The Century of the Intellectual

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 98 - 101

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The Century of the Intellectual

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY HAS BEEN the century of the intellectual—and nowhere more so than in politics.

The two leading totalitarian regimes of this century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were created by writers and talkers: Adolf Hitler and V. I. Lenin. Hitler's Mein Kampf and Lenin's Imperialism and other writings, were what put them on the map. The quality of their writings, in terms of logic or evidence, may have been shabby beyond belief. But these were masterpieces of propaganda.

Lenin's tracts rescued Marxism from the utter failures of its predictions and provided a whole new world vision, in which his political enemies were cast as international arch-villains, and Lenin's own followers as heroic agents of destiny.

Marxist-Leninist tracts like Imperialism gave comprehensive, dramatic and bitter explanations of the world's ills and discontents. Any sophomore could find in them the master keys to history, without the drudgery of having to know the facts or cope with the complexities of reality.

Hitler likewise created his own universe of the mind, peopled by whole races assigned their disparate roles in the grand scheme of history, and made titans or devils according to one man's imagination. Drivel? Yes. Powerfully effective? Also yes.

Some might say that these were pseudo-intellectuals or even anti-intellectuals, in terms of the quality of their reasoning or their use of evidence. But being an intellectual is an occupation, and the quality of their work does not change their occupation. A bad surgeon is still a surgeon—a deadly menace to the unsuspecting, but a surgeon nonetheless.

Being intellectuals was not an incidental part of the political careers of twentieth century dictators like Lenin, Hitler, or Mao. Their writings and sayings were the key instruments of their rise to power, just as military prowess was the key to Napoleon's. Moreover, their appeal was not just to the gullible masses, but to other intellectuals, including scholars, literary giants, and others with impeccable credentials in the world of ideas.

If totalitarianism was the ugly beast of twentieth century politics, its beauty was admired by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Thorstein Veblen, and its apologists ranged from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty of the New York Times to whole armies of fellow-travelers in the media and academic world of their time.

The pilgrimages of intellectuals to the lands of the dictators—to Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, or Castro's Cuba—have been among the amazing stories of this century, as eminent scholars and literary figures have come back to gush over the "progress" of tyrannies whose own people were making desperate escapes whenever they could.

In short, totalitarianism has been an intellectual phenomenon. It appealed to the same susceptibilities of intellectuals as other crusades that have seized the imagination of the educated and the articulate—so-called "thinking people"—such as the eugenics movement in the early part of the century and, later, apocalyptic environmentalism demanding Draconian regulations.

What all these movements have in common is a sense of a revelation grasped only by the anointed, but a revelation that needs to be imposed on the benighted masses for their own good. Could anything be more of an ego trip, or more in keeping with intellectuals' exalted view of themselves, or their resentment at seeing wealth and power in the hands of lesser beings?

Nothing so mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying. People who escaped from totalitarian paradises, and who told tales of the horrors there, were dismissed as political enemies spreading lies.

Where the facts were too blatant to deny, the explanation was that these were "growing pains" of a new society or "local excesses," and we were reminded that "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." The fatal talent of the intelligentsia is facility with words—and a blindness to the fact that reality is not nearly so malleable as language.

Only after the official archives were opened in the last days of the Soviet Union did the unthinkable horrors of an evil empire become undeniable. Yes, there was a deliberately engineered famine in the Ukraine under Stalin—and its victims exceeded even the horrifying estimates in Robert Conquest's classic study of the subject. Yes, the Soviets carried out a mass murder of Polish military officers and—we learned more recently—the execution of American prisoners from as far back as World War II, when we were supposedly "allies."

The past is irrevocable, but many of the factors behind its tragedies are still at work in the present, and are a danger to the future. The issues change—eugenics is not environmentalism—but the dogmatism and the ego behind the dogmatism are the same.

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11 June 2024