Why intellectuals get it wrong.

One of the conceits of many intellectuals is that they think they are supremely qualified to guide the lives of lesser beings.

Exhibit A: Lytton Strachey (1880-1932):

At Cambridge he [Strachey] was a member of the Apostles, a supposedly secret group of intellectuals who gathered for high discussions and companionship. Entry was by election and often ferociously contested. Mostly, it was a venue for the display of personality, manners and style. As trivial as its proceedings often were, they encouraged Strachey in his belief, already formed, that he and his kind were special.

He was not joking when he expressed this conviction to [Leonard] Woolf [husband of Virginia Woolf] on Sept. 9, 1904: "I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved in ours. WE are —oh! In more ways than one—like the Athenians of the Periclean Age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilisation. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the Eighteenth Century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all."^[1]

This passage could surely be used in any experiment to test whether the gag reflex is working in someone, but it’s right on the money where trying to understand why socialists and leftist zealots are so willing to engage in wild, destructive social, political, and economic experiments.

Intellectuals are impressed by their ability to understand and formulate ideas. They are justly fascinated by the world of ideas. Thinking opens up vistas into the human experience. Manifestly, people who won’t think are ignorant. People who can’t think are stupid. People who don’t think are lazy. But they are not those people!

Intellectuals, however, can confuse the capability to formulate a complex idea (e.g., change oil every 3,000 miles) with the capacity to formulate ideas that are sensible in light of the realities of human nature (e.g., individual owner of car is most likely to get oil changed on time). Rather than dilute the excellence of a brilliant idea (e.g., solve welfare problem by employing welfare moms to change oil) because of the practical limitations of human nature they cling to the idea and endeavor to bend their fellow humans into pretzels to try to make reality conform with the ideal (e.g., impose additional oil tax on oil and lube business that don't hire welfare moms).

Elizabeth Becker described this process brilliantly in her book about the Khmer Rouge, When the War Was Over, a Modern History of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia they first set out to eliminate everyone who had been a member of the old regime or who had been infected in any way by Western education or exposure. When this didn’t eliminate their difficulties, then they decided it was a faction within the Khmer Rouge itself that was obstructing progress. When there was still no progress, even after the elimination of internal opponents, the Khmer Rouge then attacked the Vietnamese as the source of their difficulties. Heaven forbid that the idea of returning Cambodia to an agrarian economy -- where "high tech" means "water buffalo" -- should be seen to be deficient in any respect. Unh uh.

Solzhenitsyn, in his masterful The Gulag Archipelago, described the Soviet hunt for “wreckers,” that is, technically competent people who knew how to run things but whose technical competence conflicted with the stupidity of ignorant Bolsheviks put in charge of factories and city waterworks. Ergo, any problems that arose were caused by these recalcitrants, these hold outs, not by the flaws in the new revolutionary system to make the New Soviet Man.

Millions died to make the communist pipedream in the Soviet Union come true. That that dream was in essence a nightmare can serve as a paradigm for all the murderous political experiments that writhed, fulminated, and putrefied in the 20th century.

Strachey’s words make him appear ridiculous but intellectuals are particularly susceptible in all ages to the same bacillus that affected him.

You'll recall that long ago Jonathan Swift had some choice words for the scientists of Laputa. In our day -– beginning as far back as the time of the League of Nations foolishness -- the Left has been infatuated with the idea of the equality of all peoples and the idea of world government as a replacement for the anarchy of the nation state system backed up by individual national militaries. To the Left, this combo of ideas shines with the brilliance of a cut diamond in the noon day sun.

In fact, this is a poisonous concoction that blinds the Left to some of the realities of human nature, viz., aggression, duplicity, world class obscurantism, and that quality so often lovingly ascribed to those of us who try so hard to straighten them out -– mean-spiritedness.

It makes for a foreign policy founded on weakness and prevents the salutary and educational use of force to kick the bejesus out of people who desperately need it.

Notes
^[1] Quoted in the review of the book “The Letters of Lytton Strachey” by Dennis Donaghue in the Wall Street Journal, p. P13, 12/13/05.