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French intellectuals don't age well
  
Robert Fulford  
National Post 


Saturday, July 27, 2002

  
The most famous exports of France have always been cheese, wine, and ideas.
The cheese is excellent, the wine has good and bad years, and the
illustrious ideas are consistently dreadful. Today, in universities across
the West, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) exemplifies the bad French idea at its
most brilliant and its most poisonous.

Foucault spent his life proving that the institutions of modern civilization
do nothing but disguise one essential truth: the powerful oppress everyone,
always. He yearned for revolution, the bloodier the better. In 1971 he said
that when the workers take power, they may create a murderous dictatorship:
"I can't see what objection could possibly be made to this." When he visited
Tehran he praised the Ayatollah Khomeini's movement as a "religion of combat
and sacrifice." He paid no attention to data and instead sprayed the air
around him with ideas informed by paranoid fantasies. He received his
reward: Dissertations on Foucault now fill university archives while armies
of art critics, feminist rhetoricians, and post-colonial theorists spend
their days quoting him.

He was wrong about everything, which only adds to his stature. He followed
the path of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who found excuses for the crimes of
all communist despots but considered the United States profoundly evil
("America is a mad dog"). Sartre was so wrong that he was considered truly
great. Charles de Gaulle compared him to Voltaire.

Foucault and Sartre won permanent reputations among scholars. Raymond Aron
(1905-1983), Sartre's contemporary and university classmate, did not. He's
pretty well forgotten now, because of his great flaw: He was usually right,
and among political philosophers and social thinkers there are no prizes for
being right, particularly when philosophy expresses itself as a commentary
on human behaviour and a prediction of the political future. He taught in
university and wrote dozens of books and a mountain of journalism; so far as
I know, there's nothing in his work that indicates madness or a lack of
human decency.

Aron noticed that in geopolitical terms intellectuals consider mass murder
justified, maybe admirable, when committed in the name of an appropriate
ideology. On the other hand, they are "merciless toward the failings of the
democracies." Why? Because, he decided, revolution has poetic charm. Its
mythology intoxicates the mind, whereas democracy involves too much prosaic
detail. Daringly, Aron used "prosaic" as a term of praise and said that The
Opium of the Intellectuals, the book many consider his masterpiece, was an
attempt to reduce "the poetry of ideology" to "the prose of reality."

Allan Bloom wrote that Aron for 50 years made sound judgments about the
realities of politics: "He was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and
right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only
hope of mankind." In other words, he was nobody a smart young cultural
theorist would want to study. Sartre made fun of him for his dedication to
justice, democracy, and other antiquated notions.

The persistent success of French intellectual eccentricity, and the relative
failure of French good sense, should terrify anyone who believes that ideas
dominate human actions and that intellectuals set the agenda for the future.
And that belief is a central part of modern intellectual life. In 1834 the
German romantic poet Heinrich Heine said: "Note this, you proud men of
action, you are nothing but the unconscious tools of the men of thought." In
1936 John Maynard Keynes wrote: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be
quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of
some defunct economist ... It is ideas, not best interests, which are
dangerous for good or evil." Raymond Aron himself argued that in the long
term, "politicians are the disciples of scholars or writers." Irving
Kristol, the father of American neoconservatism, wrote "The leverage of
ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can ...
twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape."

I've been reading all my life that this is the way societies function, and
sometimes also stating it. But events make me doubt what once seemed
obvious. Certainly there have been times when it was clearly true. Anyone
surveying the ruin of Europe in 1945 might well have decided: intellectuals
did this. A platoon of heavy thinkers fuelled fascism in Italy and Nazism in
Germany. Marx, Trotsky and other intellectuals shaped Communist
dictatorships. The results were more terrible than anyone had imagined
possible.

But since then, something else has happened. The form of government most
despised among intellectuals, bourgeois democracy, has conquered Europe.
Principles that Sartre and Foucault regarded as banal and duplicitous --
civil rights, elections, independent judges, free trade -- have become the
goals, even the demands, of Europeans. Today, you could make a rule
governing the period 1945-2002: The more respect an intellectual gets in the
universities, the less that intellectual matters in the real world. The more
brilliant he is, the less he means in public life.

Curiously, the influential political philosophers of Europe in the second
half of the 20th century were long-dead democrats like Thomas Jefferson,
Voltaire, and John Stuart Mill, people who never had even one day in the
sunlight of fashion between 1900 and 2000. Europe became liberal without
much help from living philosophers. European intellectuals went one way,
Europe another. We should remember this whenever we hear news of yet another
brilliant madman at large in Paris.

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