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When French writer Julien Benda published The Treason of the Clerks in 1926, Europe still lay in the shadow of the Great War and a failure of civilizational nerve. The old verities of faith were eroding, and new political religions like communism, ethnonationalism, and fascism were battling for ascendancy in people’s hearts and in the streets.
For Benda, this cultural malaise was the consequence of intellectuals––the “clerks” whose vocation is the life of the mind and the search for truth––having betrayed that calling to honor humane ideals and moral integrity, and instead pursued “practical advantages” in order to fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality.” He particularly focused on the ideologies “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.”
In short, a betrayal of the true vocation of the intellectual to “urge their fellow beings to other religions than to the religion of the material.”
Today, the disease Benda analyzed has metastasized throughout our body politic. This new “betrayal of the clerks” touches on every dimension of our culture, not just the universities, the natural habitat of today’s intellectuals, or its adjuncts in high-brow culture, but in K-12 education, popular culture, many churches, government agencies, sports, media, and entertainments.
This abandonment of truth and moral clarity, and in its place the adoption of a philistine, relativistic utilitarianism, has deep roots. The most heinous betrayal by intellectuals supposedly committed to truth and humane principle is the Holocaust. The seed of this atrocity was “scientific racism,” the application of Darwinian evolution to political and social policy.
Darwin’s “natural selection,” the improvement of species through the selection of random mutations that increased survivability and exterminated the less fit, informed Nazism’s race theory and gruesome practice. Like England’s Francis Galton, who said “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providentially, quickly and kindly,” Nazi scientists directed natural selection, only they left out the “kindly” and doubled-down on the “ruthlessly.”
The purpose was to maintain “racial hygiene” and avoid “race suicide” by exterminating inferior peoples who polluted the superior “folk” by interbreeding, and who competed with the superior races for resources and land. Nazism, then, misapplied the core of Darwinian evolution and its components like superior fitness for survival, and “extermination” for the less fit, the losers in this competition for resources. Like Galton, the Germans added the novel feature of scientists taking control of this process through political policies, just as British and American scientists and researchers did through eugenics. Numerous German scientists and academics signed on to this atrocity, betraying their professional ethics and their own humanity.
Marxism, however, with its toll of 100 million dead, was the first corrupter of the intellectuals. The rise of Marxism was aided by secularism, the discrediting of God and theology, and their replacement by metaphysical materialism and its new gospel scientism, a debasement of real science to provide camouflage for dubious and destructive ideologies. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.”
Marxism also adopted many of the features of Christianity, which made it an attractive substitute to those atheists who looked to science rather than faith for mankind’s meaning, destiny, and perfection. The intellectual’s vocation now became promulgating Marxist communism and proselytizing the masses. “Truth” and facts were reduced to whatever confirmed the Marxist libretto, and any argument and empirical evidence contradicting that dogma was demonized and distorted.
Thus Lenin’s and Stalin’s mass murders, engineered famines, gulags, and torture were consigned to the “memory hole,” and only the irrational, the evil, or those blinded by bourgeois “false consciousness,” Marxism preached, would accept the evidence for those crimes going back to the early Twenties. “Useful idiots,” as Lenin allegedly called them, in America and Europe, many of them credentialed scholars and intellectuals, accepted the lies and, like the New York Times’s Walter Duranty in the Thirties, publicized them.
The exposure of those lies by eyewitnesses and, more importantly, access to the Soviet archives in the Nineties, has not discredited Marxism nor its cousin Socialism, of which more than half of Gen Z’ers approve. Nor did the collapse of the USSR, Marxism’s superpower idol of global fellow travelers, weaken Marxism’s allure. The persistence of loyalty to communism and apologetics for the Soviet Union’s atrocities has turned such unseemly admiration for the greatest mass murderer in history into a mark of status and superior sophistication. These “useful idiots” 2.0 exist because affection for communism has burrowed deep into high culture, popular culture, and the universities and their “clerks,” where their betrayal has been institutionalized.
Indeed, one of the founders of the racist outfit Black Lives Matter bragged that she and her co-founder are “trained Marxists,” which as anyone versed in its history knows. is a confession that lies, slander, ad hominem attacks, violence, and a disregard of truth will be part of the organization’s modus operandi. And don’t forget the prestige and support that Black Lives Matter has enjoyed in our universities, media, corporations, and government agencies.
So too are the rise of political correctness and now “wokeism,” which likewise enjoy the approval of universities, where those illiberal attacks on, and censorship of proscribed ideologies are practiced, supported, and facilitated. As for Benda’s “racial passions,” multicultural identity politics have tribalized Americans, and dividing them into “oppressors” and “victims,” with commensurate rewards and punishments. And don’t forget the show trials in which those accused of sexual assault or “hate crimes” are deprived of Constitutional protections. That such tyranny takes place in the temples of truth and reason constitutes yet another modern “betrayal of the clerks.”
