Estado Sentido

E. M. Oblomov, "Intelligentsia Elegy":

If some of Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms sound familiar to American conservatives, it may be because the qualities he despairs of are endemic to educated elites everywhere. Or, it may be because our American intelligentsia has been Russified over the past century. You would think that a free society would give full expression to the intelligentsia’s virtues. Yet, somehow our own intelligentsia, lacking any serious need for moral courage, has managed to concentrate in itself the worst aspects of its Russian cousins: sanctimony without sacrifice; obsession with egalitarian social justice that “paralyzes the love of and interest in truth”; hatred of its own history and the confusion of that hatred with a “passionate ethical impulse”; an exaggerated sense of its own rights and entitlements; contempt for the views of ordinary people; a transparently false, pretentious pose of acting only on the basis of undisputed facts and disinterested principle. If in the Soviet case we see a servile intelligentsia crouching defensively against an all-powerful totalitarian police state, in the United States we see a different dynamic: a powerful, self-assured intelligentsia increasingly at odds with the workings of democracy.

 

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The American intelligentsia remains hard to define. A good working definition may be a class of educated people who, like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, are able to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Here, in no particular order, is a full day’s worth: colleges are hotbeds of rape culture; Cuba has excellent health care; the New York Times has no partisan bias; Islamophobia is a meaningful word; poverty causes crime; poverty causes terrorism; global warming causes terrorism; gender is a social construct; capitalism causes racism; racism causes crime; racism causes poverty; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia; and so on.

At least in the Soviet case, complicity in a soul-crushing system of official lies was coerced at the point of a bayonet. It is disturbing that, with our intelligentsia, these beliefs are self-inflicted.

(também publicado aqui.)