(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
The present state of disintegration of Western society owes much to the efforts of the so-called intellectual class....‘so-called’ because, as Robert H. Bork points out in his recent book ‘Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline’ (1997), most of the intellectual class are not involved with serious mental work. While they make their living producing and distributing ideas and symbols they need not be, and often are not, very good at dealing with ideas. As Bork observes, they may not even be intelligent or sensible.
We can’t say we were not warned. Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, never one to mince words, put it this way thirty years ago: “A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head. And that is precisely the position of America today. Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we haven’t any....After decades of preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming the impotence of the intellect, [modern intellectuals] are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded....they have no answer to give those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that reason and freedom have had their chance and failed, and that the future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith and force.”(1) Hello culture worship and humanitarian bombing.
The modern intellectual class is generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, Western society and culture, and is susceptible to utopian fantasies. Nobel Prize-winning Economist and Jurist, Frederick Hayek observed: “The mood of [the West’s] intellectual leaders has long been characterised by disillusionment with its principles, disparagement of its achievements, and exclusive concern with the creation of ‘better worlds’.”(2)
Why this might be has encouraged speculation. Economist Joseph Schumpeter has observed that while intellectuals have a lot to say, they have no direct responsibility for practical affairs, and are likely to have no first-hand knowledge of them.(3) That could be the reason. To that might be added the fact that in most cases their position of privilege insulates them from the consequences in the broader community of their own ideas and theories. They, personally, don’t have to face the court of reality. They don’t live in suburbs where the worst effects of multiculturalism are most vividly felt. Consequently, like their students, they are free to demand that reality be anything they think they can make it be. All of which suggests that they are well-meaning, but simply naive about worldly affairs. This is nonsense.
That explanation ignores the profound influence Marxism has had on this group. In his book, ‘The Closing of the American Heart’ (1990), Ronald H. Nash wrote, “According to reliable sources, some ten thousand American college professors freely identify themselves as Marxists. To this number can be added thousands of others who strongly sympathise with left-wing political and social values.” The same can be said, perhaps even more so, about Australia. The current attitude of the Australian Intelligensia wears all the badges of Marxism: hatred of the existing order and its values; the idea that they are a class ‘chosen by history’ to overthrow the existing order and replace it by something of their own making.
Australia’s ‘intellectual’ Establishment is a clone of America’s, despite an attempt during the 1970s to develop a truly Australian critique of so-called ‘capitalist society’. That attempt, called the Arena Thesis, was published in a series of articles in the Melbourne-based New Left journal Arena, and was described as “the most highly developed Marxist analysis of the Australian education system”. You see, by the mid-Sixties international socialists had come to accept the fact that the working class were never going to do their bidding and destroy existing society by revolution, so a new vanguard had to be found: the intellectual class. The Arena Thesis was an attempt to develop a ‘sociology of the intellectuals’ which would generate a revolutionary consciousness and political radicalism in that stratum or class within Australia.
According to the revised theory, the old Marxist model had failed to understand the ‘role of culture as a form of social power’. The new negation of capitalism in its ‘neo-capitalist ’ phase was not industrial production, but the intellectual culture, and the new relations of production were not material but intellectual. Dialectical materialism became dialectical intellectualism. The inexorable forces of history were no longer driving factory workers, but intellectuals and student radicals, particularly in the social science faculties. It was now intellectual culture that was ordained by history “to challenge the whole of industrial society”. The ‘intellectually trained’ strata were now the vanguard of the movement towards world socialism (now called globalism).
The student activists of those times are now in charge of the show: the university faculties, the bureaucracies, the education system, the media, the churches, even the union leadership. They are now in a position to ram their ideology of hate for the existing order and all it stands for down the throats of a reluctant populace, even though that ideology contradicts human nature, facts known to history and science, as well as reality and logic. To get around the latter, the Left even developed its own ‘logic’, which says that the truth of a proposition is determined by its inherent contradictions. It’ s called dialectical ‘reasoning’. Truth, logic, history and science are now anything the intellectual Left declare them to be. Like the crazed Doctor Moreau they are out to remake the world according to their own recipe. Preposterous? Consider the following.
In 1969 Hillary Rodham gave the student commencement address at Wellesley in which, speaking for her class, she said that “....the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears impossible, possible....We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction”. Twenty-four years later, now the wife of the President of the United States, she said that “remolding society certainly in the West is one of the great challenges facing all of us.” Notice the totalitarian impulse, the unquestioned assumption that the intellectual Left has some innate right to reconstruct the world. It apparently does not occur to Mrs. Clinton that ‘society’ consists of people, and those people might not want to be remolded. Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the intellectual Left is their failure to believe for a moment that they might actually be wrong.
Sometimes their hatred of this civilisation leads to utterances bordering on the deranged. Ronald H. Nash (on p. 70) quotes a Harvard University educator as saying in 1973: “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.” That is now the education programme of UNESCO [see ‘22 Steps to Global Tyranny’ (1999) p. 71, by the author], and UNESCO increasingly determines the school curriculum in Australia.
How did this class of destructive intellectuals come about? According to Maurice Latey in his book ‘Tyranny:a Study in the Abuse of Power’ (1969), the rise of an intellectual class dedicated to the destruction of the existing social order is a relatively recent phenomenon. The philosophers of the ancient world were expected to glorify their political masters, but not to actually invent ideologies which would justify their actions, and drum up active support for them among their subjects. But towards the end of the Middle Ages came Machiavelli who, in ‘The Prince’ (1640) set the tone of modern political ethics by declaring that anything is justified if it leads to the acquisition and retention of political power, including lying, cheating and killing; and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who set the tone for modern totalitarianism by declaring that the state had to have absolute power over the citizens.
