Twilight Of The Intellectuals

...If, as M. Aron insists, the American intellectuals have had to go looking for an enemy, it was because they decided not to find him where he lives but to take on instead the enemy's enemy, that is to say, "ideology," or in our beautifully onomotopoetic synonym, the "isms"—whether it be Socialism, Fascism, Zionism or even New Dealism...

...From the address to the Assembly of Mendes-Franee on May 21, as printed In L'Express the next day: [MendPs-France opened his address by stating that he and many others who had great respect for de Gaulle dating back to the war days had long hoped that de Gaulle would come to the aid of a troubled France and had pleaded with him to do so.] "Not once did General de Gaulle respond to these appeals...

...For almost four decades the Russian October was wafted around the globe in the form of abstract aims and illusory adventures...

...If, as he says, "anti-conformism is not without a certain conformism," anti-ideology is not without a certain ideology...

...Back in the Depression, he recalls, some radical exhalations did blow over from Europe...

...Since history has not achieved a steady sanity, the time for the extinction of the intellectual has not yet arrived...

...And is he correct in applying the measure of the post-war American to intellectuals elsewhere...

...Once inside, the only hope is to break the system to pieces...

...Any error, crudity or malice found in one may as well be attributed to the others...

...In practice, however, both America and Socialism have tended to behave, whenever things have gone well, as if paradise had already been attained and to dispose of ideas prematurely...

...a typical American-dream question...

...But we do not believe that in order to do so it is necessary to abandon the principles of republican government and the liberties to which our country holds fast or to yield to the pressure of rioters or street mobs, either in Algiers or in Paris...

...With too few exceptions, they are false, fanatical, arrogant, greedy, emotionally unstable, morally sophistical, politically and socially untrustworthy—by nature they are traitors both to their ideas and to themselves, even without bribe or force, from an ineradicable nostalgia for community with other people, who essentially revolt them, and from sheer weariness with their aimless egos...

...Is that what has happened in France among, for example, the Centrist parties, whose ideologies are certainly blurred enough to satisfy anyone...

...This type has manifested the same disagreeable traits throughout the world, in the "new nations" as in the old, wherever the breakdown of authority has given prominence to ideas.* Is it an exaggeration to say that in no place where he has appeared is the intellectual loved...

...As for guidance out of it, the more systematic it is the deeper it leads you into its trap...

...subject to the old-fashioned philosophical morality of Nietszche which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace...

...Not only don't American intellectuals have any ideas, nobody pays any attention to them in any case...

...4.50 French intelligentsia never stop playing with the colored balloons of doctrinal solutions...

...Why should not the unprecedented buildup of prosperity in the United States of the fifties, with its activation and absorption of the social premises of The New Deal—recognition for labor, pensions and benefits, G.I...

...Jekyll into the bureaucratic and "responsible" Mr...

...But by what, except by the consciousness of a "plot" in history, that is to say, by a "myth," are men transformed into heroes...

...It makes one think of a certain mariner-theoretician debarking on the glistening sands of the West Indies one refulgent morning...

...But, Aron prophesies, "The End Of The Ideological Age" may be approaching, and on this note The Opium concludes...

...But adopting this role did not result in the extinction of the American intellectual as a species—it was simply a new affirmation of his morbid character...

...The Russian Revolution left a residue of dead ideas, American prosperity the idea of no-ideas...

...Having raised to the level of a philosophy the old backwoods suspicion of the intellect and intellectuals, directed against the city, the intelligentsia became more active than ever...

...The voice of June 18, 1940 is raised once more, but, alas, it is raised only to justify or excuse the acts of the Algerian insurgents, and to condemn the political parties while keeping silent on the insurgent factions or excusing their uprising...

...To meet such a situation heroes are needed...

...The dreams differ only with regard to when ideas are to be gotten rid of—in the American dream they can be dispensed with now...

...No ideas, no intellectuals...