Even more egregious is the nationalization of a fringe beliefs––that subjective or neurotic feelings lead people to believe they’ve been born with the wrong biological sex. Worse, many medical doctors have endorsed this unscientific idea despite its lack of any empirical evidence. This irrational notion is as lunatic as “Darwinian racism” and eugenics, another example of the scientism that has facilitated the betrayal of the clerks.
And what should we say of certified, licensed physicians who betray the foundational principle of their profession, “first do no harm”? Actually, the Greek original is even more specific: “Benefit patients, or don’t injure them.” Those doctors prescribe puberty blockers or hormones contrary to the patient’s sex, and mutilate them irreversibly, leaving them sterile––the equivalent of the forced sterilization of women in America for 47 years, or the ubiquitous castration of men throughout history to make them eunuchs. These primitive treatments of the “transgendered” constitute a double betrayal of the clerks.
These are just a few examples of our contemporary “betrayal of the clerks.” The wholesale embrace, especially in the “human sciences” and the humanities, of postmodern and poststructuralists sophistries such as the contingency and subjectivity of truth, meaning, language, and values like beauty and excellence––all are mere epiphenomena of the structures of power and the interests of those wielding it. This “higher nonsense” has wreaked havoc on our fundamental beliefs, moral goods, ethics, and principles, which have lost their moorings in reality and exist now as mere preferences, their goodness or evil adjudicated by those who seek the power to control others.
Finally, Julien Benda foresaw the consequences of the “great betrayal.” Europe, he predicted, was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world”––a prediction that came to pass 13 years after he made it. So, too, we today are living in the political and moral corruption that is the predicate of disaster.
Our world could end in an orgy of violence like World War II, given the ambitions of the West’s nuclear-armed enemies like China, Russia, and soon Iran. More likely than such a horrendous “bang,” our world might end with a “whimper,” a self-inflicted decline brought on by hedonism, fashionable self-loathing, arrogant virtue-signaling, spurious moral preening, and fiscal catastrophes engineered by the serial betrayal of our “clerks,” those “experts” and “managerial elites” who have cast aside faith, practical wisdom, tradition, and common sense.
If the betrayal of the clerks continue to dominate, America, what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” for freedom, will be lost.
“Benefit patients, or don’t injure them.”
Thanks Bruce, excellent article.
Ayn Rand is the only way up and out of all this filth, only who wants to know? Certainly not the conservatives. They need new prayers. LJ
America and the West in general are heading towards a well earned Darwin Award as a civilisation too foolish to live anymore . If the Russians, Jihadists or Chinese don’t actually nuke us then we’ll simply commit suicide by ”open borders” or self destruct by undermining the sexes and creating a ”new man” which is androgynous !
But this kind of decadence and degeneracy was predicted by H G WElls over a 100 years ago in his dystopian novel
YOUTUBE The Time Machine (1960) Meet The Eloi / Books Crumble To Dust (3mins)
“ fiscal catastrophes engineered by the serial betrayal of our “clerks,” those “experts” and “managerial elites” who have cast aside faith, practical wisdom, tradition, and common sense.”
When did we start to consider those “experts” should keep us locked in our homes and afraid?
Prior to the plandemic we would consider them to be mad scientists.
Time to defund the UN.
Great article thanks.
Excellent. I decry the arts. I heard someone say recently, “why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore?”
Years ago, I was at a symphony concert Mitch Miller was directing, and he conmented during the program that music writers of today, don’t know how to craft good melodies. I would add that rock music starting in the 50s was the beginning of the degradation of music of the European tradition. I can’t stand modern music. It is terrible, absolutely terrible.
” the beginning of the degradation of music of the European tradition….”
The beginning of the decline of Western music was Claude Debussy.
Your problem is you don’t like Beethoven either. In fact, other than Rand’s Tiddlywink Music, I can’t think of any music you actually like. Or any popular culture other than the movie stars of 30s and 40s. And that wasn’t real either. It was the movies. Most of them were rich reprobates, not the polite gentlemanly people you seem to think they were.
It seems that your entire universe is comprised of the falsehoods you have made up in your own mind. I guess Debussy isn’t rationally selfish enough for you.
Always pushing the rock up hill and getting nowhere as usual. I would call you a professional failure but then I would be insulting professional failures.
The Sodomite faction in the United Methodist Church has caused a schism, with many local churches disassociating from the national organization. Thanks to the clerks (propagandists) in the national church and the media, the LBGTQ etc. faction is portrayed as heroic. A confused muddle has resulted. In the Baltimore Sun’s recent coverage of a local UMC convention volatized by the issue, it’s difficult to tell whether the 23 churches “allowed” to leave the national group consisted of traditionalists or Sodomites. Either way, the church that John Wesley founded is dead. Thanks to the “woke” clerks, what remains is a zombie version.
