The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals

Evil, Enlightenment, and Death

Harry Redner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351472623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This fourth instalment of Harry Redner's tetralogy on the history of civilization argues that intellectuals have a brilliant past, a dubious present, and possibly no future. He contends that the philosophers of the seventeenth century laid the ground for the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. They, in turn, promoted a fundamental transformation of human consciousness: they literally intellectualized the world. The outcome was the disenchantment of the world in all its cultural dimensions: in art, religion, ethics, politics, and philosophy.In this fascinating study, Redner demonstrates how secularization took the sting out of both the dread and promise of an afterlife and intellectuals learned to die without the hope of immortality popularized by philosophy and religion. Ultimately, they produced the ideologies that generated the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which subsequently exterminated these intellectuals through mass murder on a scale never before experienced. The book traces the sources of this fatal entanglement and goes on to examine the contemporary condition of intellectuals in America and the world.Wherein lies the future of the intellectuals? Redner suggest that in the present state of globalization, dominated by technocrats, experts, and professionals, their fate remains uncertain.

Part I

Evil and the Tragedy of the Intellectuals

1

How Intellectuals Arrived at Radical Evil

Section I—From Ideologies to Exterminism

Corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst) is an old Latin tag that intimates the pernicious role that some intellectuals played in making possible, initiating, sustaining, and carrying through the radical evils of the twentieth century. Among the many who perished in the resultant horrors were the intellectuals themselves. It is as if a collective death wish engulfed them during the period when radical evil was rampant. This was the culmination of a century’s longprocess that began with the rise of modern intellectuals during the Enlightenment at least two centuries before the final catastrophe. The tragedy of the intellectuals that played itself out during this period was a kind of dialectic of the Enlightenment going through four moments or acts: the Enlightenment generated the intellectuals; the intellectuals generated political ideologies; political ideologies generated totalitarian movements; totalitarian regimes generated the radical evil that exterminated the intellectuals. In this chapter we shall examine each of these acts proceeding roughly in reverse chronological order, starting with the role that intellectuals played in the extermination process and ending with their origin during the Enlightenment. (The latter will be the subject of a much more extensive study in part II of this work.) Proceeding in this way makes it easier to explain how each later stage in the sequence arises out of the preceding one.

As we shall show, radical evil has all the hallmarks of intellectuality. It arises out of terror that is intellectually devised, planned and implemented in operations of mass incarceration and extermination. This is cold-blooded murder provoked by cold hatred that is far worse than passionate hatred or, as Yeats expressed it, “intellectual hatred is the worst.” Passionate hatred, like that of soldiers on the rampage or mobs running amok, is certainly murderous, but limited, and it soon ceases when passion is spent. Intellectual hatred is unlimited and tireless; it continues as long as the goals on behalf of which it functions are in effect. It is altogether a rational process in that limited sense of instrumental rationality in which moral issues have no bearing.

It takes intellectual work to devise the ideologies that are capable of superseding and overpowering the traditional moral restraints on political action and even on war-making. Only intellectuals can accomplish this feat of befuddling moral conscience and substituting an ideological “conscience,” so to speak, in its place. As we shall see, the first incidence of such an intellectual crime was the Terror that Robespierre, himself an intellectual, instigated during the French Revolution. Goya’s famous etching entitled “The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters” is an apt comment on this kind of perversion of the intellect that was to have such momentous consequences later.

However, it was not till the First World War and the revolutions that followed that the real damage was done to civilization. The carnage of the battlefields and the civil wars initiated a process of demoralization through which masses of men became hardened to ruthless killing without compunction. These were the kinds of men who took part in the totalitarian movements that then seized power or attempted to do so throughout Europe, especially among the defeated nations where social tribulation and turbulence was at its height. It was these conditions and the resultant demoralizing experiences they gave rise to that shaped the character of the totalitarian leaders and their followers. Mussolini and Hitler fought in the war; Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the civil war in Russia that followed; Mao in the war against Japan and the civil war against Chiang.

There is no doubt that the great totalitarian leaders were all, almost without exception, intellectuals. Yet they were also in a paradoxical and perverse way anti-intellectual intellectuals who contributed more to the destruction of intellectuals and the intellect in general than any other hostile forces. If totalitarianism can be considered the dictatorship of intellectuals then it must be thought of in this highly peculiar sense. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that every form of totalitarianism, whether Bolshevism, Nazism, or Fascism, owes its inception to genuine intellectuals for only such people could have formulated the ideologies on which these subsequent regimes depended and without which they could not have come into existence.