But it was not until the Industrial Revolution that an intellectual class was able to come into existence. Prior to the Enlightenment intellectuals were few in number and dependent upon the support of the church or some great patron. Ayn Rand in ‘For the New Intellectual’ (1961), p.13, states that “The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution.” The dramatic rise in productivity brought on by the Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1750, enabled the numbers of professional intellectuals to expand into an identifiable class, based in the universities that sprang up in the wake of the Renaissance, and financed by the new wealth produced by business. It was from this class that the elaborate ideologies of modern dictatorships were to emerge.
Latey described the modern Intelligensia as ‘alienated’, yet the “most distinctive class of this revolutionary age”. Such a class, he thought, is likely to arise wherever highly educated and intelligent men are unable to find any socially constructive outlet for their talents (p. 179). He describes them as being against all established standards, against religion, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist (p. 183). They might also be described as not too intelligent and pretty short on talent as well.
Why they should be so hostile to the civilisation to which they owed their existence is a curious point. Some have speculated that they may always have been potentially hostile to the social order but were held in check by self-interest. Prior to the Reformation, had they been too critical of society they could well have found themselves being burned at the stake as heretics. But following the Industrial Revolution, relieved of their dependence on private patrons, they were free to indulge their hostility because the bourgeois state had lost the will to suppress dissent. As Professor Ferns says in his book, ‘The Disease of Govcernment’, at p.13, “There appeared in the universities learned men inventing the most involved reasons to justify the crimes of government.”
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) endeared himself to his boss Frederick the Great of Prussia, by claiming that the state was the march of God on earth. It was the source of everything. It could do no wrong because it defined what was right and wrong. Karl Marx (1818-1883) laid the basic ground rule for human social reconstruction when he declared in his ‘Theses on Fuerbach’ (1845), that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) removed any need for moral qualms in the choice of means by declaring that “God is dead”. In His place Man needed a secular substitute, in the form of the Ubermenschen, a human dictator.
The Fabian Society (formed 1884) declared that it was okay for Left-liberals to disguise their real motives (become ‘wolves in sheeps’ clothing’), and to infiltrate (permeate) and subvert democratic governments to undermine and overturn existing society by stealth and trickery. Old Fabian favourite George Bernard Shaw declared in his ‘Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism’, that you couldn’t make an omlette (remake society) without breaking eggs (people). The Intelligensia in the form of the American Humanist Association declared in their ‘Humanist Manifesto I of 1933’, that since God was now ‘outmoded’, humanist intellectuals had the right to step into the void and direct the course of human history, including the course of human evolution. In a gesture of open-mindedness, they declared their commitment to socialism as the only permissible political system [see Humanist Manifestos I (1933), and II (1973), of the American Humanist Association].
By that time modern intellectuals had shed their medieval role as the handmaidens of religion, and become instead the handmaidens of politics, particularly totalitarian politics. In the book ‘The Fellow Travellers’ (1973), David Caute documents at length how Western intellectuals fawned over the Soviet Union while it was systematically exterminating 64 million of its own citizens for failing to love communism. When the grim truth leaked out, the intellectuals distanced themselves from ‘Stalinism’, but continued to hate their own culture and work towards its destruction.
Robert Bork notes that Left-liberal intellectuals now exert a cultural influence that far outweighs their intellectual stature. Their values and ideas dominate the press, movies, TV, universities, primary and secondary schools, books and magazines, many churches, and projects funded by the American tax-exempt foundations. Now that opposing ‘politically incorrect’ viewpoints are censored, Leftist intellectuals enjoy an influence out of all proportion to their numbers, to the point where their political and cultural attitudes are almost beyond the reach of rational argument. When the Left speak of ‘free speech’, they mean being able to express their views without fear of being challenged.
Why Western intellectuals should be overwhelmingly socialist is another interesting question. Sociologist Max Weber thought their need to plan and control everything that moves had something to do with a quest for a meaning to life, a demand that “the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.”4 Whereas previously religion had supplied that meaning, now the intellectuals, having done away with God, sought meaning in a secular belief system. Leftist politics filled that need because, as Bork observes, “Leftist ideology offers a comprehensive world view and a promise of ultimate salvation in a utopia that conventional politics cannot offer.”
Modern American Left-liberalism believes in an ‘adversary culture’, which includes hatred of America and the West, alienation from the American system and lack of concern about threats to the regime. This explains the lack of concern in the US over the Cox report detailing espionage and treason in high places. It also explains why is was more important for the liberal Left to keep one of their own, Bill Clinton, in office, despite the disgrace he has brought to the position of president. The Left really would rather see the American system go under than see one of their own removed from office. It’s a simple matter of priorities. Seen in that light the present attack in Australia on High Court Justice Callinan (not one of 'theirs') was totally predictable.
In order to defeat the remaining traditional values in today’s culture, it is necessary to attack the roots of those values in the history of Western civilisation, even if it means re-writing history and distorting the truth. Western civilisation is portrayed as all bad, colonialism, slavery, empire and poverty, the guilt-inspiring picture now being taught to youth. Part of it involves fantasizing about past utopias populated by noble savages, which were allegedly destroyed by whites. This is more than sentimental nonsense, Bork observes, it is part of the moral assault on Western society and its institutions.
Not all intellectuals necessarily hold these views, but institutions have been politicised by minorities within them. According to some writers, all it needs is 20% of the faculty to be activists to intimidate the rest. There is also a tendency to make the excuse that those who do hold the views as well-intentioned but misguided. But most are not well intentioned at all. They are driven by hate for this society and its culture. They are driven too by the desire for notoriety, influence and power, and to see the structures built by others laid to waste. Unless and until these people are challenged, there is no hope for Western civilisation.