Should we allow ourselves to be influenced by intellectuals?

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Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

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“...massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.”
This is the core theme of Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, by Paul Johnson.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Shelly, Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman are among the revolutionary thinkers who have shaped the past 250 years of Western Civilization, and they are, if we are to believe the author, they were all deadbeats, philanderers, depraved, cheats, mendicants, and phonies. ​

Take the case of Karl Marx. “...it can be shown that it's [Das Kapital] actual content can be related to four aspects of his character: his taste for violence, his appetite for power, his inability to handle money and, above all, his tendency to exploit those around him.” Indeed, all of the intellectuals examined in this book demonstrated that last personality trait, “above all others”. 

“The undertone of violence always present in Marxism and constantly exhibited by the actual behavior of Marxist regimes was a projection of the man himself. Marx lived his life in an atmosphere of extreme verbal violence, periodically exploding into violent rows and sometimes physical assault. Marx’s family quarrels were almost the first thing his future wife, Jenny von Westphalen, noticed about him. At Bonn University the police arrested him for possessing a pistol and he was very nearly sent down; the university archives show he engaged in student warfare, fought a duel…”
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Why then do we allow ourselves to be influenced by such men and women? One possibility is that we aren’t exposed to their flaws, only their works. In all my study, in formal education and as an autodidact, I have never been exposed to the Yin and Yang of them.

What may we expect from a liar, but lies? What may we expect from a philanderer than excuses for inconstance. 

What of Marx’s appearance? Contemporaries describing Marx noted that he was “...intolerably dirty, ‘a cross between a cat and an ape’... He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, ‘spitting out spurts of wicked fire’’; he had the habit of saying: ‘I will annihilate you.’” Sounds more like a Dalek from Doctor Who than someone we might consult for philosophical direction. But, alas, such information is expunged from the lectures in American colleges that exhort students to revere Marxism and join the revolution to end capitalism.

Can anything good be said of Marx? One thing appears worthy of mention. He loved his wife and remained constant in his love throughout his life. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the other intellectuals who found their way into this book. How then could such a man retain the love of a woman considered beautiful in her time? The short answer appears to be that he made her laugh. His humor, caustic, biting, and sarcastic in public, must have been muted in private.

If there is a common thread to these intellectuals, it seems that all were revered leaders despite their innumerable and severe failings. I doubt, as a Lutheran minister once speculated, that many Christians would actually like Jesus if they had ever met him. However, to be fair, at least Jesus appears to have lived his philosophy as opposed to these intellectuals who never appeared to live theirs.

George Orwell

At the end of the book, we finally meet a decent intellectual, George Orwell, who idealized the Utopian dreams of socialism until he was forced to confront socialism realized. Having fought with the anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War, he barely escaped with his life when Stalin ordered these nascent Communists rounded up and executed for their failure to embrace Communism as practiced rather than some idealized form of Communism. Furthermore, when he returned to England and attempted to publish the truth he had experienced, he was barred by the Leftist press. His most damning observation which should be kept in mind as the reader reflects back on all the other intellectuals discussed in this book, ‘...one has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.’ “Indeed it was an axiom of his [Orwell, explains the author] that the poor, the ‘ordinary people’, had a stronger sense of what he called ‘common decency’, a greater attachment to simple virtues like honesty, loyalty, and truthfulness, than the highly educated.” Obviously, decency was in short supply among all those discussed in the preceding chapters.

Here we come to what must be the most startling revelation of the book. “When he [Orwell] died in 1950, his ultimate political destination was unclear and he still vaguely ranked as a Left-wing intellectual… But in the forty years since his death, he has been increasingly used as a stick to beat the intellectual concepts of the Left. Intellectuals who feel most solidarity with their class have long since recognized him as an enemy.”

A good book (or, For a book to be good…) should make the reader think. Well, this one has definitely upset my perceptions of intellectuals. Is it possible that all intellectuals are Leftists or do Leftist intellectuals have some credentialing authority that allows them to dismiss from their community those who do not share their ideology? Interestingly, in reading Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, those leaning to the Right appear to accept others regardless of ideology. Is that also true of those leaning to the Left?

Ultimately, if Leftist intellectuals are permitted to strip the credentials of intellectuals who don’t share their ideology, and those who remain are cast from the same mold as those on the Left, it may be that men and women who deal with reality are better off shunned by the intellectual community at large.