[lit-ideas] Re: A political thought (continued)

Here's another classic Lilla piece, a profile with mention of Aron.

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//courses01/rrtw/Lilla.htm



November 10, 2001
Why Are Deep Thinkers Shallow About Tyranny?
 Mark Lilla, a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University 
of Chicago, recently published "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in 
Politics," about how writers and intellectuals have ended up justifying 
communism, 
fascism and other tyrannies. Eric Alterman spoke with him. 
Is there a special gene among intellectuals that lends itself to the embrace 
of tyranny? Are they less sensible than the general populace?
If by "intellectuals" we mean those devoted to the life of the mind, we can 
see why they face more intensely a problem all human beings face: that of 
negotiating the distance between ideas and social reality. What intellectuals 
are 
prone to forget is that this distance poses not only conceptual difficulties 
but ethical ones as well. It is a moral challenge to determine how to comport 
oneself simultaneously in relation to abstract ideas and a recalcitrant world.
Do you think a philosopher's political mistakes, like Heidegger's Nazism or 
Sartre's infantile Maoism, can destroy the value of their philosophical 
insights? 
I do not think the truth or value of Euclid's proofs are affected by how he 
may have treated his servants. But philosophy, when it is not a merely formal 
or symbolic exercise, is ultimately driven by the desire to find the right way 
to live, individually and collectively. We only take thinkers seriously when 
we consider their ideas in terms of their deepest motivations and most obvious 
consequences. We owe it to them, and ultimately to ourselves, to reflect on 
these connections.
Are American intellectuals any more or less likely to embrace tyranny than 
European intellectuals?
Twentieth-century continental and American intellectuals have been attracted 
to tyranny for different reasons. In Europe the issue since the French 
Revolution has been the legitimacy of the modern age: secularity, democracy, 
capitalism, and bourgeois culture. There the intellectual temptation has been 
to seek 
a return to some imaginary pre- modern idyll or the elimination of one or more 
aspects of modern life, especially bourgeois capitalism. For 200 years 
continental intellectuals flirted with tyrants who promised radical 
alternatives to 
modern life and heaped contempt on those who engaged in meliorist reforms of 
that life.
American intellectuals are thoroughly modern and bourgeois. When they embrace 
tyranny it is usually out of ignorance and a naïve optimism about human 
nature. We Americans find it easy to assume that political cut-throats are just 
misunderstood delinquents and that their tyrannical practices are expressions 
of 
cultural differences we should tolerate. To read such statements today about 
the fascists, Stalinism, the East bloc, and third-world dictators is quite 
chilling. Our own modern democratic and bourgeois convictions are so strong 
that 
we have trouble grasping political phenomena not governed by our rules.
You say Americans have misunderstood Michel Foucault's ideas about oppression 
in everyday institutions and Jacques Derrida's notion about the linguistic 
construction of reality. Why? 
The misunderstanding is bred of American optimism and provinciality. 
Americans take legitimacy for granted, so they fail to take seriously the 
illiberal 
and antimodern implications of certain European ideas they glean from 
translations and domesticate into English. When Foucault speaks darkly of 
"power" and 
Derrida of "deconstruction," they may very well be right. But if they are, that 
means that most of what their American proponents believe about individualism, 
freedom, democracy and justice is wrong.
Does terrorism lend itself to an intellectual's embrace as well? 
Certainly there has been a fascination with "purifying" violence and terror 
in 20th-century intellectual life, as we see in the works of Sorel, 
Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. Yet it is also true that certain terroristic acts 
have woken 
people up, ending their illusions and their romanticization of the "other." I 
think here of the Cambodia massacres, the Munich Olympics, the Schleyer 
killing in Germany in the 70's. [Hanns-Martin Schleyer was head of the German 
business association and was murdered by the Red Army Faction in the fall of 
1977.]
How is it that intellectuals fall prey to what you call "philotyranny," 
denying the nature of tyranny by romanticizing or excusing it, or denying any 
fundamental difference between tyrannical and democratic regimes.
Political and intellectual life share a basis not only in reason but in the 
passions. Passion is not necessarily a bad thing: there are healthy passions 
for truth and justice that need to be cultivated. But those passions also need 
to be controlled, since they can make us mistake lies for truth and tyranny for 
justice. 
Is there a useful or proper role for intellectuals and philosophers to 
fulfill in politics? 
Modern democratic life poses a unique challenge to intellectuals because it 
is prosaic, operates through public institutions, relies on specialized 
knowledge and respects common opinion. Intellectuals, even (perhaps especially) 
those 
on the left, are aristocrats by nature: they have contempt for ordinary 
opinion and are impatient with technicalities and formalities. Modesty is the 
most 
difficult virtue for intellectuals to learn, but it is the most important one 
in democratic society.
In studying this topic, which modern writers and thinkers strike you as 
having found the proper balance between thought and action? 
The intellectuals of our time I have most admired as models of probity and 
good sense were Raymond Aron and Isaiah Berlin. Aron, because he punctured the 
myth of the intellectual as moral critic "speaking truth to power." He 
understood that thinking responsibly in modern democratic society means 
mastering the 
complexities of that society and putting oneself in the shoes of those who 
must make decisions. Berlin, because he understood the romantic yearnings and 
discontents of the modern mind, yet also knew that they lay at the root of all 
the political disasters of our time.
Have you ever felt yourself falling prey to any of the dangers you describe 
in your book?
I've been tempted â?? if we don't think passionately we are not really 
thinking. And if we are not thinking we are not really alive.

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: