The need for intellectual leadership

Today, the businessman and the intellectual face each other with the mutual fear and the mutual contempt of Attila and the Witch Doctor.

The businessman has lost confidence in all theories, and functions on a range-of-the-moment expediency, not daring to look at the future. The intellectual has cut himself off from reality and plays a futile word-game with ideas, not daring to look at the past.

The businessman considers the intellectual unpractical; the intellectual considers the businessman immoral. But, secretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with existence.

It is by this mutual attitude and the philosophical premises from which it comes that they are destroying each other. The major share of the guilt belongs to the intellectual: philosophical leadership was his responsibility, which he betrayed and is now deserting under fire.

The most grotesquely anachronistic and atavistic spectacle in history is the spectacle of the modern intellectuals raising the primordial voice of the Witch Doctor and, in the midst of an industrial civilization, wailing about the hopeless misery of life on earth, the depravity of man, the impotence of man’s mind, the ignoble vulgarity of material pursuits, and the nobility of longing for the supernatural.

The echoes answering them are the voices of the plain, medieval Witch Doctors that are beginning to be heard again, preaching the doctrine of man’s innate, preordained impotence, of humility, passivity, submission and resignation —here, in New York City, the greatest monument to the potency of man’s mind —and proclaiming that all the disasters of the modern age are man’s punishment for the pride of relying on his intellect, for his attempt to improve his condition, to establish a rational society and to achieve a perfect way of life on earth.

On a recent television panel discussion, an alleged conservative intellectual was asked to define the difference between a “conservative” and a “liberal.” He answered that a “liberal” is one who does not believe in Original Sin. To which a liberal intellectual replied hastily: “Oh, yes, we do!”—but proceeded to add that the liberals believe they can improve man’s life just a little.

Such is the bankruptcy of a culture.

It is into the midst of this dismal gray vacuum that the New Intellectuals must step—and must challenge the worshippers of doom, resignation and death, with an attitude best expressed by a paraphrase of an ancient salute: “We who are not about to die . . .”

Who are to be the New Intellectuals? Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.

The need for intellectual leadership was never as great as now. No human being who has a trace of personal worth can be willing to surrender his life without lifting a hand—or a mind—to defend it, particularly not in America, the country based on the premise of man’s self-reliance and self-esteem. Americans have known how to erect a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on crackerbarrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on prayers, nor on meta-language.

The new wilderness to reclaim is philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture, nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do. The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.

Those who could become the New Intellectuals are America’s hidden assets; their number is probably greater than anyone can estimate; they exist in every profession, even among the present intellectuals. But they are scattered in silent helplessness throughout the country, or hidden in that underground which, in human history, has too often swallowed the best of men’s potential: subjectivity. They are the men who have long since lost respect for the cultural standards to which they conform, but who hide their own convictions or repress their ideas or suppress their minds, each feeling that he has no chance against the others, each serving as both victim and destroyer. The New Intellectuals will be those men who will come out into the open and have the courage to break that vicious circle.

If they glance at the state of our culture, they will see that the entire miserable show is kept up by nothing but routine and pretense, which disguise bewilderment and fear: nobody dares to take the first new step, everybody waits for his neighbor’s initiative. If a society reaches the stage where every man accepts the feeling that he is “a stranger and afraid in a world [he] never made,” the world it gives up will be made by Attila. The greatest need today is for men who are not strangers to reality, because they are not afraid of thought. The New Intellectuals will be those who will take the initiative and the responsibility: they will check their own philosophical premises, identify their convictions, integrate their ideas into coherence and consistency, then offer to the country a view of existence to which the wise and honest can repair.

The New Intellectual will be the man who lives up to the exact meaning of his title: a man who is guided by his intellect—not a zombie guided by feelings, instincts, urges, wishes, whims or revelations. Ending the rule of Attila and the Witch Doctor, he will discard the basic premise that made them possible: the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue.

He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth.

The New Intellectual will be a reunion of the twins who should never have been separated: the intellectual and the businessman. He can come from among the best—that is: the most rational—men who may still exist in both camps. In place of an involuntary Witch Doctor and a reluctant Attila, the reunion will produce two new types: the practical thinker and the philosophical businessman. The best among the present intellectuals should consider the tremendous power which they are holding, but have never fully exercised or understood. If any man among them feels that he is the helpless, ineffectual step-son of a “materialistic” culture that grants him neither wealth nor recognition, let him remember the meaning of his title: his power is his intellect, not his feelings, emotions or intuitions. It is not the businessmen who have robbed him of efficacy, but those of his colleagues who have degraded his profession to the level of soothsayers, tea-leaf readers and jungle oracles. Let him break with the neo-mystics; let him realize that ideas are not an escape from reality, not a hobby for “disinterested” neurotics in ivory towers, but the most crucial and practical power in human existence. Then let him become an intellectual leader who assumes full responsibility for the practical consequences of his theories. The best among the businessmen should consider the function of wealth, and realize that the power behind the incomprehensible evil now unleashed against them is their own. Wealth, as such, is only a tool; by renouncing his intellect, the businessman has placed his wealth in the service of his own destroyers. They do not need to nationalize his property: they nationalized his mind long ago. Let him now realize that practical action without a theoretical base achieves the opposite of his goals, and that intellectual irresponsibility is not a way of escape from his enemies. Then let him discover the function of philosophy.

Instead of those ludicrous programs of “student exchanges” between America and Soviet Russia, for the alleged purpose of “gaining mutual understanding,” there ought to be a private, voluntary program of “student exchanges” between the intellectuals and the businessmen, the two groups that need each other most, yet know less and understand less about each other than about any alien society in any distant corner of the globe. The businessmen need to discover the intellect; the intellectuals need to discover reality. Let the intellectuals understand the nature and the function of a free market in order to offer the businessmen, as well as the public at large, the guidance of an intelligible theoretical framework for dealing with men, with society, with politics, with economics. Let the businessmen learn the basic issues and principles of philosophy in order to know how to judge ideas, then let them assume full responsibility for the kind of ideologies they choose to finance and support.

Let them both discover the nature, the theory and the actual history of capitalism; both groups are equally ignorant of it. No other subject is hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions, misrepresentations and falsifications. Let them study the historical facts and discover that all the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated and made possible only by government controls imposed on the economy. Whenever they hear capitalism being denounced, let them check the facts and discover which of the two opposite political principles—free trade or government controls—was responsible for the alleged iniquities. When they hear it said that capitalism has had its chance and has failed, let them remember that what ultimately failed was a “mixed” economy, that the controls were the cause of the failure, and that the way to save a country is not by making it swallow a full, “unmixed” glass of the poison which is killing it.