Julien Benda: The Betrayal of the Clerks. Richard Aldington translation. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1959 [1928].
Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, January and February 1994.
The Intellectuals’ Self-Betrayal
Since the late 1960s, the word ‘disinterested’ has come to be used to mean ‘uninterested,’ indifferent. The original meaning of ‘disinterested’ has nearly disappeared from public debates. We are told that no one is or can be disinterested or impartial. We’re all partisan, self-interested. Perhaps as a result of believing this claim without qualification, many of us really are disinterested in the newer sense: Withdrawn from public debate, bored by it, and distrustful of it, refusing even to vote in elections. With their typical profundity, politicians and pundits attempt to solve the problem by making voter registration easier. If people don’t want to vote, why register them? If registered, why vote?
The diagnosis of this problem was made in France and published in 1927 by the philosopher Julien Benda. Translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, La trahison des clercs, enjoyed some popularity in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is no longer much read today, least of all by those who’d most benefit from it: journalists, academics, and other soldiers in today’s culture-wars.
Those wars are characteristically bitter. Political hatred is nothing new, Benda observes. Intellectuals, also, have been with us for some time. But “the intellectual organization of political hatreds” is new, a product of the late nineteenth century that reached its apogee in the twentieth.
Looking at a Europe beginning to be populated by followers of Mussolini and Lenin, men who throve on the exacerbation of national and class struggles, Benda found it both astonishing and ominous that poets and professors had joined their ranks. “One cannot imagine the Roman Republic feeling that the moral support of Terence and Varro was of value to it during the war with Carthage or the government of Louis XIV finding that the approbation of Racine and Fermat gave it additional strength in the war with Holland.” Not only did the new dictators require such support, the new intellectuals gladly offered it.
For centuries, intellectuals had embodied a universal culture, both religious and secular. This culture extended throughout Europe, and did not exclude study of the civilizations of Asia. It exhibited a fascination (if a somewhat naïve one) with Amerindian societies as well. It was not ‘internationalist’—both capitalists and communists were that—nor was it ‘cosmopolitan’ or dilettantish. The universal culture was humanistic in the original meaning of the word—founded upon the recognition and cultivation of human nature seen as always and everywhere the same.
This conception of the universality of human nature was shared by the Christian Bossuet and the atheistic Voltaire, although each of course had sharply different ideas about what constituted the good for human nature. From Judaism on, religionists insisted on the universality of human nature even as they contended bitterly over what human beings should believe and how they should behave. Philosophers who contested each others’ theories and fully recognized the immense variety of customs and beliefs in the world never supposed that there was no identifiable core of attributes that are distinctively human, nor that foremost among these is the capacity to reason, which makes philosophy possible.
That is how thought could be disinterested or impartial. Thought was conceived as the quest for the truth about things transcending particular political societies: God, the cosmos, human beings. Benda calls this “disinterested intelligence,” and he deplores its near-disappearance in the twentieth century.
Even the most cynical politicians of the past never claimed to be doing more than working for their own or their country’s interests. Politicians might violate morality but they did not attempt to change it. The new politicians were more pretentious. They claimed that their antagonisms were apocalyptic, that partisan struggle determines not merely a political but a moral succession. In this respect, the ‘Master Race’ of fascists is indistinguishable from the ‘New Man’ of communism. Whether the struggle is over nationality, race, class, or some other particularism, the universality of human nature is scorned as a myth.
Benda does not so much deplore political men holding up such idols. He deplores intellectuals who salute them, even fashioning them for political use. As a result of such efforts, “humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes.”
Can we say we had that war, the Second World War? And can we say we survived it?
Benda Today
In the Second World War an alliance of commercial republics and a leftist tyranny defeated an alliance of rightist tyrannies and a theocratic empire. Benda had witnessed representatives of all these political orientations in the France of 1927—parliamentarians, communists, and that odd combination of fascistic and theocratic beliefs called Action Française, whose spokesman was the writer Charles Maurras. (It isn’t too much to call Action Française the French Catholic equivalent of Japanese imperialism, so long as one understands that many French Catholics vehemently opposed the Maurrasiens.
