"The Treason of the Intellectuals and 'The Undoing of Thought'"

By Roger Kimball at The New Criterion:

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said “famous,” but perhaps “once famous” would have been more accurate. Today, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys currency. “La trahison des clercs”: it is one of those phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medieval sense” to mean “scribe” — someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs. The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals, sums it up neatly.

The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 04/21/06 08:23:06 PM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.

"Judas: A Saint for Our Seasons"

By Gerard Van der Leun @ American Digest:

.... But beyond these considerations, the publication of the "Gospel" of Judas has another, deeper and more lasting benefit to our neophytes of nihilism. It puts one of the final elements of their anti-morality play at center stage. It seeks to sanctify treason.

It was never a question of "if," but only a question of "when" our contemporary society would discover an avatar who would make treason acceptable. It only codifies the realities of their secular belief system. Treason against others or one's country has long been as common as adultery in this country. Like adultery the rate of treason is on the rise because, like adultery and similar forms of personal betrayal, it no longer has any consequences at all.

It is true that the federal crime of treason is not easily established and is rarely if ever charged. But the formal crime of treason is not what I am discussing here. Rather the more common, garden variety of treason as understood by plain people — the rabid and unremitting hatred, expressed in word or deed, of the country that gives you the freedom to express your hatred. It is the treason of the ingrate, the soul-dead, the politically perverted, and the bitter; it is, as Roger Kimball at The New Criterion discusses, the treason of the intellectuals and "the undoing of thought."

It's a fact of our self-centered contemporary existence that betrayal has become one of the common forces that shape our lives. For when our own desires ride us like a drunken demon lodged on our shoulders, betrayal is the first order of the day when others seek to thwart our desires, or even when others become a mere inconvenience to our wants and whims.

We've long permitted greater and greater levels of betrayal in our society. We've codified them as law, policy and custom as far as the wishes of the individual are concerned. It is no longer sophisticated or fashionable to speak of selfishness as betrayal. That word is so harsh when, after all, we are only speaking of "differing needs," aren't we. When the betrayal of others is glossed over with phrases such as "I needed to be me," or "I needed my space," or "I needed more money,"or "We were just on different paths," then the elevation of this disease of the soul from the betrayal of another into the larger realm of treason against all is only a question of degree....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 04/21/06 08:03:05 PM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.

"Crisis in Europe"

By Bruce Bawer at The Hudson Review:

My learning curve was steep. When I look back, it’s as if one day the whole business wasn’t even on my radar screen, and the next day I understood that it was the most important issue of our time.

It happened in Amsterdam, a city I flipped for in 1997 and moved to a year later. But it wasn’t till 1999, when I lived briefly in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, that I took in the fact that the city was divided into two radically different and almost entirely separate communities. One of them, composed mostly of ethnic Dutchmen, was secular, liberal, and (owing to a very low birthrate) dwindling steadily; the other, composed of immigrant Muslims, lived in tradition-bound, self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly. This division, I soon realized, was replicated across Western Europe. Clearly, major social friction — and more — lay down the line.

Yet nobody talked about it. Or wanted to. And when I went to the Amsterdam library in search of information about this subject (the Internet then being far less fecund a resource than it has since become), I found little other than books like The Islamic Threat (1992) — in which the American scholar John L. Esposito insisted that there was no such threat, period — and A Heart Turned East (1997), in which the British writer Adam LeBor celebrated Muslims for bringing to Europe something “intangible, but nonetheless vital,” namely “God and spirituality.”

To be sure, a few thoughtful observers had made public their concern about Europe’s ongoing transformation — but I didn’t find this out until later, after I’d moved to Oslo. In the 1996 memoir Min Tro, Din Myte (My Faith, Your Myth), Iraqi immigrant Walid al-Kubaisi depicted a Norwegian elite that not only failed to encourage integration but, motivated by a misguided, condescending romanticism about exotic foreigners, actively discouraged it to the point of chiding freethinkers (like al-Kubaisi) for whom part of the appeal of living in the West was its democracy. Then there was Unni Wikan, a social anthropologist who, it turned out, had been calling for stronger integration efforts for years. Invited by the Norwegian government to propose a plan for immigrant families, Wikan urged authorities to attend to the civil rights of Muslim women and children, many of whom, she knew, suffered severe abuse in patriarchal homes; yet her recommendations were rejected on the grounds that it would be disrespectful for the government to challenge the authority of Muslim husbands and fathers. And of course there was the Dutch sociologist turned politician Pim Fortuyn, whose book Tegen de islamitisering van onze cultuur (Against the Islamicization of Our Culture) took a position opposed to Esposito’s, arguing that the rise of an illiberal Muslim subculture in his country did indeed threaten democratic values and that the Netherlands was doomed unless it seriously addressed this threat. Though Fortuyn’s book had appeared in 1997, I didn’t hear about it, either, until much later.

These were strong voices; but they were also voices in the wilderness, taking on a political, academic, and media establishment that refused to listen. If al-Kubaisi’s arguments were virtually ignored by that establishment, and if Wikan’s proposals were dismissed out of hand, Fortuyn — while finding a receptive audience among ordinary Dutchmen — was demonized by the Dutch elite. Though he was a liberal, committed to freedom and sexual equality, politicians and journalists labeled him a fascist. This systematic misrepresentation led directly to his murder on May 6, 2002, by a Green Party activist whose account of his motives read like a précis of the establishment line on Fortuyn....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 04/21/06 07:45:32 PM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.