justin> This is an extraordinarily revealing comment. We are not, it
justin> seems, to speak truth to power. We are instead supposed to
justin> figure out how to exercise it for ends that are taken as
justin> given. How utterly vile and contemptible. If Washington and
justin> Jefferson had taken that line, we'd still be singing "God
justin> Save the Queen," and if William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet
justin> Beecher Stowe had done so, we'd be thing about how to
justin> ameliorate the lot of the slaves. jks
I found Lilla's essay, "The Lure of Syracuse", which serves as a kind of extended advertisement for his book, in the 20 September NYRB completely disgusting.
Surely there is *something* to be said -- in an essay promoting a book purporting to examine the relation of 20th century tyranny and intellectuals -- about at least *one* American thinker? I guess not if you conveniently define tyranny to begin and end with communism and European fascism.
Lilla's total silence about the degree to which American intellectual culture justified the many American imperialist ventures in the first part of the century -- the Philippines and Haiti, say -- and Vietnam in the second part is simply deafening. While I suspect he might duck out of this criticism by making some cutesy point about the difference between European and American intellectuals, or between intellectuals and technocrats, that's a really unsatisfying move which begs the larger question.
The NYRB essay is full of criticism of "continental Europe" which, he says, "gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism", but he hasn't a single cross word for American tyranny abroad or at home.
One might like to have read a few words about the degree to which American intellectuals justified, say, extending American racial apartheid until the mid-60s. Or perhaps a few words about intellectual justifications for the familiar litany of anticommunist-inspired horrors.
Lilla's thesis strikes me as a kind of retread of Paul Johnson's *Intellectuals*, only with more updated jargon -- "philotyrannical intellectual" -- a marginally more interesting setting in the "history of ideas", the Committee on Social Thought's native stomping grounds, and an updated, Americanized List of Bad Guys and Their Apologists. One can say at the least that Lilla lacks Johnson's mastery of the cheap shot.
He writes breathless passages like --
"The doctrines of communism and fascism, Marxism in all its baroque permutations, nationalism, tiers-mondisme -- many inspired by a hatred of tyranny, all capable of inspiring hateful tyrants and blinding intellectuals to their crimes"
-- but inconvenient words, "colonialism" and "imperialism" and "anticommunism" and "capitalism", simply do not occur. He apes Lyotard when he says, half-heartedly, "the age of the master ideologies may be over", all the while leaving totally unexamined the most potent "master ideology" remaining, namely, globalization.
Employing the Straussian gnostic hermeneutic -- which was already old when Origen stole it from Philo -- one can finally say this of Lilla: he protesteth too much!
The effect of all his exoteric protestation, about European tyranny and its "philotyrannical" intellectuals, is to do implicitly for American tyrannies, at home and abroad, precisely what he accuses them of doing explicitly for European ones: to justify, to excuse, to, in short, tell lies and obscure the truth.
I'll take Said's *Representations of the Intellectual* or just about anything of Chomsky's -- who must wonder what he's done to deserve having Hitchens and the American Prospect as critics -- any day over this Lilla nonsense.
I can't remember the last time an NYRB essay made me so *mad*.
Best, Kendall Clark