In what follows we shall mainly be concerned with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the main progenitors of radical evil, disregarding lesser figures such as Kim II Sung or Pol Pot. We shall also discount the other totalitarian leaders who were not radical evil doers, such as Mussolini, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro. In some sense these were also intellectuals and all were schooled in the Socialist classics of the nineteenth century and emerged out of Socialist movements. Mussolini is the prime example of a Socialist intellectual of no mean quality who developed the ideological basis of Fascism. As a great leader, the Duce of Italy, he was not excessively hostile to other intellectuals; he did not eliminate them en masse as was the case with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

These latter three were not great intellectuals; they were not original thinkers as were some of their progenitors who devised the ideologies they expounded. They evinced some theoretical talent in the manipulation of the ideas of others, but a much greater ability to put them into practical effect. All three began as artists : Hitler was a painter with the ambition to be an architect; Stalin was a poet in his native Georgian language, by all accounts a very fine one; and Mao was also a poet well versed in the Chinese classics. As dictators all three continued to take a great interest in the arts over which they exercised supreme critical sway forcing all other artists to conform to their requirements. Inevitably the results were disastrous to the arts in their countries. But above and beyond their artistic talents and critical abilities they were intellectuals of a minor kind.

Any doubts about Hitler as an intellectual have been laid to rest with the publication of Timothy Ryback’s book on Hitler’s library.¹ As Ryback demonstrates, the man who burned books was himself a great reader. He read voraciously at all times in his life and owned thousands of books on almost every conceivable subject. What he actually understood of the books he read, especially the philosophical ones, is open to question. He read Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche but mostly he retained only anti-Semitic catch-calls and slogan phrases. However, not only did Hitler read books he also wrote books, among which at least two were published and a third remained in manuscript form. He might not have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as Churchill did with his writings; Mein Kampf is no masterpiece, but it certainly enjoyed a wide readership. And besides, nobody, not even his worst enemy, can deny that he was a great orator. Without this ability he could never have won the following he had even before he came to power.

Stalin’s intellectuality can be doubted even less than Hitler’s, for he is the author of a number of books that matter in the sphere of Communist ideology. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is one of his late works, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, published in 1950. Even such a harsh critic as Robert Service allows that this book “has been unjustly ignored.”² Much to the surprise of every intellectual and academic in the Soviet Union at the time, Stalin launched into a frontal assault on the crude Marxist linguistic theory of Nikolai Marr that then prevailed. He has much to say on language that makes good sense and even affords a corrective to the exaggerated emphasis placed on language by Wittgenstein and the Oxford Linguistics Philosophy exponents, if only they had bothered to read him. Right from the start of the revolutionary career as Bolshevik, he was the acknowledged expert on the nationalities question, and he wrote the book Marxism and the National Question. In April 1924 he gave a series of nine lectures later published as a book, Foundations of Leninism, which Service concedes was “a work of able compression ... of Lenin’s doctrines.”³ Later he added to this with his Problems of Leninism of 1926, which was also a “model of pedagogical steadiness: ideas were introduced and carefully explained from various angles.”⁴ Eventually he went on to write the epitome of Marxism-Leninism in his The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik): A Short Course, which we shall presently discuss.

Mao’s intellectuality is questionable by Western standards though not by Chinese. He was a typical poet-scholar, exercising his intellectual faculties not so much on Western Marxist literature, as on the traditional Chinese classics, as Simon Leys writes:

Mao belongs to the inward-looking peasant world. His intellectual landscape was furnished not so much with Western Marxist writings—which he read belatedly, in a haphazard and superficial way—as with Chinese classical literature, historiography and fiction, with which he developed a lively if patchy and unsystematic familiarity, typical of a self-taught provincial genius.⁵

As Chang and Halliday report, “he himself was well-read and loved reading. His beds were tailor-made to be extra large, with enough space for loads of books to be piled on one side ... and his favourite hobby was reading in bed.”⁶ But as for other people, he said, “the more books you read the more stupid you become,” and also that “we need the policy of ‘keep people stupid’.”⁷ He even criticized Stalin for retaining the literary classics: “Stalin took over the so-called classics of Russia and Europe uncritically, and this caused grave consequences.”⁸ Mao himself did not write very much. The celebrated Little Red Book is a compilation of quotations that Lin Biao devised, much to Mao’s delight; and he went on to compare it to the Analects of Confucius.⁹ Mao was clearly of the artist-intellectual type more of an aesthete than a thinker. But to various degrees so, too, were the other great dictators. As Simon Leys remarks, “the phenomenon of the failed artist as statesman, of political leadership as self-expression, ought someday to be properly analyzed, in the course of such a study Mao could provide one of the most exemplary cases.”¹⁰

All the three great artist-statesmen took terror to be a normal principle of rule and based their regimes on its implementation. It is true that Hitler, unlike Stalin and Mao, did not come to power by means of terror but through the legitimate democratic process, yet once in power he quickly instituted a reign of terror. Following the excuse of the Reichstag fire, the Nazis very quickly set up concentration camps to incarcerate all their most threatening political enemies as well as to cow the Jews and force them to emigrate. The concentration camp system became ever more extensive and better organized as the regime consolidated itself. Open terror on the streets was also utilized for specific purposes, such as the notorious Kristallnacht, designed to confiscate Jewish wealth and make them leave all the sooner. This was the prelude to the radical evil of the Holocaust and the terror exercised throughout occupied Europe during the Second World War. However, in Germany itself only token terror was necessary to maintain Nazi rule since Hitler and the National Socialists enjoyed mass popular support for as long as the war seemed to be being won.

