He repressed and renounced any interest in ideas, any quest for intellectual values or moral principles. He could not accept the altruist morality, as no man of self-esteem can accept it, and he found no other moral philosophy. He lived by a subjective code of his own—the code of justice, the code of a fair trader—without knowing what a superlative moral virtue it represented. His private version or understanding of altruism—particularly in America—took the form of an enormous generosity, the joyous, innocent, benevolent generosity of a self-confident man, who is too innocent to suspect that he is hated for his success, that the moralists of altruism want him to pay financial tributes, not as kindness, but as atonement for the guilt of having succeeded. There were exceptions; there were businessmen who did accept the full philosophical meaning of altruism and its ugly burden of guilt, but they were not the majority.
They are the majority today. No man or group of men can live indefinitely under the pressure of moral injustice: they have to rebel or give in. Most of the businessmen gave in; it would have taken a philosopher to provide them with the intellectual weapons of rebellion, but they had given up any interest in philosophy. They accepted the burden of an unearned guilt; they accepted the brand of “vulgar materialists”; they accepted the accusations of “predatory greed”—predatory toward the wealth which they had created, greed for the fortunes which, but for them, would not have existed. As a result, consciously or subconsciously, they were driven to the cynical bitterness of the conviction that men are irrational, that reason is impotent in human relationships, that the field of ideas is some dark, gigantic, incomprehensible fraud.
No one can accept unearned guilt with psychological impunity. Starting as the most courageous class of men in history, the businessmen have slipped slowly into the position of men motivated by chronic fear—in all the social, political, moral, intellectual aspects of their existence. Their public policy consists of appeasing their worst enemies, placating their most contemptible attackers, trying to make terms with their own destroyers, pouring money into the support of leftist publications and “liberal” politicians, placing avowed collectivists in charge of their public relations and then voicing—in banquet speeches and full-page ads—socialistic protestations that selfless service to society is their only goal, and altruistic apologies for the fact that they still keep two or three percent of profit out of their multi-million-dollar enterprises.
There are many different motives behind that policy. Some men are moved by actual guilt: they are the new type of businessmen, the product of a “mixed” economy, who make fortunes, not by productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special privileges; these are psycho-epistemologically and economically closer to Attila than to the Producer, and have good reason to feel guilty. Others are forced reluctantly into a mixed position, where they still live by productive ability, yet have to depend on government favors in order to function; these are the closest to the position of self-destroyers. The majority of businessmen—perhaps the ablest and best—work in silence and are never heard from publicly. Most businessmen have probably given up the expectation of any justice from the public. But there is one motive which is shared by too many businessmen and which is the penalty for renouncing the intellect: an unconfessed fear of ideas under the professed conviction that ideas are futile, which leads to a nervously stubborn evasiveness, an anxious feeling or hope that wealth as such is power, that only material possessions are of practical importance.
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 impractical; 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 men’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 cracker-barrels, 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.