Hacker News Reader

"Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges)"

This is, maybe, a non-sequitur, but for the sake of intellectual correctness, I believe the Cultural Revolution, at least, was anti-intellectual. Mao closed down schools, burned books, and put teachers and intellectuals into re-education camps until they were ready to join work groups where they toiled in factories and fields. Mao's greatest intellectual rival, Deng Xiaoping, was held under house arrest for years. Mao promoted hard work and nationalism, not intellectualism.

He did all that under the theory of Communism, though.

"Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東; pinyin: Máo Zédōng; Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung) About this sound pronunciation (help·info) (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and Communist leader. He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism, military strategies, and his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong

(Wikipedia, the true sign of a lazy citer. :) )

So we should conclude that communism and intellectual thought are equivalent? Ridiculous.

Look, it's a fact that ideas, when misapplied by powerful individuals or institutions, can lead to needless suffering. You could point to large scale suffering resulting from communism, from a misplaced belief in ethnic or cultural superiority, from capitalism, from religion, and so on.

The fact that various beliefs (whose social implementation results in suffering) have been propounded by intellectuals does not warrant the conclusions you are drawing. I am tired of this tendency among some HN readers with a bee in their bonnet about communism to just drag it into any discussion and use the deaths of large numbers of people as currency for laying out an irrelevant political argument.

The world hasn't seen any communism yet. A lot of phonies using that banner to grant themselves enormous power -- but, like democracy, yet to be realized anywhere.

"Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots."

I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples. Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.

Furthermore, all 3 men in your example were, strictly speaking, populists who crafted themselves as intellectuals only through propaganda. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were never known for their intellectual prowess until they took power and their respective propaganda machines rebuilt their image.

And your central claim, that contemporary distrust of intellectuals is somehow rooted histories butchers begs the question: why isn't anti-intellectualism more widespread, especially on the populations most devastated by these monsters?

The type of anti-intellectualism outlined in this thread and news story is a distinctly American version. Yet in your rationalization of this view you name none of the cultural causes in the US for this view.

> I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples. Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.

The intellectuals are deeply at fault because it was the intellectuals who gave the orders. The militaries just carried them out.

You can argue that the pilot of the Enola Gay had some responsibility of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, it's absurd to argue that FDR and Truman had less responsibility for that bombing.

Neither Truman nor FDR were intellectuals. Truman especially: he was (in)famous for operating from the gut, making decisions swiftly and dealing with the consequences whatever they may be. FDR was blue-blooded and well educated (although he dropped out of law school) but he was ultimately a populist and charismatic leader who was said to have been guided by deep moral empathy for the poor that was instilled in him by a Christian boarding school headmaster: which would indicate that his thinking on his administration's policy was being guided by emotions and morals, rooted in an influential life figure's religious belief - as opposed to cold, plain, secular reason.

The examples being listed against intellectuals would be more appropriately applied against charismatic leaders who either instigate or take advantage of populist sentiment in populations during difficult times.

I'm guessing we have very different views of what an intellectual is, so let me make this clear: Being smart and well educated doesn't make you an intellectual. It just makes you smart and well educated. If that's your standard, HN is probably exclusively populated by these intellectuals. No offense, but this isn't the case ;).

> Neither Truman nor FDR were intellectuals.

The point was that leaders are responsible, not that those specific leaders were intellectuals.

It's interesting that you defend intellectuals against the charges of mass murder by using your definition of intellectual, but don't mention that the folks in question, while not intellectuals according to your definition, got their ideas and justifications from folks who do satisfy your definition of intellectuals. And, that went both ways - they were also supported and praised by intellectuals.

The whole point of being an intellectual is that words have consequences.

I'm not saying that a leadership's intellectual advisors and supporters are as responsible for the purges as the leadership, but it's absurd to claim that they had no responsibility. That claim is especially absurd coming from someone who tried to argue that the leadership was far less responsible than the folks who carried out their bidding.

It seems you are conflating (intentionally?) "intellectual" with "ideologue".

Also, what can this following sentence possibly be but doublethink?

> Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position.

(What is intellectualism if not a deep faith in rationality itself?)

I think he's trying to make the point that influential idealogues, more often than not, are intellectuals.

I'd like to note that, even if they are correlated, this does not in itself show that there is a causative relationship between intellectualism and dangerous ideology.

I don't think jerf drew any distinction between intellectuals and ideologues at all, not even in an attempt to argue for causation -- it's generous of you to assume he did.