...pest have The Ten Days That Shook The World begun to lose their hallucinatory power outside the USSR (in Russia the revolutionary charade faded much earlier...

...And M. Aron sums up this rosy condition in prose: "These intellectuals are perfectly reconciled with the United States" (whatever that means...

...It will be a bad night when, lacking truth itself, man suppresses the superstition of truth.—RENE CHAR Much of the potency of contemporary attacks on socialism lies not in the points they score against Marx's ideas—since these points when valid could be made equally well, and often have been, by Marxists themselves—but in the fact that all ideas have turned out so badly...

...Hence he can only note as an oddity the vicious anti-egghead campaign of America's 1952 elections (erroneously set by Aron in '53), with its overtones of persecution for sedition and foreign alliance...

...Unpleasant as it is to have us around, and anxious as we are to get rid of ourselves, society has no choice but to put up with us—if for no other reason than that we can at present be abolished only by other myth-makers...

...We hope that out of this crisis will come at least the wish to put an end finally to these weaknesses...

...While the intellectual is designated socially by his occupation, no definition by occupation alone can distinguish the modern intellectual from his "non-intellectual" counterpart in the vast array of professions and crafts that constitute the organization of work in contemporary society...

...Beyond Marxism, The Opium is striking at all ideologies, and at their creators and carriers, the intellectuals, particularly the French intellectuals...

...In part, Aron's vision of us is simply the old European stereotype of Primitive America, land of cowboys and Indians and millionaires, all of these being, of course, pragmatic people intent on specific ob jectives and without appetite for ideas...

...This myth has not been realized, and to Aron's mind it has stood in the way of real progress...

...ADORING AMERICA or rejecting France has, of course, nothing to do with the relation between intellectuals and their country...

...Aron's contrast of adoring Americans with rejecting Frenchmen is owing to more than the mistaken impression of a foreigner taken in by the "typical attitudes" of a moment...

...This voice which we barely recognize—who will ever forget the eighteenth of June?—this voice offers to the Algerian insurrectionists an echo from metropolitan France...

...Immediately they achieve the goal for which others strived for so long in vain...

...Ideas as such are suspect...

...Hyde...

...Aron is a fellow traveler of the American fact...

...We don't need ideas and what's more we don't want any...

...From the cafe tables of St...

...Unfortunately, Aron's liquidation of the American intellectual as the vanguard of the vanishing intellectuals of the world is no more to be depended on than the related attempt by his American friends to liquidate themselves...

...In this Spring's Partisan Review ("Coexistence: The End Of Ideology") he goes further: the extinction of ideologies must come or mankind itself will be destroyed...

...Today, from the truest system nothing but evil is expected, if only because it is a system...

...A former Minister of Algeria...

...We are stuck with ourselves, and the world is stuck with us at the price of making itself perfect...

...The United States," declares Aron enthusiastically, "knows nothing of ideological conflicts in the French sense of the word...

...rights and civil rights—win adherents outside the continent where it took place as realizing in practice advances which socialism could only promise...

...To him "ideology" is synonymous with "myth" and myth with a fog in the brain...

...The failures of all these years, the storm clouds of demagoguery, the frequent neglect of the most essential national interests, the evil practices, the constant capitulation to special interest groups—all derived from the mediocrity of our economic policy and the weaknesses of our policy toward the French Union—these are faults that some among us have relentlessly denounced and have never acquiesced in...

...America makes no concession to hers, who nevertheless adore her," Aron marvels...

...Echoing our own ex-Left, M. Aron dismisses these dissidents as out of date: "There are some American intellectuals who remain faithful to the tradition of anti-conformism and who attack simultaneously digests [readers'], the trusts, McCarthyism [written in 1955 The Opium is also out of date, and in more ways than one] and capitalism...

...It may be, or it may not be, that intellectuals are, as Aron says, "closely linkedto the national community"—as a type they transcend nationality, as anyone mayascertain by dropping in at the U.N...

