"Beware Intellectuals!”

 

 Paul Johnson’s stunning summary of a study of Western intellectuals runs counter to what many people think, or at least once used to think.

 

 If truth is not the Holy Grail ( the Summa Grande ) for intellectuals, what is? 

Truth surely is the reason why intellectuals think passionately, read voraciously, pursue research tirelessly and argue about anything and everything interminably. 

Almost at the dawn of the Western intellectual tradition, Plato described philosophers in the Republic as those with “no taste for falsehood; that is, they are completely unwilling to admit what’s false but hate it, while cherishing the truth.” Similarly, Aristotle wrote in his Ethics that the person who loves truth for the very sake of truth when nothing is at stake will still be the more truthful when someday everything is at stake.

But that was then. To be sure, there have always been people who were skeptical about anyone who knew more than they did. How could they ever find out whether the other person was trustworthy? 
 

But now we have many people for whom mistrust is the badge they wear proudly to show their schooling in postmodern suspicion, so that “mistrust intellectuals” and “question authority” go hand in hand. After all, Nietzsche and his postmodern disciples have surely won for the moment. Truth is dead, and everything is relative at best and at worst a matter of the will to power.

 Nothing is what it appears to be. 

 

If truth was once the stated goal of intellectuals, it is now easy to read between their scholarly lines and see the petty egos and the dirty ambitions behind the lofty aspirations for truth. Truth is finally undecidable, as the postmodern philosophers express it...

 

 At best, truth is simply the compliment you pay to sentences that you happen to agree with.

However you explain the record, what are undeniable are the facts about the story of intellectuals, and the embarrassing evidence long precedes postmodernism. Many of the celebrated makers of the modern world have been shown up for their devious handling of truth in some aspect of their thinking or their lives—including Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Margaret Mead and others.

 Yet these are the men and women of ideas who have risen up to overthrow the guardians of traditional Western society, and who on the basis of the brilliance of their minds are now trusted to diagnose our ills, prescribe our remedies and direct the future for our children and for the world.

 

My Final Thought: 

Given the veracity of the books: The Intellectuals  and  Fool's Talk... 

...We are left with suspicion on our minds, disagreeable taste on our intellectual palate and a world divided and polarised by the ideas trickled down a savage mountain side filled with  twisted debris, spewed muck and silent venom. From men and women who declared their lot with intelligent banter, fiction producing worldly friction endued with relative nonsense masquerading as wisdom for the common man and woman.

Denying the truth and as some proclaimed that even telling us that they were NOT telling the truth but their thought-ful version of reality.

Recommended Sources:

Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk:  

Paul Johnson, The Intellectuals.

R.C. Sproul, Consequences of Ideas. 

 

(From and By Digital Anvil) 

 

As usual , if you disagree or..... then drop a comment as you drop by. 

 

 ( Essay based largely on Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: )