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| Intellectual Morons | | Date Created: Apr 10, 2005, 09:02 PM |
 Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas by Daniel J. Flynn.
I had high hopes for this book. I can think of a number of smart people...
It started out well too. It's worth it for the introduction which is called "True Believer", some of which will be excerpted below. The end of the conclusion, "A Terrible Thing To Waste" is also great.
In between is a chapter for each of the intellectual morons that the author has researched. There are ample notes and references, so if you want to bone up on these characters, this is a good place to start. Of what I've read, only David Horowitz and Peter Collier's book on Noam Chomsky, The Anti-Chomsky Reader, is more complete and better analyzed, but then it's book length and Flynn's read on Chomsky is one chapter.
If you're going to read only one chapter after the introduction, read the one on Marcuse.
Here's the cast of characters:
Herbert Marcuse -- the father of it all. Marcuse converted marxism to victimology.
Alfred Kinsey -- I had no idea. But then you wouldn't if get your information from the media or academics
Paul Ehrlich -- proving that once you get to be a professor, it doesn't matter how demonstrably wrong you are.
Peter Singer -- When Princeton hired him I looked into him a bit and didn't like what I saw. It's far worse.
Rigoberto Menchu and her enablers -- Proving that academics and intellectuals agree that it's okay to lie for a good cause.
Howard Zinn -- Wherein the author notes that the band Rage Against the Machine has Zinn on their reading list; "note: beware of rock bands that issue reading lists".
Noam Chomsky -- "ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities." -- doesn't say much for the humanities
Gore Vidal -- This guy doesn't have a clue. A poster child for blind liberal bias.
Leo Strauss -- Scary stuff. Leads up to neocons proving not all IM's are liberals.
Margaret Sanger -- From an earlier era, she certainly let political agenda rule over science. If we go back further Flynn would have to cover Marx and Freud.
WEB DuBois -- Also from an earlier age, and Flynn doesn't mention it but I'm wondering what the connection to Cornel West is.
Alger Hiss -- Actually, Ann Coulter's book, Treason, deals with Hiss rather well.
Ayn Rand and Objectivism -- Amazingly, I've never read Rand. Apparently her ideosyncrasies and her obsessive followers are the problem. I sense Flynn is looking for political balance here too.
Betty Friedan -- Another dishonest hero of the politicized feminist victimologists
Postmodernists: Derrida, Foucault & Co. -- Everything is relative, no one has a lock on truth unless, of course, you're a postmodernist. Then you know what is politically correct.
"The primary and most obvious reason people join mass movements and follow ideology is the issues they address. To view all ideologues as entirely tricked or self-deluded overlooks the fact that at the core of many ideologies is a laudable idea... Naturally, people want to correct the failings they see around them. But dangers arise when the perceived morality of the mission allows immorality -- lying for the cause, forcing the "good" upon society, self-righteousness, and so on -- to corrupt the crusaders. Problems also occur when activists mistake any cause bearing their ideology's name for a noble one. It is intentions rather than outcomes that matter for such people...
...What matters to the party-liners...is not the issue involved but how that issue can be used to damage political opponents. 'The issue is not the issue' 1960's radical famously remarked. It still isn't, unfortunately.
Ideologues are prone to mistaking their ideal for the real. Whether consciously or not, they tend to see what they want to see and to find what they want to find. The impulse to evaluate reality by how it vindicates the greater theory leads to a selective use of facts, cooking the books, and simply making things up when the facts don't cooperate. In other words, ideologues draw conclusions prior to investigating...
[It's easier. They're fundamentally lazy.]
What never fails inside the mind of an intellectual never works outside the confines of his head. The world's stubborn refusal to vindicate the intellectual's theories serves as proof of humanity's irrationality, not his own...
Systems fail because the notion of a single idea directing, ordering, and planning the lives of vast numbers of people is an absurd one...Tolerance for the failed idea rarely wanes. Tolerance for the humans invariably does. When the masses balk, elites impose their will. After all, they know what's best for us...
[Thus all ideologies and ideologists, given enough power, will become totalitarian. Flynn also explains how ideology acts as a religion with all it's potential for abusing people in the name of the lord]
To fix what's wrong with politics and culture by laboring for the victory or defeat of a particular candidate or a piece of legislation is merely to chop away at branches that will grow back. Real change will come only when we unearth the roots of the bad ideas holding sway over countless academics, jounalists, artists, government officials, and other elites...
It is folly to blame 'bad' ideology for the current degraded state of the public square. The problem isn't necessarily Left ideology or Right ideology, but all ideology. Anyone who abandons rational analysis for the dictates of a govverning philosophy is bound to go astray. To the ideologue, what matters is not whether an idea is good or bad, harmful or beneficial, or true or false. What matters is whether it can serve the Cause. There is great danger when lies are institutionalized as truth. Ideas...have consequences...
Ideology acts as a mental straitjacket. It prevents adherents from seeing reality, encourages zealotry, and justifies dishonesty. It makes smart people stupid."
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