I don’t know much about the UMC but isn’t that what the Left does to all institutions? It infiltrated them, hollows them out, and re-purposes them in its service. It’s resulted in the zombification of nearly all of our institutions
“wokeness” means corruption. You’re right about that. It’s demonic.
Yes. “We are the Borg….”
Then there is Huge and his Borg Free Thinkers
Excellent article. Pondering the end of civilization is unavoidable these days.
The “clerks” are surely the starting point for such betrayals. However, were those in the next layer of the “intellectual structure of production” less susceptible to the poison, the damage would be greatly mitigated.
We’ve always had some “treasonous clerks.” For example, the Communist infiltration of the United States we already in progress in the 1920s, a decade during which national morale was high and resistance to foreign dogmas was even higher. The penetration of those treasons was slight — admittedly large enough to infect the FDR “Brain Trust” — and thus Marxist doctrines were not widely taken up or advocated.
Surely the “clerks,” especially those in our “institutions of higher learning,” must be either detoxified or expelled. But a robust, knowledge-founded Americanism capable of defending its ideals must also be cultivated among business executives, the media, the entertainment industry, and most especially among the teachers of minor children. Consider it “defense in depth” for the American mind and way.
The left starts Brainwashing the youth when their s till young and they start in 1st Grade
Years before 1st grade, the television is a hateful and dangerous babysitter.
And you don’t think this has something to do with the fact that, since 9-11, we’ve been living in a state of fear? “If you see something, say something,” and all that? Homeland Security, FISA courts, pandemics, etc. If you want to defeat critical thinking, keep ’em scared.
As an unfortunate degree holder in two of the social “sciences”, I can with absolute conviction declare that every single liberal arts discipline should be eliminated, with the exceptions of Art and Religious Studies. All of the so called “Social Sciences” and their derivatives should be minimized under History.
Feminist and Gender studies, CRT, DEI and all of their subsidary and related “scholarship” should be banished forthwith and forever from every taxpayer subsidized public and private institution.
What you are calling for – the elimination of the liberal arts, as already happened. And that is the problem!
Liberal arts must be RESTORED. It is no longer taught except at classical Christian private schools and home schools (usually in the form of The Trivium).
Hillsdale College is a very fine small liberal arts college whose graduates are over represented in positions of leadership in politics, education, art and the sciences. Liberal arts teaches the student how to think, not what to think. Hillsdale takes not one penny of federal monies in order to maintain the right to teach classical liberal arts.
___ Is the world’s “last best hope” for freedom lost?
That would be MAGA. And no, it is not. Never lose resolve; never lose Faith.
America …. Land of Depravity.
What could go wrong ?
Oh, dear, what a mush of truths and trahisons!
I like Mr. Thornton very much, but his scapegoats not so much. I can’t blame a blameless Charles Darwin for the horrors of ethnic mass murder, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t fly, any more than the Woke distortion of sexuality can be
attributed to real sexuality. Mr. Thornton may have fallen for the lie that perception = reality. The Nazis and Bolsheviks practiced the Big Lie, but we don’t have to follow their example, do we?
I like the Treason of the Intellectuals very much, and today even the teachers’ union seems to be bent on betraying the children in its care. The “clercs” in the book title are really the teachers at all levels, and the tenure system in schools and bureaucracy has obviously entrenched some real psychopaths. All true, and catastrophic.
It has to be corrected somehow.
But please, let’s not take the word of professional liars like Friedrich Engels for the truth.
b.aronson
“Adapt or die” as the old racists used to say. Or was that a misapplication of Darwinian principles? I think Darwin understood evolution had no principles even if some enthusiasts like David Attenborough still don’t. They didn’t survive too good.
We have a treason of more than just clerics and it looks like the resolution will be painful as history usually is.
Great review. There were other prophets too seeing it all like Julien Benda.
The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in – see http://judeochristianamerica.org/OnEcclesiastes.htm
Raspeil envisaged this in “The Camp of the Saints”; Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged”, and most recently Michael Weller in “An Island for Whites” http://judeochristianamerica.org/Weller/
the answer to the question is , yes . it’s lost .
For those not paying attention, the entire current attack on Western Civ: open borders, decarceration, crap schools & teachers, BLM, the homeless, eyc., is rooted in empathy. That poor kid, thug, murderer, teacher…
And, as such, it is downstream from suffrage.
We can have a free, fair, safe, educated society … or we can let women vote. No third option exists
I hope to meet you when the Democrats send us to reeducation camps. You are correct, but there is no way back to voting being a duty of those who have demonstrated that they are responsible adults. Nowadays, it’s all about “democracy” and making sure every registered Democrat’s vote gets counted toward the Democrat candidate, regardless of whether the voter actually votes.