[NSD 10/4/02]

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: MINDS ON FIRE

Robert Conquest—former British soldier, diplomat and journalist, and now a resident historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution—notes that ideologues are more threatening today than in the past.

"Dostoevsky writes of a human type 'whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes forever.' The true Idea addict is usually something roughly describable as an 'intellectual.' The British writer A. Alvarez has (and meaning it favorably) defined an intellectual as one who is 'excited by ideas.' Ideas can indeed be exciting, but the use of the intellect might be thought to be primarily one of subjecting them to knowledge and judgment—especially on the record of our century.

"Intelligence alone is thus far from being a defense against the plague. Students, in particular, have traditionally been a reservoir of infection. The Nazis won the German students before they won the German state, and there are many similar examples. In much the same way, a leading scholar of Russian affairs (Ronald Hingley of Oxford) noted during the Soviet period that basic misapprehensions about it in the West were rare among truly serious scholars, and also among ordinary people, being confined to those of fair intelligence. He commented, 'For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed.'

"Eric Hoffer suggests that those who become possessed by exciting Ideas and identification with causes are often 'selfish people who were forced by innate shortcomings or external circumstances to lose faith in their own selves.' It might be argued that, whether through temperament or accident, some who are simply bored with the quotidian turn to Ideas as stimuli. We are told of hostesses in Berlin in the early 1930s to whom National Socialism gave 'meaning to their empty lives.'

"Boredom is indeed a pitiable condition. And the feeling of meaninglessness can be devastating. Still, to compensate by abandoning reason for ideology is a desperate remedy."