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The Problem With Ideas And Idea People

Via Prufrock, check out this Terry Teachout blog entry about why, even though he’s interested in ideas, he considers himself more of an aesthete than an intellectual. Excerpt: All history, especially the history of the twentieth century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often they end up […]

Via Prufrock, check out this Terry Teachout blog entry about why, even though he’s interested in ideas, he considers himself more of an aesthete than an intellectual. Excerpt:

All history, especially the history of the twentieth century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. As Irving Babbitt pointed out:

Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode. It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.That’s one of many reasons why I choose not to call myself an intellectual. “How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?” Raymond Aron asked in The Opium of the Intellectuals (a book that John Coltrane, of all people, can be seen reading in a little-known snapshot). To be sure, musicians do tend as a group to take an innocent view of human possibility, but you rarely see them escorting anyone to the guillotine. They’re too busy trying to make everything more beautiful, one thing at a time.

One of the most engrossing and important books I’ve ever read is Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by historian Ruth Scurr. It shows what inhuman savagery intellectuals in thrall to the purity of an idea are capable of — even if that idea is justice. This lesson cannot be emphasized often enough, especially because intellectuals almost always are blinded by their own pride, such that they don’t believe it applies to them. They always say, “With me, it’s different. I mean well.”

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