311
“The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring those ‘men of action’ who practise violence. Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more grusome excesses of the SS.” p. 319
Regarding Russell and Chomsky:
“Now it is a characteristic of such intellectuals that they see no incongruity in moving from their own discipline, where they are acknowledged masters, to public affairs, where they might be supposed to have no more right to a hearing than anyone else. Indeed they always claim that their special knowledge gives them valuable insights.” p. 339