...GIVEN THIS HAPPY conclusion, it is hard to see why Doubleday brought us M. Aron's tract unless perhaps to indicate where we could find a foreign market for our mental vacuum cleaners...

...his error is made possible by his static definition of the intellectual according to ancient categories of employment: "clerk," "expert," "man of letters," all three being groupings within society...

...Or is such a supposition unreal, since without the ideological mists exuded by the intellectuals there would never be a crisis...

...But there is more to this conception than the Old World platitude of American barbarism...

...Perhaps when everyone has defected from the common "reality," that is, when everyone has become an intellectual, the role of the intellectual will be ended, and with it that unhappy species itself...

...Did this yielding to fact make the Russian intellectuals similar to the practical Americans, or did their ideological motives cause them to resemble the idea-intoxicated French...

...Perhaps he has forgotten how in the years following the Russian Revolution the most ideological generation in history was drawn into "socialist construction" and "reconciled with its reality...

...In his identification with the outlook of our typical "integrated" prosperity intellectual, Aron exemplifies the phenomenon, about which too little is known, of the flotage of ideas from their original mooring in historical fact and their fall-out in distant places...

...324 pp...

...In believing that "the American reality" has permanently transfixed the American mind, this Frenchman is dreaming the American dream...

...The same question could be heard booming in chorus from these shores since the onset of post-War prosperity...

...In a word, the sage of The League For Cultural Freedom is reporting America correctly, at least so far as appearances are concerned...

...Given this attitude toward ideas, does it matter whether a critique of Marxism is referring to the conceptions of Marx, of Lenin or of Stalin...

...Daily life is enough for us, not to say too much...

...Rather will a dream of unreason supply what the dream of reason could not...

...That Aron presents this image as an object of emulation rather than of contempt does not alter its character...

...M. Aron admires us—with a vengeance...

...A century ago Cardinal Newman thought that one might "look for a blessing through obedience even to an erroneous system, and a guidance even by means of it out of it...

...the psychology of patriotism, if one must so remind an expert in Marxist "oversimplifications," is much too complex to summarize in a word...

...If America could maintain the incorporation of its intellectuals in productive labor, there might continue to be nothing to ideologize about, except perhaps the menace of ideology—in their material paradise (i.e., reality without opium) they could go on living in a state of adoration...

...Having no concept of the stranger, he misses the tension between the intellectual and his neigh bors, even in a country he adores, and between one band of intellectuals and another...

...They are also the basis of his Utopian view of American life—e.g., as devoid of social conflict—and his journalist's contempt for cafe radicals and "talkers...

...Or does the absence of universals tend rather to result in a day-by-day yielding to events, until the steady erosion of principles become the accompaniment of a paralysis of the will...

...In the name of what European values could the intellectual turn his back on the American reality...

...This taking for granted that our paradise is here to stay reveals the idealistic underpinning of M. Aron's skepticism...

...The anti-intellectual intellectual like Aron has no power to prevent history from going mad...

...The notion that radical criticism is a symptom of doctrinaire hangover or mental ankylosis has been pressed upon us from every source, including philistine psychiatry, ever since the ex-Left discovered it had a part to play in the Cold War, the part of penitents and "responsible" underwriters of social unanimity...

...This "sobered" intellectual, serving society as a hired man, whether as expert or bureaucrat, is the figure of Aron's admiration in the United States and, in a reserved way, in the Soviet Union...

...The largest part of his book consists of blasts at phantasies generated by Marxism: "The Myth Of The Left," "The Myth Of The Revolution," "The Myth Of The Proletariat," "The Illusion Of Necessity...

...The aim of Marx's writing was that, in the predictable crises to come, a mass hero raised up out of the modern city should act in consciousness of itself and its possibilities...

...Once a hero is needed the absence of ideologies will not save the day for the skeptic and pragmatist...

...Aside from his deplorable character which makes his presence in any society of dubious advantage, there is a deeper reason for desiring the elimination of the intellectual with his ideological carpetbag...

...Except perhaps that portion of it that works quietly in the laboratory, the study, the classroom...

...What distinguishes one from the other is precisely his non-identification, open or veiled, with his metier and his self-separation from its values...

...Any criticism of America could only be made in the name of European ideas—of themselves Americans know only things...

...For actually, there was nothing to lose one's head about...

...AMERICA HAS SOLVED the problem of the intellectuals—except that, in M. Aron's view, there never was any problem here...

...The assumption is: Treat 'em rough, they like it...

...Why should we not shed our European illusions ("myths...

...Only the concrete existence adequate to itself of in dividual men and women...

...Who but one with a taste for priests would desire this peculiar caste to flourish...

...Will the result be a calm development of wise solutions by the experienced men of affairs in whom M. Aron reposes such trust and whose hands he would have us untie by disappearing...

...In a society that has reached a certain degree of literacy, which makes it susceptible to the formation of ideological bands, and in which, consequently, one may qualify as an intellectual in terms of social dynamics without having gone beyond the fifth grade, this re-definition on a large scale is inseparable from a "revolutionary situation...

...He stands for deficiency in human life, a blank spot in being...

...This is the drug that has transformed the fighting humanitarian Dr...

...poses the question in a journal published in the Southwest: 'Will it be necessary to sacrifice Algeria in order to save the Republic or to lose the Republic in order to save Algeria?' My answer is that at this hour you risk losing both at once, the Republic and Algeria...

...How superior to the situation in France, where "writers with no authority whatsoever can obtain large audiences even when they treat of subjects about which they quite openly boast of knowing nothing— a phenomenon which is inconceivable in the United States...

...The model for how nations shall think in the future is America—and the model intellectual for M. Aron is none other than the contemporary American, the intellectual as "expert" engaged in doing his job and suspicious of abstractions and systems...

...In such a coherence itself one already sees the outlines of a prison cell...

...The worst of it is that the somnambulist Hyde dreams not only that he alone is awake but that he is vigorously bringing into being the very same world that his original could only feebly imagine...

...The thought of an all-real world, from which abstractions, utopias, higher states and other projections of the mind have been banished, has charmed every true humanist, including Marx though not Aron's Marx...

...Given the mood induced by the failure of ideas mentioned above, this antidoctrine overflowed our borders and reappeared as a world idea...

...Germain des Pres, Aron sees rising the image-laden fumes that make all of France giddy...

...The Opium Of The Intellectuals fails even to consider whether the American intellectual's pre-occupation with "fact" belongs to conditions of a particular period, rather than to a fixed status within the nation...

...only since the parody of Buda...

...In the end his common sense can have only the effect of promoting a distrust of ideas that brings capitulation to the myth of the man of action...

...Still, one could mention Congressmen who would consider the word "adore" too strong...

...In it the humanitarianism of the 19th century was heightened to the pitch of world drama...

...And now it happens that sedition is enacted in Algiers, that civil and military functionaries make momentous decisions, in the name of General de Gaulle...

...In response to this demand an intellectual without ideas appears, one whose function is indeed to stand guard against ideas as a disintegrating force...

...For those in America who continue to criticise, before tiny audiences naturally, M. Aron "conveniently borrows" Louis Bromfield's genial description of the American radical as "a doctrinaire supporter of Middle European socialism...

...Until they give up this pastime and get to work, France will not regain her balance...

...AEON HAS COMPLETELY ignored the composition of the intellectual caste by which it is re-defined under specific conditions as a caste of social delinquents...

...With individual talents supplied with resources to work within society, the very definition of the intellectual underwent a change in America—from the ominous outsider of the days of the "brain truster" and the Red, he became the inferior "egghead," that is, a social type identified by his look and his vocabulary...

...In the name of what European values could the intellectual turn his back on the American reality...

...On the other side of the Atlantic there is no sign of either the traditions or the classes which give European ideas their meaning...

