Magazines: A Weakness for Causes

“Why writers should be canvassed for their opinions on controversial issues I cannot imagine. Their views have no more authority than those of any reasonably well-educated citizen. Indeed, when read in bulk, the statements made by writers, including the greatest, would seem to indicate that literary talent and political common sense are rarely found together.”

Quoting this recent remark by Poet W. H. Auden, Encounter magazine asked a group of leading intellectuals if they agreed. A surprising number did.

In their replies—published in the September and forthcoming issues—they used even stronger language than Auden to describe the confusion, not to say hypocrisy, of many of their fellow intellectuals. The contributors were particularly struck by the fact that intellectuals who berated the U.S. for intervening in Viet Nam also berated the U.S. for not intervening in the Middle East war on the side of Israel.

Odor of Self-Righteousness. “There is a certain kind of militant animal,” writes Playwright John Osborne, “which seeks out and exploits political crises for reasons of personal aggrandizement and creative frustration. There is an odor of psychopathic self-righteousness about many of the hardy annual protesters. I have long ago refused to sign those glib and predictable letters to the Times, including the one during the recent Israeli crisis when so many of these cause-happy activists leapt to the telephone and their pens. The same principle applies to the Viet Nam war, the very name of which has become a synonym for left-wing sanctimony.”

To Novelist Constantine FitzGibbon, intellectuals tend to follow a double standard. If the war happens to trigger their emotions, they don’t worry much about moral behavior. “If the struggle is remote,” he writes, “it can be viewed as an intellectual exercise and a moral problem. Stern judgments can then be handed down, and safely. It would seem that for the run-of-the-mill intellectual, the less he knows about a complex issue far away the stronger his moral judgments.”

Intellectuals cannot have it both ways, says Anthony Hartley, editor in chief of Interplay, a new magazine on international affairs. “If they applaud the Israeli victory over the Arabs, they cannot then use pacifist arguments to condemn American policy in Viet Nam.

Napalm is indivisible. If apartheid is deplored in South Africa, it cannot be applauded in the theories of Mr. Stokely Carmichael.” Intellectuals should be properly informed before they take a stand. “The idea that a strong human intelligence can be brought to bear on any subject under the sun may date from the Renaissance, but there were then fewer subjects under the sun.” Abstract pronouncements are useless in deciding between the “respective rectitude of Biafra and the Nigerian Federal government. It is only surprising that intellectuals still back countries or factions in countries as others back football teams or horses.”

Long-Frustrated Revenge. Beneath the intellectuals’ loftv professions of humanitarianism, Political Writer John Mander discerns some ugly undercurrents. “The Arab-Israeli war has perhaps given the game away,” he writes.

“A highly successful (if provoked) act of aggression was greeted with enthusiasm by most West European intellectuals.” How explain this enthusiasm among so many “Third-World-befriend-ing, antimilitarist intellectuals? Is it that beneath these attitudes there lies something very different—a long-frustrated wish to revenge the humiliation of the past 20 years, to take it out on the fuzzy-wuzzies, as the ‘European’ Israelis decidedly did? Is it possible, further, that the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals expresses not so much a wish for the triumph of North Viet Nam’s peasant army, as for an American humiliation?”

The so-called “progressive” intellectuals scarcely deserve the name intellectual, thinks Tibor Szamuely, onetime history professor at Budapest University I and now a political lecturer at the University of Reading. Their involvement in politics, he writes, is “fundamentally nonintellectual. It is practically impossible to carry on a rational argument about Viet Nam, to hear a case against U.S. policy made in coherent, analytical, factual terms. Secure under the protection of U.S. firepower—and knowing this, and hating himself for knowing it—the intellectual cries out for more stories of American atrocities.

No horrendous anti-Western tales are too incredible to be disbelieved, no facts about Communism or the Third World sufficiently well-documented to be accepted. The liberal intelligentsia has replaced reason by faith, rational judgments by visceral reactions.”