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Dated 26th December, 2021
The article Rousseau, Guevara, Marx and More: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Left by Guglielmo Piombini and Bernardo Ferrero would be scandalous if not true.
Hosted on the Mises institute, it surfaces snippets from lives of few idolized (or reviled) intellectual personalities. These snippets do not paint a wholesome picture of these men (and these indeed were all men). The article labels them as those on the Left and perhaps provocatively calls them out to signify moral bankruptcy of the Left.
In the West, when the Church stood tall, you either believed (presumably in the power of the Church) or did not. After the sacredness of the Church was incrementally erased from the hearts of men, by the Church's own actions, and by forces outside of it, a new distinction arose: the Left and the Right. This distinction has seeped so deep into the ordinary language today that it overshadows a far more important distinction: one which the Church, even in its most dessicated form, at least alluded to.
The Left and Right distinction, like any other, provides an opportunity for those who are gifted: in intellect, business acumen or wielding of power: to align on its either side; or at least to set loyalties and allegiances with reference to it. Men need an excuse to quarrel and they will grasp whatever rubric happens to prevail at a given time to fight. The article, correctly, groups the personalities under question as Left, but, rest assured, the Left would likewise find some other personalities, and call them out as Right.
The labels are unhelpful. What is helpful is to look at each man who is idolized and realize the contradictions which make him. The test of a man is whether or not a) his own life is witness to the fact that b) he struggled to find a path c) to make sense of these contradictions and d) managed to mesh them together into a whole. If not, then such men should not be followed, least of all elevated to a pedestal.
The Qur'an, a speech which offers the courtesy to its listener to first define unambiguously what it lables -- and it does label very sparingly -- is categorical: respect the messenger, absorb the message and worship the Divine. What happens over time of course is to worship the messenger, misuse the message and forget the Divine. The intellectuals, as the term is commonly applied, have always had something to do with this inversion.
When it comes to intellectuals of the Left the words of Sir Roger Scruton ring true: if you are intelligent and think hard about ills of society, you will turn to the Left. But if you think a bit harder, you will turn to the Right. Of course, the Right he referred to, one which spoke of traditions, customs, the heritage, the arts, and importantly, a sense of the sacred, has ceased to exist today. Indeed, it can be argued whether it ever existed in this form. It was always possible though, and perhaps still is, to trace a thin and faint outline of continuity of this sentiment of what is pure, decent, honourable and sacred through the history of all man-kind.
This continuity, conservatism in its proper form, a framework of living built on principles that constitute what is good about a person, has always faced threat of harm from intellects prone to reaction. To the extent the Right, or elements of the Left, aligned with this conservative instinct, it could be claimed by both sides. The article, while correctly calling out the radical tendencies injected by a spectrum on the Left, should also accept that the Right is not far behind; or perhaps very much along-side to the right of the Left.
But the article is useful to the extent it serves to remind us of the duty of intellectuals. The gifts imparted on them by God have to be used to teach caution, moderation, restraint, goodness, beauty and uprightness to men. If this is a tall order for the intellectuals as a body, then they must at least ensure they conform to another duty at all costs: practice within your walls what you preach outside of them. Failure to fulfill either (of these duties) guarantees that the efforts of intellectuals will be recorded in books of history as acts of vanity. The RSS, birthing from the minds of a self-proclaimed intellectual class, provides sound evidence of the same.
The shoulders of all intellectuals (or those would prefer to fancy themselves as such), as the article implies, must bear the weight of accountability of the actions of their minds. Their shoulders must unfailingly keep pace with their God-given mind-gifts. They cannot make others bear the load of their actions.
Abraham, as he neared completion of the sacred Kabba uttered a prayer, brought to life in a matter of three ayats in the Qur'an, encapsulating what the act of leading men by the power of the speech demands. The lesson is: it indeed is not everyone's cup of tea.
And when Abraham was raising the plinth of the House
with Ishmael, (he prayed):
"Accept this from us, O Lord,
for You hear and know every thing;
And make us submit, O Lord, to Your will,
and our progeny a people submissive to You.
Teach us the way of worship
and forgive our trespasses,
for You are compassionate and merciful;
And send to them, O Lord, an apostle from among them
to impart Your messages to them,
and teach them the Book and the wisdom,
and correct them in every way;
for indeed You are mighty and wise."
~~ 2:127-129
An intellectual, therefore, is one who will bring mens' hearts closer to God; any other exertion of the mind may qualify as intelligent but is unlikely to make for an intellectual. This simple Abrahamic criterion may serve to disqualify many a vested interests as well as aspirants waiting in the wings. Students who pay high fees for colleges may want to take notice.
The world is better off with a few teachers that toil honestly, rather than many who seek to reinvent and claim as their own what was established long before. And without doubt, the world could certainly do well in absence of those who conjure fancies of a mythical ill, spoil the tongue of a generation and bombard with profanity the ears of hearts which still hold decency in high regard.
Nationhood, to cite an example, is a gift when men feel it in their bosom but a curse when a few steal the right to define it on a piece of paper on behalf of others. A nation defined on paper is what it is: an ideology. The idols of the Left certainly have something to offer their counter-parts on the Right: if the latter do not heed today, two other authors down the road will write similar scandalous accounts of them.
After all, the records of the actions of the Left and the Right must balance in the ultimate Book of Law.
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