The Decline of the Obvious

A discerning French observer, Jacques Ellul, once remarked that educated people are more susceptible to propaganda than uneducated people. That paradox stopped me in my tracks when I read it many years ago, yet it’s so, so true — like George Orwell’s observation that there are some things so far-fetched that only an intellectual could believe them.

I suppose the reason is that educated people tend to overestimate their own understanding. Simple ignorant people know their own limitations; educated people forget theirs. They mistake literacy for expertise. Knowing a smattering of many things, they confuse a dim awareness with sophistication. Flatter their intelligence a little, and they’ll swallow anything — especially if they think it’s the latest thing.

The twentieth century was notable for many horrors, not least of which were the fads of the intellectuals — Marxism, Freudian psychology, existentialism, sexual freedom, “abstract” art, and so forth. Common sense and tradition fell into disrepute. The old idea of self-evident truths gave way to the glamour of the “counterintuitive.” Anyone who could take a philosophy course could become a deep thinker, refusing to be taken in by the obvious. The obvious became vulgar.

To the intellectuals, the future, unlike the discredited past, seemed to hold infinite possibilities. If you can’t claim to be a good poet, as G.K. Chesterton put it, you can always claim that your poetry is “the poetry of the future.” Who can contradict you? And Chesterton saw how this would apply to politics: “The old tyrants invoked the past. The new tyrants will invoke the future.”

No idea seized intellectuals more strongly than the vague notion that the future was going to be radically different from, and better than, the past. Man could “build a new society” on scientific principles. The “new society” — first spotted in the Soviet Union — was going to be more just than all previous societies.

More just? By what standard? This was a rather obvious question, since the “progressive” intellectuals were also moral relativists who denied that there were any permanent standards of justice. But the intellectuals didn’t let the obvious cramp their style, so the problem of defining justice, as a practical matter, was left to the political idols of the intellectuals, from Stalin to Mao to Castro.

In short, justice was now to be defined by sheer power. The new “progressive” rulers — now called “leaders” — had a higher mission than mere governing, as traditionally understood; it was up to them to “raise the consciousness” of those they ruled. Often they achieved this by making themselves official objects of worship. To contradict the word of the “leader” became a capital offense.

Educated people found this less horrifying than ordinary folk did. When the American journalist Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union, he returned home ecstatic: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” At home he was a skeptical muckraker, exposing the greed and corruption of the capitalist system; but in “the future” — J. Stalin, Proprietor — he had witnessed Paradise.

But the intellectuals weren’t quite as naive as they seemed. True, they often made pilgrimages to the various socialist utopias, returning home to report on the “progress” the New Societies were making under the tutelage of their “leaders.” They reported that illiteracy was being wiped out, that everyone enjoyed free health care, that the fruits of production were being equally shared, and so forth.

The point is that the intellectuals always did return home. Maybe “the future” was a nice place to visit, but they didn’t actually want to live there. For some reason they seemed to prefer life in the corrupt capitalist world.

So did the subjects of Stalin, Mao, and Castro, who had to pen them in by arming their borders. Even after tasting the delicious fruits of socialism, even after decades of relentless consciousness-raising, millions of ordinary Russians, Chinese, and Cubans retained an inexplicable desire to get the hell out.

The armed borders of the socialist Paradises — armed not against invaders, but against would-be refugees — were one of the distinctive features of the twentieth century. Naturally, they were beneath the notice of the intellectuals. All obvious things were.

Joseph Sobran