Treason of Intellectuals. One More Chapter.
Dostoevsky's best characters, like Dmitry Karamazov, for example, know that humans are surrounded by mysteries and riddles. For Yates, "the best lack all conviction"; it is only "the worst [who] Are full of passionate intensity": they live in the world of moral and intellectual clarity.
How else can one explain the actions of one poet and writer, Juraj Cintula, who decided to shoot Slovak Leader, Robert Fico? What gave him certainty, and convinced him of the moral necessity to take another person's life?
Chekhov was musing on these issues as well, as he wondered about the insane certainty of Russian intelligentsia, which already knew that there were no more mysteries left, and therefore their latest theory gave them all the tools to understand truth and lies, good and evil.
In one of his short stories (translated as either "Home," or "At Home”) Chekhov writes:
"Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand. …This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked….. The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book. . . . how little of established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer. . . ."
Indeed. For a truly thinking person, there is no certainty, that's why it is so difficult to be a teacher, a writer, or even a thinking lawyer. If anything, Brothers Karamazov demonstrates how limited and simplifying the jurisprudence is, when applied to the mysteries of human behavior.
Yet, the intelligentsia knows. They are certain. They know enough to take a gun and attack. And paradoxically, it is these very people, who instead of teaching us uncertainty, and caution, and mystery, fill us with "passionate intensity," and poison ours and their own minds with stupid certainty and equally stupid morality.
In the affairs of this world, we see "through the glass darkly." We don't see "face to face." Only God does.
And that's the point. The self-righteous intelligentsia, however, fills itself with certainty and decides to play the role of God. That's all there is to it.
They know. They shoot, they sanction, they ban, they ostracize, and demonize. They are so certain, that similar to Russian students, they are ready to kill the tsar, similar to Gavrila Princip, they can start the WWI, similar to this Cintula, they can shoot the country's prime-minister, or similar to the youngsters in Ukraine, to overthrow their government and plunge their own country into unmitigated disaster.
Long time ago, Julien Benda, called it "the treason of intellectuals" (trahison des clercs), and which he explained exactly in these terms: intellectuals no longer profess divine mysteries and uncertainties; instead they embrace earthly hatreds and fake clarity, and imagine themselves gods in the process.
Sad, pathetic, and dangerous... But not to worry, there must be some failed student somewhere, who already knows how to solve it all with one simplistic and violent action.