It was very different in Russian where since the star of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks could remain in power only by means of terror. Lenin was a ruthless and bloodthirsty dictator; “a revolution is meaningless without firing squads”, he declared. He murdered considerable numbers. He was utterly intolerant, permitting no other political party to exist but his own. Within his party he ruled by the principle of “democratic centrism,” which meant that power was concentrated in a Central Committee that he controlled. However, among its members he did allow a degree of collégial autonomy that occasionally led to his proposals being voted down. However, all the institutional instruments were already prepared by Lenin for Stalin’s eventual emergence as sole dictator whose dicta were infallible and whose word was law.

For Stalin terror became the normal means of control even within the party. This became most pronounced when he refashioned himself in the 1930s as a traditional Russian-style Czar and modeled himself on Ivan the Terrible, both as ruler and executioner. Once, having just signed lists of people to be executed, he is said to have remarked to his underlings Molotov and Yezhov: “Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one. Who remembers the names of all the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.”¹¹ Like Ivan the Terrible, though on a vastly larger scale, Stalin resorted to terror in order to overcome any major problem of governing that confronted him.

He began his reign of terror by stirring up, by means of propaganda and show trials, mass paranoia among the people. As James Mace explains:

Starting with the phony war scare of 1927 and show trials designed to point out various social groups (managers and engineers held over from the old regime, academicians, people who had been associated with national or religious movements, etc.) as nests of plotters in the pay of world capitalism, a massive propaganda campaign was carried out designed to convince the people that the Soviet society was under siege by the hostile capitalist world encircling it. Soviet society had to catch up with the capitalist West or be crushed. The crash collectivization of agriculture was portrayed as essential in order to do this.¹²

Whatever failures occurred in these crash programs were blamed on “internal” enemies, who, like the witches of old, were the spoilers of the peoples’ efforts. So constant witch-hunts had to be conducted to ferret them out and bring them to punishment. From then on the terror went on unceasingly.

For any seemingly insuperable difficulty Stalin had but the one constant answer: terror. And often this did, indeed, succeed in breaking through the blockage and achieving near miracles of production and human performance. But the constant resort to terror as a method of ruling was in the long run self-defeating. Terror could achieve such results only at enormous costs and wasted expenditure; it was economically, as well as in every other way, irrational. The ultimate effect of Stalin’s rule was to make the Soviet Union unviable as a normal society. Its eventual collapse much later had been prepared by Stalin long in advance.

Thus Stalin did achieve the industrialization of the Soviet Union at an incredibly fast pace. But to do so he ruined agricultural productivity for the long term. By forcibly collectivizing the peasantry, he was able to expropriate surplus produce and manpower to invest in industry. But the new system of agriculture that arose was so wasteful and inefficient that it would never be able to feed the Soviet people to anything approaching acceptable standards. Shortages and queuing became a way of life. Part of the reason for this low level of productivity was the effect that terror had in demoralizing generations of peasants.

Once Stalin grasped that terror worked, though he did not realize at what cost, he used it also for his own personal ends. In order to establish his absolute power and satisfy his growing paranoia, he instituted party and military purges. He succeeded in eliminating every potential enemy that his sickened imagination could conceive. He turned on his own people, those who had been his comrades in the revolution, and killed or imprisoned them by the millions. An exterminist apparatus, the Cheka and its successor organizations, was already in place ready and willing to do his bidding no matter what it might be. These apparatchiks, such as the heads of the secret police, were even ready to kill each other at Stalin’s behest.

But once again, though terror worked, the costs were horrendous and nearly fatal for the Soviet Union. The purge of most of the leading generals and the ablest officers below them was a disaster for the Red Army and largely responsible for the defeats it suffered in the first year after the German attack, which could have destroyed the regime. And apart from the military personnel, there were also the hundreds of thousands of extremely able functionaries killed or deported who could have made a great contribution, had they been left in place, to the success of Stalin’s rule. They were certainly no threat to him.

An even more graphic example of the megalomania and paranoia of a great leader that led him into exterminism is provided by Mao, who could do even greater damage because he worked on a larger scale, with a much bigger and even more obedient population at his disposal. He tried to follow in the footsteps of Stalin, but lacked Stalin’s level of knowledge or h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Evil and the Tragedy of the Intellectuals
• Part II: Enlightenment and the Triumph of the Intellectuals
• Part III : Death and Afterlife
• Index