Crawling with Animus

...This makes mysterious, however, his inclusion of Ibsen when three of Ibsen's plays—An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm—aie all about truthtelling and its costs in an untruthful society...

...Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be the objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice...

...Obviously the Pope believes in absolute values, and the...

...In Enemies Johnson attacks Paul Tillich for following Heidegger in existentialist apologies for violence that can "demolish Western civilization itself...

...American religion has been saved from doctrinal strife by a pragmatic emphasis on common morality rather than differing belief...

...Free inquiry and free criticism are essential to democracy, and so are free intellectuals, for all their faults...

...But they can be reviled, censored and silenced if anti-intellectualism in fervent religious guise wins popular support...

...Voltaire or Thomas Paine would have been delighted by large sections of A History of Christianity...

...Johnson has an amazing number of books to his credit...

...Did you know that Rousseau displayed his bare bottom to young women in the dark streets of Turin...

...Why take such a book seriously...

...How can we know...

...Johnson's all-out denunciation brings back the painful realities of the Bush campaign...

...But where Johnson in A History of Christianity described so fully and unfavorably the Vatican's pact with Hitler, in the later book, where it is even more relevant, he ignores it completely...

...That campaign and the tactics of the antiabortionists should make intellectuals wary in the way they support religion as a cure for the ills of society or talk about absolutes without troubling to define them...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University If Intellectuals were a movie, it would be called Enemies II...

...Every indiscretion is grist to Johnson's mill...

...Even opponents agree that he is a master of the striking detail, the pertinent anecdote, the memorable quotation...

...But all the women children who have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.' " Johnson cannot resist such shockers even when they threaten his whole case for religious absolutes...

...Whatever one thought of its thesis, Bloom's book, with its frequent references to Hobbes and Heidegger, Hegel and Nietzsche, was wittily argued and intellectually demanding...

...Yet without Christianity, he exclaims, "how much more horrific the history of these last 2,000 years [would] have been...

...Johnson is as scrupulously detailed about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition as of the Nazi death camps...

...We know that human nature has not changed, and we know what religion is like in those parts of the world where intolerant sects go on killing each other...

...A decade later Allan Bloom made an amazing publishing success by sounding the same alarm in The Closing of the American Mind, except that his guide was Plato, not the Pope...

...Tolstoy has become one more example of " what happens when an intellectual pursues abstract ideas at the expense of people...

...The universities, the sciences, even the government can hardly get along without them...

...The "enemies" are Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz and Lillian Hellman...

...The Inquisition was self-supporting for centuries because it could seize for itself the estates of its victims, sent to the stake by the lies of paid informers...

...Now you surely wouldn't want to see A Doll's House again...

...Johnson boasts of his love of truth, but he can be selective in presenting it...

...In the volume on Christianity Johnson paints an unqualifiedly black picture of the surrenderoftheProtestantandCatholicchurches in Germany as Hitler rose to power...

...The Lutherans, in their hope of becoming the state religion again, behaved even worse according to Johnson...

...all are dense with facts, not ordinary popularizations...

...Did you know that Ibsen hated dogs and would thrust sticks through a fence—if the the fence was strong—to enrage them...

...Johnson's new work, crawling with animus, makes no intellectual demands whatsoever...

...Then he goes on almost gratuitously to reflect that "of course violence has always played a significant part in JudaeoChristian affairs ever since Moses, on the instructions of the Deity, instructed his captains to revenge Israel on the Midianites: 'Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him...

...Although some of the imaginative writers targeted had ideas certainly, one may wonder whether Hemingway, for example, was an intellectual...

...Johnson does serious reading for us in areas where we might not venture...

...The history of Christianity contains a bibliography of 400 items, mostly of recent scholarship...

...That German Christianity supported Hitler after it was clear where his blatant anti-Semitism was heading is not reassuring...

...In the summer of 1933 "Romesigneda concordat with Hitler, which in effect unilaterally disarmed German Catholicism as a political and social force, and signaled to rank-and-file Catholic priests and laymen that they should accept the new regime to the full...

...No danger if those intellectuals get close to the levers of power...

...There are likely to be tough times ahead...

...We have to because of Paul Johnson, and because Intellectuals puts such a dangerous anti-intellectual or know-nothing stamp on the present return to religion...

...But that is Johnson's term for those whose views he does not like...

...Undoubtedly there is a return to religion now, the more orthodox the better...