...At least so long as we have a President to fill the bill...

...while Socialism wants to hold on as the last idea and liquidate itself only when all other ideas have been defeated...

...This mood is typified by Raymond Aron's The Opium Of The In tellec tuals.* Its pages gasp for the open air of a world cleared of ideologies...

...In the name of what European values could the intellectual turn his back...

...Suppose that Aron has his way and in a social crisis the intellectuals continue peering into their microscopes or analyzing the prosody of Virgil and nobody comes forward with the myth of a better world...

...Be that as it may, suppose a crisis exists and no ideologist comes forward...

...soon, however, our natural sobriety reasserted itself...

...This is strikingly apparent in a study like Whyte's The Organization Man, whose author, without any revolutionary intention, defines himself as an intellectual, in contrast with socially identical Orgmen, by the sole fact of his inner dissociation from the organizational universe...

...LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR without delay that I share M. Aron's ideal of the disappearance of the intellectuals...

...The immanent assumptions of United States accomplishment are the groundwork of his non-doctrinal progressivism, his trust in common sense, his impatience with theory...

...The goal of supplanting doctrines and superstitions with material profusion belongs equally to the dream of America as a paradise on earth and to the dream of Socialism as an earthly paradise...

...Aron knows the weak spots of Marxian theory and the nightmares connected with it in practice, though the advantage of this knowledge seems diminished by the fact that he feels obliged to reject, for example, the term "capitalism" in favor of "the West...

...The others, the ideological ones, those who want to remake the world, the revolutionists in everything from paint to politics, those who never stop talking save when someone puts to them a pertinent question, these people have proved themselves as a group more trouble than they are worth...

...The question is: has he understood what he is reporting...

...Perhaps Algeria is the effect of an opium discourse that went wrong—and shopkeeping and ranch-owning colonials and poverty-stricken Moslems are only parts of the mirage...

...Marxism offered the conception of a universal acting of progress to the point of universal victory...

...I hope our Southerners are listening...

...He has performed the astonishing feat of writing a book on the modern intellectual without mentioning the disintegration of social classes and the estrangement of individuals—he has even forgotten to mention the Jews...

...The same function may be performed by two "experts" seated side by side in a newspaper office or advertising agency, yet one is an intellectual and the other is not...

...Though we have already seen there has been no one here to make any concessions to...

...What caused American social criticism to slacken was total employment...

...For what is a crisis but a situation in which the practical men of affairs, who are always the people in power, have already failed, exposing the limits of the practical intelligence...

...The poison of the intellectuals since World War I, the poison responsible for the catalepsy of the Third International as for other collapses, has been the ideal of practicality, of a politics and social philosophy stripped of "myth" and "ineffectiveness," of a subordination to "reality," in sum, of their own disappearances as intellectuals...

...Will the * Doubleday...

...By the end of ideologies M. Aron means an end to an interest in political theories and of "nostalgia for a universal idea...

...Let us remember that this dream was a European product in the first place...

...But this anti-conformism is not without a certain conformism itself, since it resurrects the themes of the militant liberalism of yesterday...

...France exalts her intellectuals, who reject and despise her...

...Aron bases himself also upon what American intellectuals have been saying about themselves and doing during the past decade or so, as well as upon the temper of the nation that had elected Ike and was preparing to do so again...

...building...

...And if, besides, he now endangers the world, as M. Aron warns, that should certainly settle it...

...Mendes-France went on to speak of the possibility of civil war.] "To say that such a civil war derives from the confronting of patriots— those who aspire to a national renascence and consolidation of the French Union—with the defenders of a discredited regime whose weaknesses de Gaulle condemns is to misstate the political option of the moment...

...FOR ONE WHO SCORNS ideologies Aron derives too much from the evidence of "opinion makers" and too little from the hints contained in historical analogies...

...For they have, indisputably, one thing in common: they are "ideologies," that is, interpretations in which all events hang together...