Revisiting Benda

 I finally finished Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs) this week. The book has sat on my shelf unread and followed me through various moves for at least a decade—perhaps almost two—so I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in getting around to it at long last—even if the book is not that long and can be read in a day or two. 

My copy dates from a 2007 print run, and comes complete with an introduction by Roger Kimball, of The New Criterion and National Review fame—which feels very of its moment. These were the grand old days of bow-tie-wearing right-wing "intellectuals"—and there was something of a vogue among neoconservatives for Benda specifically. 

This feels like an odd choice in retrospect. Benda's entire book is devoted to denouncing nationalism, militarism, and wars of aggression. Which doesn't exactly make him a natural fit for the Bush-era right. One wonders what exactly he would have made of, say, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. I find it hard to imagine he would have seen in it a triumph of humanism. 

Lord, what would the neocons say, / Did their Benda walk that way? to alter a couplet from Yeats. Benda was, as Orwell wrote of Dickens, apparently a writer "well worth stealing." 

But I suppose the neocons found in his defense of moral universalism and objectivity a useful mine of quotes for their war against postmodernism, "cultural relativism," etc. 

I spent a lot of time too back in those days denouncing the same ideological phenomena—and it all strikes me now as so much wasted ink. Not because I was wrong, but because the very sterility and emptiness of these doctrines eventually led them to collapse under the weight of their own self-contradictions, without any help from me. 

Here we are, a decade or two later, and it's plain that "post-structuralism" and "postmodern relativism" and so forth left no real impact on our intellectual culture. Of course, many of these same people are still writing about them in the same academic journals—but no one reads them and no one cares. 

Kimball's appearance on the front cover of my copy of Benda, however, prompted me to wonder what had ever become of him. The Bush-era neoconservative, after all, is a species that experienced multiple divergent evolutionary pathways in the subsequent Trump period. 

Kimball, I supposed, might have gone the way of the Bill Kristols and the George Conways and the Bulwark guys; in short, he might have become practically a "Resistance lib" by today's standards. 

Alas, I was disappointed. Here is what Wikipedia had to report about his later ideological evolution: "Kimball endorsed Donald Trump for President. In July 2017, Kimball wrote an article comparing Trump's 2017 speech in Warsaw to the Funeral Oration of Pericles of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. [...] Kimball [wrote] that Trump, 'despite his imperfections, is a man of good character' because he repeatedly demonstrated willingness 'to storm the cockpit of our corrupt, sclerotic, and increasingly unaccountable governmental apparatus.'"

Oh, the "strange irony of fate" (to borrow a phrase from Borowski). For it would seem from this synopsis that Roger Kimball, after penning his introduction to my copy of Benda, lived on to perfectly embody the "treason of the intellectuals" in our time. 

"A French writer, who was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to history," writes Benda (Aldington trans. throughout); "and he replied, 'I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a fanfare of trumpets.' The same thinker gives us to understand that his chief motive in 'seeking contact with national minds ' was to 'throw more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down."

What Benda here wrote of Barrès—a preeminent example of the "treason" he denounced among the "clerks"—sounds a great deal like Kimball, at least as reflected in the passage quoted above. Trump is to be celebrated because he "storms the cockpit" of our government and promises to free us from all that is "sclerotic" in our national life. It sounds a great deal like Kimball "followed Trumpism, as a man follows a fanfare of trumpets." 

Let us count the many ways, then, in which Benda would have opposed not only 2007-style neoconservatism, but still more the MAGA conservatism that developed in its wake. Would a man who condemned that other "characteristic of patriotism in the 'clerk': xenophobia[, t]he hatred of man for 'the man from outside'" have had any trouble figuring out how to assess the moral quality of Trumpism, or of its "clerkly" apologists? 

Benda writes witheringly of the "blind patriotism" of those intellectuals and men of letters who defend wars of aggression—"Kipling in England, if we can judge by his conduct during the attack of his nation upon the Boers," and "William James in the United States, if we recall his attitude when his compatriots seized the island of Cuba." In contrast, he praises the attitudes "of the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century, men like Bartholomew de las Casas [...], earnestly denouncing the cruelties committed by their compatriots[.]" 

Would Benda, judging by these passages, have had any patience with the neocon intellectuals of 2007 who tried to justify the invasion of Iraq—or those of today who defend Trump's lawless attacks on Venezuela and Iran?

Benda condemns those pseudo-intellectuals who "preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of justice, above all in its relations with other States;" who "praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the desire for 'strong frontiers,' the effort to keep his neighbors under his domination"; who "glorify those means which to them seem likely to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith, contempt for treaties." 

But what has Benda done here other than accurately describe the foreign policy of Donald J. Trump? Think of the creed of "strength, force, and power" preached by Stephen Miller; of Trump's contempt and scorn for our allies and treaty obligations; of his assassination of the leadership of Iran in the midst of ongoing negotiations; of his kidnapping of Venezuela's head of state; of his obsessions with "borders" and building "a wall" along them; of his idiotic gibes at Canada, threatening to incorporate them by force as the nation's "51st state"; or his proposals to annex Danish territory that he has repeated so many times now, our own NATO allies have actually started to prepare contingency plans in the event of a U.S. invasion.

"Sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith, contempt for treaties" indeed!

Benda writes too against "The extolling of harshness and the scorn for human love—pity, charity, benevolence [...] the cult for cruelty" among the pseudo-intellectuals of his time. What is this too if not a prophecy of the Trumpian right, of which it has been well said "the cruelty is the point"? Who was Benda talking about—if it was not the type of right-wing influencers and pundits who have once again, in our era, popped up like toadstools espousing the doctrine that "empathy" is "toxic" and "anti-Christian." 

Benda's criticisms of aggressive war and the cult of nationalism and "blind patriotism" could be invoked against both the neocon of 2007 and the MAGA-con of 2026; but with one key difference: whereas the neocon of the Bush era at least pretended to be acting in the spirit of the Enlightenment and in the tradition of liberal democracy, the MAGA conservative of today openly rejects both. 

And so, the difference between our era and the one of a short generation before us is much like the one Benda detected between the "clerks" of his day and those of yesteryear. Whereas in the past, the Middle Ages, say, people "acted ill but honored the good," the "clerk" in his day had erected evil into a positive system; thus, it could be said, he "acts ill and honors what is ill."

This, Benda repeats time and again, is what strikes him as so novel and frightening about his contemporary situation in the interwar period. It's not that people committed evil (that, alas, has been with us always). It's that they did it proudly, without shame. He quotes a line from Tolstoy: "Others were at least ashamed of being brigands; but what is to be done with this man, who is proud of it?"

When our own MAGA "thinkers"—or what pass for such—openly praise authoritarianism, Franco, the Nixon of Watergate and all his "dirty tricksters"; when they dabble in Hitler apologetics or Holocaust revisionism; when they openly mock and condemn "empathy," and exalt only "strength, force, and power"—it can indeed be said that they have decided to honor evil. 

That is a betrayal indeed of the intellectual's calling—the ultimate trahison of the clerks. 

Oh irony of ironies that the same people who praised Benda twenty years ago for calling out this phenomenon should live to commit this treason themselves!