...It is unlikely that a revivalist religion in the U.S., speaking in the name of absolutes, will resemble the Erasmian humanism that seems closest to Johnson's heart when he is not defending dogma or the mild nonsupernaturalist social religion Daniel Bell recommends in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism...

...He similarly ignores the courageous role of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the liberal German theologian who joined a plot against Hitler and was killed for it, though this too was included in A History of Christianity...

...The author's acknowledgments of his sources give the clue to his choice of villains...

...What Johnson requires is a public figure of whose political ideas he disapproves, and whose private scandals have already been exposed by biographers or pathographers in a conveniently transferable form...

...Gollancz is included not for his own writing but for his Left Book Club, which successfully deceived many people about Stalin...

...Of the titles cited, Modern Times has 832 pages, the others over 500...

...Is the playwright here, as we are told, because "long before Freud" he "laid the foundations of the permissive society," or because the author wants to have fun with Ibsen's incredible vanity and strange relations with his wife...

...Johnson praises and quotes what are "almost the last words Tolstoy wrote...

...The book received little attention...

...At the Protestant Church elections, with the help of the Nazi propaganda machine, the German Christians [the Rightist group] won an overwhelming victory...

...The major instances of cruelty and dishonesty occupying page after page of Intellectuals are far worse than this, as detailed as in a police report, and no doubt 90 per cent true...

...As late as Enemies of Society, comparing terrorism in our own time with that of Russian students in the 19th century, Johnson writes: "The theoretical justification of violence in the name of social justice drew from Tolstoy his last indignant protest against the prostitution of the human intellect in the real or imagined cause of progress...

...does not harbor the "relativists" and "secularists" Johnson repeatedly cautions against...

...Beware intellectuals,' he warns at the end...

...How many of its tens of thousands of purchasers read it through —or understood much of what they read —we cannot know...

...Ten years later he turned up in Washington at the American Enterprise Institute...

...But decisive change occurred between A History of Christianity (1976) and the books that come after...

...to write a laudatory biography of thepresent Pope without a blink explaining John Paul ?Gs obduracy about contraception...

...It is devoted to describing how secular intellectuals ("secular" is the key word) drink too much, tell lies, foment violence, betray their lovers, abuse their wives, sponge on their friends, neglect their children...

...Yet these are the types, Johnson says over and over again, who want to tell us how to conduct our lives, who want to reconstruct society from blueprints of their own design...

...His attitude toward Tolstoy took a sharp turn as well...

...Johnson cannot resist one more itemization of Lillian Hellman's lies because he himself, as he says repeatedly, so loves truth...

...Many are works of tremendous scope and have followed in fairly quick succession: A History of Christianity, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, A History of the English People, A History of the Jews...

...After a rapid survey of practically every aspect of Western civilization—science, economics, politics, education, the arts— Johnson warned that unless we return to a belief in moral absolutes civilization is doomed...

...It is the rancorous sequel to the book Paul Johnson published in 1977 called Enemies of Society, with scary chapter headings like "Schools for Attila," "Heart of Darkness," "Crime, Madness and Savagery," "The Return of the Devils...

...He mentions Huizinga's "vigorous polemic" against Rousseau, Edward Crankshaw's "formidably critical account" of Tolstoy, William Wright's " masterly piece of detective work" on Lillian Hellman...

...Johnson was on the staff of the liberal British New Statesman and Nation from 1955 to 1970, and its editor for thelast six of those years...

...But resurgent orthodoxy now demands strictness in both areas, and attacks liberal Protestant churches and liberals within Catholicism—nearly all intellectuals—for promoting permissiveness with a Leftist stamp...

...And he is meticulous in describing the burnings of heretics—deviant intellectuals—over obscure points of doctrine completely meaningless today...

...The Rightists among them made great play with Luther's anti-Semitism and hatred of democracy...

...Johnson blames fallen human nature for "the massacre and torture, intolerance and destructive pride on a huge scale" that his history of Christianity reveals to us...

...So much for the Social Contract...

...It presses our Republican Administration and a Rightist Supreme Court for explicit support...

...Now in Intellectuals we are given the "bad" Tolstoy, whose "stormy life ended not with a bang but a whine" in circumstances of "jealousy, spite, revenge, furtiveness, treachery, bad temper, hysteria and petty meanness...

...Their motto was: 'The Swastika on our breasts, the Cross in our Hearts.' " Modern Times devotes its chapter on "The Devils" to the '30s, and to the "unprecedented ferocity and desolation— moral relativism in monstrous incarnation" that took such parallel form in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany...