Intellectual Morons
By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com October 5, 2004
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Daniel J. Flynn, the author of Why the Left Hates America and of the new book Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.
FP: Mr. Flynn, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Flynn: I'm a reader of Frontpage, so I particularly appreciate you having me.
FP: What motivated you to write this book? What, in general, has led to your interest in the Left and in its mindset?
Flynn: My purpose in writing Intellectual Morons is to get more people to think with their brain rather than their ideology.
The endless stream of recent scandals involving intellectuals rationalizing dishonesty in the service of a cause—Rigoberta Menchu, Betty Friedan, Michael Bellesiles, etc.—motivated me to write the book. It’s one thing for used car salesmen or politicians to lie. It’s sort of a staple of those trades. But the mission of the scholar is to find the truth. Unfortunately, truth has taken a back seat to political agendas among intellectuals.
My specific interest in the Left stems from the Right’s general disinterest in the Left. Outside of conservatives who once were on the Left—like the publisher of this site—there aren’t a lot of people on the Right who really know a whole lot about the Left. Intellectual Morons vaccinates readers against getting sucked into ideologies and gives them a better understanding of Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, Chomsky, and other figures of great influence.
FP: If it is possible to say so briefly, why do supposedly smart people fall for stupid ideas?
Flynn: The main idea behind Intellectual Morons is that ideology acts as a mental straitjacket. It blinds adherents to reality, breeds fanaticism, and rationalizes dishonesty. It makes smart people stupid.
It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you don’t use your brain. Intelligent people aren’t necessarily rigorous thinkers. In fact, many of them are mentally lazy. Ideology provides a way for lazy people to respond to issues, ideas, people, and events without thinking. For the ideologue, ideology is the Rosetta Stone of everything. Why think when the system provides all the answers? Ideology is attractive to smart people because it flatters them by suggesting that a single idea from the mind of an intellectual has the power of explaining all of history or ordering the affairs of whole nations. No person is that smart; no idea that good.
FP: How do you think the Rathergate scandal meshes with the thesis of your book?
Flynn: My book is about how ideology overrides common sense among intellectuals. The Rathergate scandal is about how ideology overrides common sense among newsmen. The pattern is the same. The players are different.
How did a massive news organization with enormous resources and all that manpower miss something that lone bloggers exposed almost immediately? The answer is that the CBS eye was blinded by ideology. CBS’s documents purporting to show Texas Air National Guard officers feeling pressured to sanitize George W. Bush’s service record are as real as Harry Potter. Rather and company believed the documents were real because they wanted to believe the documents were real. Had they come across information damaging to John Kerry, they would have acted in a more careful manner. If Dan Rather’s reaction—stonewalling, belittling opponents, avoiding the charges—seems more appropriate for a partisan than of an objective newsman, maybe it’s because Dan Rather is more of a partisan than an objective newsman.
FP: Tell us what you found about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
Flynn: I guess you could say Margaret Sanger was the original “feminazi.” Within a day of researching Margaret Sanger’s papers in the Library of Congress, I found a speech from 1932 in which she called for a massive system of concentration camps housing between 15 and 20 million Americans. Her eugenic dream would have been a nightmare for the poor and uneducated, both of whom would have been sent to the camps along with drug addicts, criminals, and others she saw as unfit for reproduction. Her plan is blunt and unambiguous: it would have imprisoned about one out of every six or seven Americans. The significant thing is not that I stumbled upon this information, but that not one of the dozen or so biographies of Sanger that I’ve examined even makes a fleeting reference to Sanger’s plan. This cover up is a scandal. Margaret Sanger is a towering figure in American history who is depicted as a champion of reproductive freedom and choice. This portrayal doesn’t hold up when you know that she advanced an American gulag and forced sterilization to prevent reproduction by massive portions of society.
FP: The Left continues its pathology in the War on Terror. Now we have leftist feminists showing up at demonstrations nude, wearing Saudi head-gear, and protesting Bush. Yet if they lived under the cultures and societies they are siding with, they would be exterminated within 30 seconds just for showing an ankle. We have groups like “Queers for Palestine” that show up at anti-Israel rallies and get beaten up and shouted down by Islamists at the demonstration. Homosexuals in Palestinian culture are persecuted and flee for safety in Israel.
Overall, the Left has sided with a fascist enemy that extinguishes all supposed leftist values themselves: women’s rights, gays’ rights, separation between religion and state, etc. etc.
Is there some kind of death wish or self-loathing here or what?
Flynn: When imposing a rational explanation upon the actions of irrational people you run the risk of appearing irrational yourself. Having said that, I'll try to provide a partial explanation that I think makes sense.
The Left's reflexive hatred for America and its allies overrides its genuflections to human rights. That's why they don't cheer human rights advances in Afghanistan, or Israel's tolerance of Arab homosexuals who would be severely punished for their behavior in their homelands.
The Left used to get their marching orders from the Soviet Union. They're gone now. But their enemy remains, and some leftists simply define their positions by what opposes the United States. If there has been a cohesive idea uniting the Left since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is anti-Americanism.
FP: In other words, then, even if Adolf Hitler came back and led the Nazis all over again in our modern world today, the Left would take his side just to be anti-American?
Flynn: I don't know what the Left would do in that situation today. I do know what the Left did when this situation was real rather than hypothetical.
