The Book Club: Intellectuals by Paul Johnson with Allen Estrin | The Book Club

Welcome to the Book Club. I'm Michael Knowles and this month we will be discussing Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. We're joined by the great Alan Estrin, Executive Director of PragerU. Right off the bat, here is the thesis of this book. The rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world. For the first time in human history and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects. That's what Paul Johnson says an intellectual is and that's why intellectuals are terrible, terrible people. We will get to more specifics on that. First, I've got to thank our friends over at THNKR. In our fast-paced world, it is tough to make reading a priority, even for me. Part of my job is to read and I barely have time to do it. What's great about THNKR.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form right when you have time to consume them. Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old American classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to very recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life. You can do all of that. You can challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, become a better thinker. Go to THNKR.org. No E. We don't have time. It's a fast-paced world. THNKR.org. Start a free trial and put your mind in motion. Thinkers are good. Intellectuals are very bad. That is the point that Paul Johnson makes in this book. The book is divided out into about 12 chapters, basically one intellectual per chapter, some there are multiple intellectuals, and he goes through their ideas, what the public knows of them, and their biographies and how the biography relates to their ideas and vice versa. You, like me, hate intellectuals, but you love Paul Johnson. Why is that? Let me tell you about Paul Johnson, just a bit about his biography that'll explain why I love him so much. He was educated at Oxford. He became a journalist. He started out on the left. He moved to the center, and then I would, let's say, to the center right. And he did that because he collided with experience. He encountered reality. And he met a number of people in this book. He personally met them. In addition to that experience, Paul Johnson developed into a brilliant writer. He writes very, very clearly. And he has an incredible body of knowledge. I really don't know what Paul Johnson doesn't know. And he is a big part of my own intellectual migration. As a matter of fact, my journey, also from, let's say, left toward the right, really begins, which is one of the reasons why he's so important to me, begins with Paul Johnson, begins with this book, The Intellectuals. And I will tell you, I have learned more from Paul Johnson than from any single author. I really owe him a debt. He has really expanded my view of the world. I consider him a key part of my education. And I never hesitate to say to the young people, when they ask me, well, what should I read? Start with Paul Johnson. He's very accessible. You know, with a lot of the intellectuals that you read about in this book, when you read their writing, it kind of comes off as a bunch of gobbledygook. You get to the end and you say, what are you trying to say? With Paul Johnson, you know exactly what he's trying to say. McCulloch said, the historian David McCulloch, he said, to write well is to think clearly, which is why it's so hard. What's so interesting about this book is on this show, we've said we're doing the great books, the canon, the whole of Western civilization. And intellectuals doesn't show up on most of those lists. But what Johnson does such a great job of is distilling so many of the great thinkers, the great intellectuals from that Western canon and telling you a little bit about maybe how their lives reflected their political philosophy and vice versa. And ultimately, and this is the thesis of the book, why they're such horrible people. Because when we talk about intellectuals in our modern culture, that's the greatest compliment you could pay anybody. You say, oh, he's an intellectual. That's an unqualified good. And yet the intellectual is a kind of modern construct, right? You only get intellectuals as a public category about 250 years ago. Why is that? Well, the reason for that is because in the early, sort of late 18th century into the 19th century, you have the Enlightenment movement. And that movement begins, I mean, it evolves through all sorts of things as life does, as history does. But it begins really, and this is where the book begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He turned the world upside down. And so many people look to Rousseau. I mean, people in the book, the intellectuals, Marx, Tolstoy, Sartre, everybody looked to Rousseau as a sort of, he's the great intellectual. And he turned everything upside down. And the way he did it was by making a very simple statement, which was that all received wisdom no longer counted. So you're talking about all tradition, everything we have inherited in our culture and civilization, bupkis. It's nothing now because Rousseau has his unaided intellect, and he can restart the world anew. This one person knows how we all should live, and we should listen to him, not our experience, not the received wisdom we received from our parents and ancestors. It all no longer matters. So if Rousseau is going to basically wipe away all of tradition, he's going to recreate civilization anew. He's going to tell each and every one of us how to live. He must have lived a wonderfully upright life, right? Absolute flourishing morally, personally. Is that how it turned out? No, not exactly. And one can go to one fact about his life, which tells you a lot about Rousseau, and that is that Rousseau had five children. But I don't remember seeing little Rousseaus running around the Rousseau household. No, he abandoned every one of his children. Worse than that, he abandoned them to an orphanage in Paris that at the time was known as a horrible place. Where the majority of kids would die. From disease, from all kinds of things. I mean, he literally had his