Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [80]
In The Treason of Intellectuals, Julien Benda argued that it is only when intellectuals are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that they can serve as a conscience and a corrective. “For more than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists, men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the multitudes,” Benda wrote.
Once intellectuals transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage, they emasculate themselves as intellectuals. They disregard unpleasant truths and morality to influence or incorporate themselves into systems of power. Stanley Hoffman denounced the liberal class for the bond between the scholarly world and the world of power in his 1977 essay “An American Social Science: International Relations” in Daedalus magazine. Academics and researchers, he notes, were “not merely in the corridors but also the kitchens of power.” What had once been an intellectual exchange had become a professional one. Liberal foundations, Hoffman writes, had became “a golden halfway house between Washington and academia.” Scholars saw themselves as efficient Machiavellians who were there to advise “the Prince on how best to manage his power and on how best to promote the national interest.” Scholarship became directed toward a tiny elite in the hope of shaping policy. And the closer scholars came to the centers of power, the greater the temptation was to “slight the research and to slant the advocacy for reasons either of personal career or of political or bureaucratic opportunity.” This meant that the scholar “may still be highly useful as an intelligent and skilled decisionmaker—but not as a scholar.” Hoffman argued that “the greatest hope for the science would lie in blowing up the bridge that leads across the moat into the citadel of power.”3
Benda wrote that intellectuals in the past had been indifferent to popular passions. They gazed “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” These intellectuals were not, Benda concedes, very often able to prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did “prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good.” But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.”4
Those within the liberal class who challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question reigning political passions, are usually removed from liberal institutions. The list of apostates, those once feted and then ruthlessly banished by the liberal class, is long. It includes all those who refused, in the end, to “be practical” and serve power.
Sydney Schanberg arrived at the New York Times in 1959 after attending Harvard University on scholarship. He was soon promoted to a job on the city desk, sent as a reporter to the Albany bureau, and then became a foreign correspondent. He covered Vietnam and the India-Pakistan War and opened a bureau for the paper in Singapore in April 1973. He went to Indonesia,