Eric Simpson's Blog: Marginal Accretion - Posts Tagged "modernism"

Intellectuals by Paul Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in October, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 16 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

Vitriol and venom characterizes the typical style most professional reviewers adopt when approaching the academic work of Paul Johnson. The rhetoric is often hateful and unsober, as can be seen for instance in the Salon review of the book under our inspection here, a writer who claims that Johnson’s thick Modern Times is “awful” and “unreadable”--both sentiments reflecting more the reviewer’s dim ideological bias than the actual, quite readable prose Johnson offers.

In terms of quality of writing itself, Johnson’s Intellectuals makes for entertaining historical reverie. The British author’s intent is to put to test several of the ‘intellectuals’ who exerted cultural and social influence during the Enlightenment period forward to our own time. Johnson writes,

“One of the most marked characteristics of the new secular intellectuals was the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny. How far had they benefited or harmed humanity, these great systems of faith? To what extent had these popes and pastors lived up to their precepts, of purity and truthfulness, of charity and benevolence? The verdicts on both churches and clergy were harsh. Now, after two centuries during which the influence of religion has continued to decline, and secular intellectuals have played an ever-growing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions, it is time to examine their record, both public and personal. In particular, I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself.”

In this endeavor to put the critics of religious morality to the acid test, Johnson begins with Rousseau, highlighting his egoism, sexual perversity (“liked to be spanked” and was a public exhibitionist of his “bottom”), his ironic abandonment of his own children at birth, and his naive political statism.

Moving onward, we find moral failure in the life of the poet Shelly, who emphasized imagination for the transformation of society, but did not possess the imagination to put himself in the place of another on a personal level, and hence was a great debtor and thief, adulterer, and truly without compassion.

Marx, we discover, was purely philosophical and academic, disliking the working proletariat, and an exploiter of others. Johnson fills us in on Tolstoy and Hemingway’s sexual infidelities and emotional abuses of their respective spouses, the shaky foundations of Bertrand Russell, and Sartre’s life of sexual and profligate excess.

In short, much like the Protestant Reformers who preceded and indirectly encouraged the devaluation of all external sources of authority that came later, Johnson engages in a swift, eloquent and admittedly biased ad hominem attack on the newly crowned "popes" and "priests" of the Enlightenment. The premise is that if moral and cultural existence can be rooted within the span of the faculties of the human spirit, rejecting for the most part the claims of revelatory guides, how has this panned out practically in the lives of those who lead the charge? What has humanism, based principally on the autonomous use of reason, to say for itself pragmatically? Has it worked?

Johnson’s point is a good one, though I think his methodology is flawed. Reading Intellectuals is a bit like listening to gossip, which is both unnecessary and necessary. To put the Enlightenment emphasis on the intellect to the test through challenging the moral lives of those thinkers who have had an historical influence is valid; however, Johnson risks a subtle fallacy of concluding that one’s immorality stems directly from the realm of ideas (an "Enlightened" notion itself). He therefore stumbles in the same way he would criticize his intellectuals for stumbling. The ad hominem attack upon intellectuals no more refutes their ideas than their attacks can efficaciously refute the claims of the Christian Church in the West.

Yet, the gossip also serves a necessary function if one adheres to the notion, as I do, that the separation between one’s ideas and one’s life is an unfortunate gap, and that the best moral teachers have brought the two into dynamic union. From that basis, which is more of an Eastern view of moral authority, Johnson’s well-paced diatribe serves a useful purpose.

Johnson’s choice of intellects is also seemingly arbitrary, but perhaps are also reflections of Johnson’s bias, which contorts the thesis of the book in his favor. Why Rousseau and not Voltaire or Turgot? Why Shelly but not Byron or Keats? Why Tolstoy but not Dickens or Turgenev or Dostoevsky?

Lastly, given Johnson’s methodology, it’s interesting that Johnson’s own life has come under scrutiny in the paparazzi press and popular yellow journals, allegations of “immorality” not unlike Rousseau’s which can be found easily enough online. A continuous dynamic of ironic folly makes it’s appearance at this point, beginning, perhaps, with the error of the original Enlightenment thinkers, an error repeated by Johnson, then re-repeated by those who attempt to discredit Johnson for his own immorality. What is the Enlightenment base for judgment? What is Johnson’s base? What is the base of his critics?

No clear lines of distinction between ideas and moral life have been made. Couldn’t it be than even the greatest of intellects might also be found, at one time or another, as a moral failure? Are not most people, at their worst, riddled with both bad ideas as well as moments of hypocrisy? Here I think lies Johnson’s most fatal flaw, his own seeming lack of compassion for those under the lens of his moralizing pronouncements.

On a more superficial level, Intellectuals is a pleasure to read, filled with interesting details from the lives not only of Rousseau, Shelly, Marx, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Tolstoy, but there are also chapters dedicated to Ibsen, Brecht, Wilson, Gollancz and Helman. The last summary chapter touches on twentieth century madness, and includes brief discussions of several various contemporary intellects.



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