To rephrase the grandparent comment's line of reasoning in a more sarcastic way: "Wildfire kill Ogg family! All fire bad! Ogg anti-fire!"

"(What is intellectualism if not a deep faith in rationality itself?)"

Faith in the academy.

which is trusting their beautiful theories too much

I think this mistrust of intellectuals is misplaced. Any kind of person, no matter education level, is susceptible this. Any person who is single-mindedly perusing his crazy view of the world and does not care of consequences is dangerous. Historically, intellectuals have had more means and knowledge to pursue their crazy ideas and I guess that is why they are more prominent.

You say you think the mistrust is misplaced, then proceed to (in my opinion) explain why it is not misplaced in your last sentence.

It's certainly true that non-intellectual theories of the world can be very destructive if society places too much trust in them. That would be "superstition", I think. But it hasn't been the problem in the 20th or 21st century in most places.

Superstition does rack up its own respectable death toll though; a number of the other slaughterings that can't be credited to intellectualism of any kind can be credited to some large degree to superstitions, especially if you're willing to call racism a sort of superstition, which is at least debatable.

explain why it is not misplaced in your last sentence

Good catch. I was trying to give a reason for this misattribution and not justify it.

But back to the larger point. It strikes me that intellectuals who have racked up the greatest kill-scores have done so because of their views in humanitarian fields (politics, philosophy, etc.) I am yet to see a genocide in the name of math or art. One exception I see is the misrepresentation of climate data to support global warming (if indeed that is true).

You say you think the mistrust is misplaced, then proceed to (in my opinion) explain why it is not misplaced in your last sentence. Except it is still the case that the reason you gave applies to non-intellectuals as well.

I recently finished reading "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black. Hitler's purges are really not reasonably debatable: the Third Reich employed statisticians who came up with racial theories to determine how "Jewish" a person was. They published their work in journals. They clearly tried to couch their bigotry in scientific terms.

With that said, I don't know what your operating definition of "intellectualism" is. Mine is just one who values and seeks out learning for its own sake.

Fair enough. I'll leave my post as-is for the record but consider it edited.

Further followup, it is obvious that "intellectualism" can have many definitions. My primary point is to demonstrate that for a large set of definitions, mistrust is rational. Playing with the definitions as so many of my repliers do makes it easy to lose the point in a flurry of words as we redefine "intellectualism" to something harmless by definition, which proves nothing about what's out there in the real world. All this is a way of obscuring and hiding from my point, though, which is that there is a kernel of truth here. That there are definitions of "intellectualism" that are not scary does not prove that there isn't a rather large, scary line of "intellectualism" that has proved very dangerous in the real world, seductive academic ideas and theories trusted over empirical evidence to dangerous effect.

How do you feel about the argument, put forth by some Christians, that Darwin is responsible for the holocaust? The evidence is that Darwinian thinking was a clear influence on Hitler's plans to purify the race.

I hope you think it's absurd. If a madman and a thug takes inspiration from a theory, it's hardly the fault of the theorist.

Most westerners are able to see the absurdity of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but they fail to see the absurdity of blaming the Holodomor on Marx. This is probably because the intellectual climate here has been poisoned by decades of cold-war propaganda, which created a paranoid sense that all socialism would necessarily devolve into Stalinism.

I didn't mean to trivialize horrible things that have been done by evil people in the past (regardless of their IQ). I think that there is a general definition that an "intellectual" is someone who is, at best, detached from reality in a way that you brought up. This wasn't my intent with the word.

I was referring more to the high-school-like effect where people interested in exploring "intellectual" topics like math tend to be treated as "uncool" because of how our education system tends to focus on how to perform a calculation rather fostering its real applications as Devlin mentions here.

If math was just boring calculation, I would also say it's "uncool."

I think there is a sensible logic here.

Bad Theories + Power --> Bad Results.

Bad theories come from all over the spectrum but power tends to fall into the hands of smart people.

I guess the problem is that the kind of intelligence needed to get into power and the kind needed once in power can be different. I view the latter as requiring a lot more critical thinking/questioning of your own ideas (although for the former you may need to question others ideas).

Read Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for more atrocities of the XXth century.

I'm surprised Pinker hasn't had a bigger backlash than he did. I chalk it up to the people who would make the most noise not being the type to come into contact with his ideas.

Ya left out Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... both made possible by "smart" people.