The treason of the intellectuals
The phrase “La Trahison des Clercs” was the title of a 1927 book by the French Philosopher Julien Benda (1867-1956). It was published in translation in the US as “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” and in the UK as “The Great Betrayal.” Its theme was that the European Intellectuals of the 19th and 20th Century had abandoned their duty to judge political and military events from afar, bringing the light of reason and understanding to interpret the developments of their day, and had instead chosen to take sides with the less desirable and less humane ideas of their times. Instead of exposing and opposing populism, nationalism, crude racism and the military adventurism that swept across various countries of Europe, they had, in effect, chosen to endorse such developments and become their apologists.
He called it treason because he believed that intellectuals had a duty to uphold civilized values against the tides of unreason that raged across the Continent. Just as we speak of “noblesse oblige,” meaning that those in privileged positions have a moral duty to engage in honourable, generous and responsible behaviour, Benda’s view could be described as supporting the idea of “sagesse oblige,” requiring that those endowed with wisdom, learning and understanding have a similar moral imperative to comment on events in a dispassionate and intellectually honest way, rather than being swept along by the tides of passion that moves those less well endowed with intellect and insight.
We see today a similar abandonment of duty by those in our university seats of authority, and in those appointed to preserve and protect our national institutions and to extend their value and their heritage to the general citizenry of the country as widely as possible.
University vice-chancellors, and indeed their lecturers and professors, have an implicit and understood duty to preserve the status of a university as what Disraeli described as “a place of light, of liberty and of leaning.” They are places where ideas should be expounded and challenged, where values should be subject to scrutiny, and where views, even outlandish views, should be free to strut upon the stage and receive the support or rejection of the audience. They should be a ferment of intellectual challenge and conflict, rather than places where people can feel comfortable and secure listening to the unchallenged echoes of their existing prejudices.
Institutions such as the National Trust, the British Museum and others, have a duty to make widely accessible the heritage that inheres in them, and let people learn from the past and what it has bequeathed to the present. It is not their purpose to judge all of the past by the standards of the present, and to discard or diminish its achievements because it derives from societies that had different values to those we hold today. Humans advance in moral resources as well as in physical ones, and should not denigrate or despise all of the past because it failed to live by today’s higher standards. Past thinkers and statesmen lived by the standards of their day, just as we do.
We expect students to challenge authority; it’s what they do and have always done. It’s how ideas are formed. What we do not expect and should not accept is the treason of the intellectuals who should be upholding and defending their right to do so, but are instead falling supinely before the demands of a few outspoken voices to curb freedom of expression and open debate. As Edmund Burke said, ““Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink…do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
It may be time for those who commit Benda’s “treason of the intellectuals” to be removed and replaced by others who do not.