Death of a salesman

The Jerusalem Post
4 Feb ’05

Arthur Miller’s death was the occasion for almost universal praise.

Critics and writers ignored Miller’s common intellectual malaise of hating his own country because it failed to practice an abstract ideal of perfect justice, while condoning and even supporting extremely repressive regimes because they mouthed the right slogans about human rights, self-determination, equality etc.

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The death recently of the famous American playwright Arthur Miller has brought into focus again the “problem of the intellectuals”, already extensively discussed in Julien Benda’s 1928 pioneering work, “The Treason of the Intellectuals”. Miller’s death was the occasion for almost universal praise. Critics and writers ignored Miller’s common intellectual malaise of hating his own country because it failed to practice an abstract ideal of perfect justice, while condoning and even supporting extremely repressive regimes because they mouthed the right slogans about human rights, self-determination, equality etc.

You need not be a literary critic, or live in America, to realize that something was badly rotten in the intellectual kingdom. Our own universities support a considerable number of “intellectuals” who condemning Israel for human rights violations but devote their lives to the promotion of a most oppressive Palestinian state. They follow in the footsteps of so many brilliant intellectuals and writers, from Bertrand Russell to Bernard Shaw, from Jean Paul Sartre to Arthur Miller, who condemned democracies but supported the worse tyrannies from Stalin’s and Hitler’s to Mao’s, from Castro’s to Arafat’s and even Saddam Hussein’s. Intellectuals everywhere (not least in Israel) have also supported, and still support, obviously defunct and retrograde ideas, despite the repeated catastrophes they caused. They stuck to these ideas even after the fall of Communism and the social and economic bankruptcy of Socialism. In the service of false utopian ideals and adolescent messianic longings, intellectuals have often sacrificed the values for which they supposedly stand – truth, integrity and responsibility – and have betrayed the oppressed and impoverished masses they pretended to defend. All these bear witness to a persistent perversity in their mind and character.

The great philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead warned of the intellectuals’ proclivity to indulge in what he termed “the fallacy of misplaced concretion”, namely their tendency to ascribe to generalized abstractions a concrete and particular reality. This repeatedly led to their most outrageous violations of common sense. The Social Sciences, and especially political science, but also Sociology and its adjuncts, and even certain schools of philosophy will often refer to “Society” as being such and such, or “wanting” or even “demanding” this or that. As if an abstract notion, “society’’, is a real coherent entity endowed with a mind and with volition, when in fact common sense tells us that “society” is merely an tag referring to a complex conglomerate of groups with various and often conflicting interests (otherwise we would not have politics, would we?).

From treating their abstractions as real, intellectuals make the quick leap of unreason to an imagined Utopia, another absurd and impossible notion that has been perverting so many minds.

As anyone looking in the mirror must recognize, society is obviously not made up of saints or a perfect “humanity”. Therefore the notion that imperfect people could somehow produce a perfect social order is so palpably absurd.

But how could such a pedestrian, common sense thought hope to even curb the great intellectual conceits, like those that presume to know what “social justice” is, or assume that if we just tried hard enough all of life’s natural inequalities could be nullified. How could a conservative skepticism ever curb the great adolescent enthusiasm of true believers in the instant “perfectibility of man”, in “society’s” ability to rapidly mold and change human nature once certain social arrangements get to “revolutionize” history in one fell swoop; if only our believers could convince their obdurate, really perverse opponents, or failing that simply eliminate them.

The intolerance bred by true believing is perhaps why so many intellectuals have become politically tyrannous. Pretending to respect diversity they soon develop what the Talmud described as the Sodomites’ pastime, the measuring of every person on a uniform (presumably ideal) bed, and then cutting or stretching to size those who deviated from the norm. Like their political idols, the world’s tyrants, intellectuals tend when they can (in universities) to enforce obedience through the tactics of the thought police, and through the character assassination of anyone who is contemptuous of their debilitating political correctness. From thought police to re-education or to concentration camps the distance is never great.

We earlier wrote of the risk of isolation that inflicts intellectuals who live in the heady atmosphere of the ivory tower. Not aware of how reality works, intellectuals tend, for example, to treat with condescension or contempt businessmen, since they have learned that profits derive from exploitation. They have no notion what it takes to build and maintain businesses that put bread on their table, nor do they recognize the positive effects of wealth creation, not least its contribution to their life of tenured ease.

We need, of course, ideas, and we need intellectuals trafficking in ideas, even when the majority are mere salesmen of second-hand goods. What we need not subsidize, really, are those intellectual salesmen who are too lazy and irresponsible to base their prescriptions on knowledge. A brief course in basic economics, for example, could probably serve as antidote to a lot of intellectual nonsense and modify, at least, some of their arrogant conviction that besides their field of narrow specialization they also qualify as social reformers, who know how to engineers reality so that it delivers absolute social justice. Now.

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