In perhaps the weirdest dispatch it has ever been my giddiness to read, the NY Times reports that the French government will "launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds 'Islamo-leftist' tendencies that 'corrupt society,'" alongside the outré objectionables of divisive, "radical" scholarship of race, gender and post-colonialism.
Said the minister of higher education, one Frédérique Vidal, the government's Center for Scientific Research will conduct investigations into the "totality of research underway in our country."
Ms. Vidal, meet Savonarola. You two could have an exhilarating roll in the hay; but actually it would be a ménage à trois, since French President Emmanuel Macron would also be on hand, so to speak. He has endorsed this fatuous, chesty madness as a right-flank maneuver against the far-right Marine Le Pen.
The Gallic Young Turks of academic eminence have, suffice it to say, as the Times does, "clashed with an older generation of intellectuals who regard these social science theories as American imports" (even though the theories are global in origin). No doubt — to me, anyway — such valid inquiries have morphed into sentimental dogma, "wokeness" overkill, and the repressive enforcement of GoodThink. Frédérique, Giroloma, and Emmanuel may enjoy looking at each other's ass in the barn's flying hay, but in institutions of contemporary intellectualism, you had best watch your own.
I just read conservative historian Paul Johnson's Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky — and I'm still wondering why. Married since 1958, Johnson once carried on an 11-year affair, yet in his well-written volume on the aforementioned and other modern-age thinkers, e.g. Shelley and Hemingway, he smugly eviscerates the badly behaved — their philandering ways; often, their excessive drinking; their mistreatment of family and friends; and most of all, their leftist arrogance in promoting assorted paths to greater enlightenment and a better world.
Whatever the personal failings of Johnson's intellectuals, I've always adhered to Montaigne's take on the matter. He cared not, he wrote, if his cook was a stinking drunk outside of the kitchen, as long as he served up edible repasts. A fair, even judicious attitude, I say. And to British historian Paul Johnson, I say, Why so bloody selective?
Why, throughout the book, do you demean all intellectuals? What of S. Johnson, Gibbon, Freud, Jung, Hume, Keynes, Goethe, Spinoza, Arendt, Weber, Durkheim, Niebuhr, the Durants, Edward Said, Isaiah Berlin, Henry Adams, John Stuart Mill and dozens of other modern-era ponderers in search of higher knowledge? I'm sure that all of them, being human, had their personal failings, too. But what in God's name does that have to do with their ideas?
In closing I'll just say to Ms. Vidal and the French government's Center for Scientific Research, this — the obsessive wokeness of academic institutions — well, this too shall pass. Which, in fact, was a once rather common conservative attitude toward epochal obsessions.