wife deposit the kid at the doorstep of an orphanage and left, and that was Rousseau. This was the man who told France and the world some years later how to raise their children. How to raise children. I mean, so much of Rousseau's philosophy centers around the raising of children and education, and yet he knew personally nothing about it. And this is what Paul Johnson points out. He says, responding to the criticism that he's taken these cheap shots at Rousseau, and that's not fair. He says, it is right to dwell on his desertion of his children, not only because it is the most striking single example of his inhumanity, but because it is organically part of the process which produced his theory of politics and the role of the state. The key here is, since Rousseau felt in some ways as a child, so many of these intellectuals, they never really grew up. It followed he could not bring up children of his own. Something had to take his place, and that something was the state in the form of the orphanage. So the state, according to Rousseau, the whole key to his philosophy, or part of it, was that the state literally should raise your children. And you see, everything you talk about with Rousseau, you see modern manifestations of that. I mean, we have a crisis now in education, and part of that crisis, a big part of that crisis is that we are turning over more and more the education of our children to the state. That is a Rousseauian idea. Guaranteed, well, obviously K through 12. Initially it was first grade through 12, then they added kindergarten. Now there's going to be guaranteed college. That's so many different political candidates are promising this. Then you're supposed to have guaranteed preschool. I mean, pretty soon you wonder, when are the parents going to see their own kids? Is there any time for that? But it all follows from this one thinker, centuries ago, who decided that rather than have the family, rather than have the normal local community that helps raise children, that's all gone because of his political theory that would give the state total control. The thing I love about Johnson is he engages in what you might call psychobabble. I mean, he's really probing the psychological motivations, but he backs it up. He backs it up with the dark side of history about these intellectuals who very often lie about themselves. They lie, they cheat, they abuse the women in their lives, they abuse the children in their lives. They're self-promoters, they're publicists in their whole public life. And this shows you the darker side of that history. Johnson pulls the curtain back. That's what he does better than anyone. He does it in all his books. He does it so well in this one. A great way to learn history is through biography. And this book is a series of biographies that take us from the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Right, all the way up to the present. That whole period, you learn a lot by reading this book. Right. And what you learn about these intellectuals, there are some exceptions, obviously, but they tend to be only children, or at least the eldest or the only son. They tended to have doting mothers. They tended to have a ton of self-pity. The more they got, the more people were generous to them, the more ungrateful they were. And then I think the key to understanding these intellectuals is they all loved humanity, but they hated individual humans. You see that even today. Oh, absolutely. And we can move on to Marx. I mean, Marx... He's sort of the perfect example of this. Right. He actually disliked workers. The few times he actually met them, he was extremely rude and nasty to them. This was in the early period of the Communist Party at meetings. He had nothing but disdain for the workers. Like all of these guys. And he never worked, obviously. He never worked a day in his life. He never tried to get a job. He lived off of Engels, who was his partner. Frederick Engels. Frederick Engels, who worked with him. His collaborator. And he lived off of the generosity of some other people, always in debt, always keeping his family, you know, just above the water. It's true of all of these intellectuals. It seems that they all want to be identified with the people or the workers. And with very few exceptions, they never met a worker in their lives. This really gets to the heart of the whole concept of intellectuals. That the intellectual, as Paul Johnson describes them, love ideas more than they love people. Right. It's a very dangerous place to be. But you know what I notice that they love even more than ideas? Themselves. Yes. They all have such self-interest. And whether it's Rousseau or it's Marx or it's any of the other guys in this book, they womanize. They cheat. They don't bathe themselves. They spend money. It's a very selfish lifestyle they all seem to live. And what they don't love is truth and facts. They don't. I mean Marx is a great example of this. Throughout his writing career, he would embellish figures. He would use old discredited data. He would ignore refutations of what he had written because he wasn't pursuing truth. He said he wanted a science of history. Really, he had already come to his conclusions and he was trying to fill in the blanks with data. But there was one time that he got really called out for it. And Johnson notices this. This is in the inaugural address to the International Working Men's Association. This is an amazing story. Everybody should know this little antidote. Go ahead. Somehow I never heard this when I was learning about Marx in college. He was giving a speech in 1864. He's quoting Gladstone, the British Prime Minister. And he deliberately falsifies a line of the speech. So what Gladstone had said was, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the class who are in easy circumstances. In other words, if only the rich were getting rich and everyone else was in misery, then I would look on that with a great deal of negativity. What does Marx say? Marx says that Gladstone said, this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. He completely inverts what Gladstone said. He gets called out for it. He puts