After the defeat of the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Right,’ there remained the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Left.’ Their confrontation with the commercial republics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere threatened a still greater and more nearly perfect war. In this confrontation Benda, who lived until 1956, surely would have recognized the continuation of the disease he had diagnosed in the 1920. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France numbered among hundreds of intellectuals-turned-ideologues, apologists for tyranny. In the commercial republics there was also a subordination of intellect to practical aims the Cold War made necessary, from planning to polemics, although in those regimes dissent didn’t land you in prison.
In the Soviet Union the tyranny eventually collapsed, resoundingly, only to be replaced by a sort of elective monarchy. The ‘Left’ remains in power on mainland China, well-financed after having relieved itself of Maoism and more dangerous to the rest of the world for it.
Benda’s critique stands. Some modern political regimes have changed, but modern intellectuals have not. Careerism, materialism, and the organization of political passions, secular beliefs urged with a fervor once reserved for religiosity (Benda calls this “divinized realism” in which “the State, Country, Class, are now frankly God”), the scorn for reasoned argument, the demand for ‘activism’ for social-justice warfare: All are familiar to us today, wherever ‘the politics of race, class, and gender’ replaces the simpler doctrines of nationalism and class-war. Religion still gets into the act, too. Yesterday’s Action Française finds its echo in today’s Catholic-leftist ‘Liberation Theology,’ a moderate form of which finds itself raised to the apex of the Vatican. And then of course ‘Islamism’ ardently seeks the explosion of its many enemies.
The huge public and private bureaucracies that attempt to ‘manage’ the modern societies complicate the intellectuals’ situation still more. Today’s bureaucracies rule by claiming to serve. They ‘deliver’ goods to customer/constituents who are less citizens than they are ‘consumers.’ In these structures intellectuals serve their masters as wizards of data and conjurors of images. The bureaucracies often find opposition among academic and ‘counterculture’ intellectuals, but as often they coopt or manipulate them; protest songs of the ‘Sixties end up as ad jingles.
The greatest and most perfect war need not involve violence at all. This war may turn out to be a mind-battle of rival culture-networks, powered by computers. Were he still alive, Benda might warn that the so-called culture wars rarely concern true culture, the cultivation of human nature. In the names of equality and liberty (both misunderstood as self-satisfaction) the antagonists race toward human nature’s systematic debasement. As a handicapper, I put my money on the dim, plodding corporate tortoise, not the hare-brained, erratic erotics of academe.
Benda traces the origin of the intellectuals’ self-betrayal to G. W. F. Hegel, the great philosopher who replaced contemplation of the eternal with the apprehension of the history of thought. “Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought” Benda asks, rhetorically. Hegel presented a well-articulated historicism that ranged from concrete particulars to the most abstract generalities. His leftist inheritors (Marx in particular) vulgarized historicism, made it into a form of materialism, and therefore made it popular, a political instrument in an age of democratic politics. Hegel’s rightist inheritors rejected materialism at first—Nietzsche despised it so much he called it English—but eventually succumbed to mass-movement politics as well.
‘Left’ and ‘Right’ came to exalt action over contemplation, willing over thinking. This encouraged the militant personality—the bellecist general and the pacifist ‘demonstrator’ alike. The genuine intellectual disappears; his “defeat begins from the very moment when he claims to be practical.” If humanism ‘goes political’ in a thoroughgoing way, the logical result will be the world-state, a universal bureaucracy ruling a humanity united in order to exploit the earth: “But,” Benda writes, “far from being the abolition of the national state with its appetites and its arrogance, this would simply be its extreme form…. Humanity would be united in one immense army, one immense factory, would be aware only of heroisms, disciplines, inventions, would denounce all free and disinterested activity, and would cease to situate the good outside the real world, would have no God but itself and its desires…. And History will smile to think this is the species for whom Socrates and Jesus Christ died.”
Recent Comments