|
Somebody once said our eyes do not show a lack of sense of beauty, but a lack of discovery. Apparently, it's an undoubtful guide to Paul Johnson and his controversial book Intellectuals, only what he want to discover is not beauty, but scandals and gossips.
The book was first published in London in 1988, when the Conservative Party and and Ms. Thatcher were in charge of the British parliament and government. It aroused a heat debate and controversy on both side of the Atlantic Ocean. The New York Times Book Review said this book "revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done, and the reveling parts of the book are great fun to read."
That is definitely true. In his book, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Brecht, Sartre and other influential "secular intellectuals" are not even a normal person. The nature they share in common are cold, angry, arrogant, narcissistic, sexual perversion. If there are anything more exciting to know that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in victim of hypospadias, I don't think so or else Mr. Johnson did not find it.
To definite the term "secular intellectual" is an interesting task. First of all, they are intellectual. Literally, it means a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity. But they are not just intellectuals, they are a group of people, a secular people. It means that they are not saints, like in the Middle Ages, who preferred to meditate in a cave of nowhere, and died without anybody noticed. They are people with thoughts. Being a genius doesn't mean they are perfect.
However, the whole point of being is to trash intellectuals who idealizes the pursuit of freedom (either in behavior, in intellectual pursuits, from society). Mr. Johnson admitted that it was unfair to use the private lives of individuals to judge the strength of their thoughts, but nonetheless he spent the entire book documenting the deficiencies of men who talked big and lived meanly. The quality of the men never matched the beauty of their vision, prose, or poetry.
Being one of the most influential intellectuals of 20th century, Mr. Johnson must have a vivid impression on what what intellectuals are. In 1998, ten years after the first print of this book, Mr. Johnson was revealed to be having an eleven-year affair with writer Gloria Stewart. Ms. Stewart went public with the affair to the newspapers after what she saw as Johnson’s hypocrisy over his views on morality, religion and family values and also alleged that Johnson liked erotic spanking.
This is far more spicier than to know the scandals of somebody died decades ago. But this can not deny the great ideas and books Mr Johnson contribute to human history and culture. Intellectuals are one of the mortals. Flaws are inevitable to mortals. We treasure their great gift and honor their contribution to the improvement of human beings, and for that, who will care about how many mistresses Shelley had, or if Karl Marx had a illegitimate child.
The big conclusion of Mr. Johnson is that "one of the principle lesson of our tragic century , which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity , is -- beware intellectuals." He thought the intellectuals just need to concentrate on their essays and researches, and leave the politics and reality alone. Mr. Johnson must like scholasticism from the bottom of his heart. Because only at that time, the intellectuals are pure and devoted. All they need to do was to calculate whether the God can created a stone he can not move.
Look at the intellectuals we should "beware" of: Rousseau, the father of the French Revolution; Shelley and Russell, radical libertarianist; Sartre, Wilson and Hemingway, famous for their left-wing stand; Tolstoy, the God's elder brother and a demonstrant against aristocracy; Marx, no need to say more. Apparently, Mr. Johnson warned us to beware of those who resent the corruption and injustice of the contemporary society, and those who hold the best wishes and ideals to establish a better world.
It is true that there were a lot of suffering during the past two centuries, and there were a series of frustration on the way to build that better world. But bad people do bad things. As much as I detest social relativism, post-modernism, and religious dogma, I can’t fault these ideas as causing mass effects. I can, however, fault the men who, upon gaining power to commit atrocities, cloak their acts in the trappings of a recognizable philosophy. To suggest that terrorists or dictators valued life until reading a book seems to be placing the cart before the horse.
Famous for his conservative stand both in his books and political ideas, Mr. Johnson clearly decided to follow his heart when he wrote this book. There 's no such an issue as anti-intellectual in the book. Revolution or counter-revolution, that's the main point of it. The up-rising of the neo-conservatism during the past decade is certainly a sign of the right-turning of the western intellectuals.
But to me, I still hold the belief that the responsibilities of intellectuals are crucial to the society. After the end of dark ages, intellectuals are consciously take the job to shape the world, generation after generation. I think the main problem of contemporary intellectuals, if not over worried, is that the corruption of their faith, horizon, and sense of responsibility instead of private life or morality. I do agree with Mr. Johnson for one thing: "The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas." The brightest future of human beings depends of the varieties of idea, if the intellectuals today can still create some. |
|