it in Capital. Capital is his most famous work. He constantly repeats this throughout his life. Never admits that he just flat out lied because the facts contradicted his theory. Yeah. That never got in Marx's way. And when you think about the whole structure of communism based on his philosophy and his philosophy, anyone who looked at the research that Marx purported to do found it was all based either completely out of date. Marx believed that as Capital, he says it over and over, as Capital is accumulated, the workers' plight will necessarily get worse. During his lifetime, working conditions got better and better and better. He lived to see his theories disproven. As England grew richer. Right. But he didn't exactly care for facts. He had his conclusions. He was sitting in his ivory tower, you might call it today. His wasn't so ivory because he was such a disgusting person. So many of these intellectuals were actually personally not hygienic. They were dirty. I mean, Marx was a complete slob. Rousseau didn't cleanse himself. I mean, Hemingway was a mess. Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, all of these guys were so disgusting that the women in their lives, the long-suffering women, wrote about how they could barely, the smell was so bad. And yet all of these guys, almost all of them, I think maybe every single one, was a terrible womanizer, discarded women. I mean, in the case of a very modern intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist of the 20th century, he, this is amazing. Again, they don't teach you this in feminist class. He took the most prominent feminist, maybe of all time, Simone de Beauvoir, and turned her into his mistress, basically to be discarded. No respect shown whatsoever. Cheated on her left and right. Insisted that she take care of him. Treated her like dirt. All of the, I mean, they would actually say things like, women are stupid. Women are incapable of reason. Tolstoy would say it. I mean, so many of them. What is it about them? Why were they so filled with bitterness and hate? Why did, especially in the case of Sartre and many others, why did they become so violent? Why did they endorse violence? It's a great question. They're all so narcissistic. I mean, from the very beginning. Right. I don't think they cared. They just didn't care about consequences. They would say whatever would bring them attention, would bring them fame. Their concern was the disembodied idea. It didn't matter what the consequence of the idea was. That didn't concern them. They just somehow believed, again, starting with Rousseau, that somehow it's all going to work out. You judge the tree by its fruit, right? You judge the idea by the practical effects it has in the world. Just Jean-Paul Sartre, just that one intellectual, he said of Fidel Castro, the country which emerged out of the Cuban Revolution is a direct democracy. Of Tito's Yugoslavia, a monster, it is the realization of my philosophy. He loved Mao's China. All of these guys were defending Stalin, were defending the worst dictators that have ever lived. They didn't seem to care. Bertolt Brecht, another one of these intellectuals, he was a tool of the Soviet regime. He would lie for them. He would deny their atrocities. I guess my question, leaving this, is if you're not interested in the truth, why would you dedicate your life to being an intellectual? Why would you dedicate your life to ideas? You would think that was the case, but that is the great contradiction that the book raises, why these people with these ideas are the ones that have been so influential. You have a whole century, the 20th century, based on these intellectual ideas, and literally millions of people died, millions more suffered. You can take this right to today. We're now supposed to trust, we're still supposed to trust these ideas? I mean, Rousseau's ideas are in play. The state has to control society. If you don't go along with what the state wants you to do, then you're a danger to the state and have to be dealt with. You have to be purged. You have to be tossed away. These ideas have been actually tried. In Cambodia, these guys, the leaders of the Cambodian revolution, Pol Pot and his group, they studied basically at the feet of Sartre. They did, I mean, in Paris, in France. Johnson contrasts intellectuals with regular normal smart people. Rudyard Kipling, the poet, was not an intellectual. He was a genius, he had a demon, but he did not believe he could refashion the world by his own unaged intelligence. He did not reject the vast corpus of its inherited wisdom. You see the intellectual emerge when we got rid of the priests. It's an answer to the priests and the soothsayers and the prophets. It's the same thing for a world that is now deprived of God and of tradition. I love his conclusion. He says, intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior. They are no wiser as mentors or worthier as exemplars than the witch doctors or priests of old. What we must remember that intellectuals habitually forget, he says, are that people matter more than concepts and must come first, and that the worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas. Love that phrase. He's such a good writer, Paul Johnson, on top of everything else. He's just such a clear, imaginative writer. It's very easy to read this book because it just flows so beautifully. But it's a challenge. If you're someone who is attracted to these intellectuals, these so-called philosophers, read this book and challenge yourself. It's a challenge to this worldview that we have all been brought up in, this worldview of the intellectual, of the modern. It reminds us of what so many ideologues say today. They say, no, no, no. Who cares if this works in practice? Does it work in theory? What Johnson challenges us to do is to flip that around and look at the real world, look at real consequences, look at real people like you and me. We could talk about this all day, but we got to go. Alan Estrin, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for watching. Be sure to tune in next month to The Book Club. Until then, I'm Michael Knowles. Happy reading.