In the late 1930s, Leftists who vehemently opposed Nazism suddenly became vehement opponents of a war against Nazism once Hitler and Stalin became allies. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, for instance, becomes the Hollywood League for Democratic Action in 1939 to catch-up with the Soviet line. League When the no-honor-among-thieves alliance broke apart, the Left then reverted to its vocally anti-Nazi stance.
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but it's usually a fairly accurate indicator.
FP: In your book you go into Chomsky's five dumb ideas. Could you share them with our readers?
Flynn: Noam Chomsky has had many dumb ideas, but I picked just five to examine in Intellectual Morons. Let me give you the abridged version of three that I discuss.
First, prior to the war in Afghanistan Chomsky warned of millions of civilian deaths in that war-torn country. The numbers are in and the highest estimates put the figure at a few thousand, while other sources put it in the high hundreds. Second, Chomsky claimed that Clinton's bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan resulted in more than 10,000 deaths. In fact, there were no more than a handful of casualties. Third, Chomsky famously denied the Cambodian genocide in an infamous book review he co-authored in The Nation in 1977. He clearly accepted the notion that "executions have numbered at most in the thousands," and were generally out of the Khmer Rouge's control. He puts "slaughter" in the obligatory scare quotes, speaks of "tales of Communist atrocities," and regards a death count of a million or more as a joke.
FP: What are your views on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11?
Flynn: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a crude, anti-Bush campaign commercial. What's worse for Moore, it's boring, contains little original footage, and the film often appears grainy. It had a good soundtrack, though.
It's propaganda. Two types of falsehood stand out.
First, there are the specific falsehoods. One example would be Moore's claim that Bush waged the war in Afghanistan to help the Union Oil Company of California install an oil pipeline. But Unocal dropped plans for a pipeline when Bill Clinton was president. It's almost two years since we ejected the Taliban, and not only is there no pipeline but there are no plans for one either. This pipeline exists in Michael Moore's delusions, but not in Afghanistan.
Second, there are general falsehoods--dishonest portrayals. Fahrenheit 9/11 depicts smiling children riding ferris wheels, flying kites, and riding bicycles in Hussein's Iraq. Then Moore cuts to the war and images of burned, wounded, and dead children. On different grounds than Moore, I opposed the Iraq war but honesty compels me to ask: Couldn't proponents of the war just as easily have juxtaposed Saddam's pre-war brutalities with post-war happiness?
FP: What would be your definition of “intellectual moron”?
Flynn: An intellectual moron is someone who squanders his superlative cognitive abilities by relying on ideology rather than his mind to do his thinking. Next to this definition is a picture of Noam Chomsky.
FP: So Mr. Flynn, what hope is there that conservatives can win the Culture War? The Left clearly moulds our language and our society's parameters of debate.
Tell us where there is hope that this leftist control over our culture will one day, perhaps, be shattered.
Flynn: Very few people agreed with Ronald Reagan when he said that the West would transcend Communism. But it happened, and it didn't happen by accident.
In academia, Hollywood, the judiciary, and other strongholds of the Left, the prospects for conservative progress may appear bleak. But we've seen freedom triumph over totalitarianism, and conservative ideas gain at least a beachhead in the media. Progress has been made when concerted action has been taken. If conservatives focus on the campuses, for instance, in the way that they focused for many years on media bias, I think great things will happen. I'm an optimist.
FP: I hope you are right. But overall, as long as humans remain who they are -- fallen and flawed -- I think the socialist impulse will never go away, and will remain the easiest thing for people to cling to. Indeed, as long as inequality exists, so will the impulse toward equality, and so millions more humans will be tortured, starved and exterminated.
We can’t make things “right” and “perfect” in this world, because only God is perfect. And because of original sin and free will, imperfection and tragedy must be constant realities of human life. For many humans, however, the easiest thing intellectually is to believe that this can be fixed and that heaven can be built on earth – an experiment that always leads to hell on earth. And so the Left will remain powerful and continue to build more human hells in its utopian experiments, which now involves the glorification of the suicide bomber.
What do you think?
Flynn: The idea that man can be perfected is the most dangerous delusion. Whether it's an Islamic terrorist attempting to establish Allah's earthly kingdom, a Nazi believing that a perfect race of men can be created, or a Communist looking to make Heaven on Earth, the motivation of these fanatics is the same. They are all utopians.
The road to heaven on earth always seems to detour to hell on earth. If you really believe that your ideology will bring salvation to humanity, what would you be willing to do to impose this world-saving idea? Would you be willing to lie? To kill? Looking back on the last hundred years, the answer too often is yes. When you're building utopia, all is permitted. No end is greater, so no means can be too base to get there.
FP: And this is why I am saying that I don't think the Left can ever really be defeated, because the desire in many humans to believe in utopia on earth is stronger than acknowledging the limits of human hope. But you appear optimistic?
Flynn: If you're asking if I'm optimistic that the Left will disappear, the answer is no. If you're asking if I'm optimistic that the Left will diminish in strength in academia, the judiciary, Hollywood, and other strongholds, I'm saying there are reasons for optimism. In America in the early '70s, liberals had a near monopoly on DC-based policy organizations. They don't anymore. In the '80s and '90s, liberals had a near monopoly on major media outlets. They don't anymore. These changes came about because large groups of people acted in concert to change matters. Higher education and other institutions can change for the better, but only if large numbers of people make an effort.
FP: Ok, fair enough. Thank you Mr. Flynn. It was a pleasure.
Flynn: Thanks Jamie.
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Get your copy of Dan Flynn's new book, Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, for only $25.95 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
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