The moral pathologist of an era

The Dishonesty of the Liberal Conscience by Anthony Daniels. It is a book review (of Anti-Americanism by Paul Hollander) from the August 28, 1992 Spectator (UK). Interesting for a couple of reasons. The review is approving but muscular in its prose and with distinct turns of phrase. I checked the reviewer, Anthony Daniels. Didn't recognize him. Googled Anthony Daniels. Ahh. There's the connection. Anthony Daniels is the essayist who frequently writes under the nom du plume, Theodore Dalrymple. Always insightful, erudite, and . . . muscular in his prose. I did not know back in 1992, pre-internet, that Daniels and Dalrymple were one and the same.

The second point of interest is that the topic is evergreen. Postmodernism was just percolating through the intelligentsia and academia in 1992. Twenty-five years later it is finally cresting before, hopefully, plunging, but still topical.

From Daniel's essay. Emphasis added.

Paul Hollander is the author of Political Pilgrims, the classic and often very funny account of Western intellectuals who, blinded by the problems of their own society and frustrated by the lack of power and influence they considered their due, sang the praises of communist regimes which raised tyranny to new and previously unsuspected heights. In the present book, Professor Hollander deals with the reverse side of this intellectual and emotional dishonesty: anti-Americanism.

That he should have recognised both philocommunism and anti-Americanism as centrally important phenomena in the spiritual life of our time is greatly to his credit, though I doubt he will receive much gratitude from certain quarters for his shrewdness. His diagnosis is expert and exact: he is the moral pathologist of an era.

Why should so many intellectuals have extolled despotism and decried freedom? Why should they have become so incapable of moral perspective? They magnify the admitted imperfections of American society until they overshadow all its good qualities, thus rendering totally inexplicable the burning desire of countless millions over many generations to emigrate there.

The lack of moral perspective which Professor Hollander describes is very common, and far from an occasional betise. Only the other day I was reading the foremost British textbook of forensic psychiatry, where I found in the chapter on serial killers, written by two professors at Stanford, a short list of the worst crimes of the 20th century. The Holocaust and the My Lai massacre were placed side by side, as being roughly equivalent. Of the Armenian genocide, the Great Terror, the Ukrainian famine, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and of Pol Pot, Macias Nguema, Haile Mariam Mengistu and Idi Amin (among others), there was not a mention.

According to Professor Hollander, the absence of perspective is in part caused by the sheer increase in the amount of information available to people who have no historical knowledge. Since the mass media inevitably emphasise the grotesque, the abhorrent and the shocking, the misleading impression is easily created in the weakminded that we live in a society of unprecedented awfulness.

But, as Professor Hollander indicates, the problem goes much deeper than this. Intellectuals, who think they uncover and reveal the secret workings of the world where others are blinded by mere appearances, believe they should become the acknowledged legislators of the world. In a democratic market system, however, they are accorded no special significance; therefore they revolt against it.

Intellectuals dislike the sight of the uneducated masses enjoying themselves or exercising freedom: at heart, their objection to the marketplace is an aesthetic and misanthropic one. When people are given choice, they almost invariably choose the meretricious, the trashy, the cheap and the nasty. Intellectuals then have to deny that the choice of the masses is really a choice at all, but merely a conditioned reflex; and they invent concepts such as the Baader-Meinhof gang's Konsumterror (the Consumption Terror) to justify the irritation they feel that the taste of others differs from, and is far worse than, their own.

Professor Hollander penetrates straight to the dishonesty at the heart of the liberal conscience, which is so eager to assume the burden of guilt for all the woes of the world. In the first place, this guilt — or rather, pseudoguilt — permits people to behave abominably in their private lives, and frees them from all customary restraints: for what is a little personal cruelty, selfishness, dishonesty etc. to set against the monstrous injustices of the world at large? Only a hypocrite would notice a peccadillo while so many Dinka, Nuer and Azande starve in southern Sudan.

Secondly, the assumption of guilt is extremely grandiose. It assures us that, while we may be terrible people, we are at least of the greatest importance. In Central America, I met liberal Americans who thought that the Guatemalan army couldn't figure out how to burn down straw huts with a flame thrower without American tuition. The liberals failed to notice that this was rather condescending, and reduced the Guatemalans to the level of minors, and stupid minors at that. In fact, the liberal conscience is but a gestalt-switch away from the imperialist's white man's burden.

Anti-Americanism, because its subject matter is more diffuse, lacks somewhat the literary unity of Political Pilgrims, but it brings together in a very readable and often amusing way a vast mass of material vital for an understanding of our times. Professor Hollander deserves the highest praise for writing a book of great philosophical and psychological allusiveness without resort to any jargon whatsoever.