Quote for the day: "An intellectual commits treason against humanity when he or she propagandizes for ideas which lend themselves to the use of tyrants and terrorists."

That's from Eric Raymond's latest post on intellectual treason. Beginning with a summary of Julien Benda's 1927 La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the intellectuals), Raymond goes on to describe the defining features of intellectual treason today:

In Benda's time, the principal problem was what I shall call "treason of the first kind" or revolutionary absolutism: intellectuals signing on to a transformative revolutionary ideology in the belief that if the right people just got enough political power, they could fix everything that was wrong with the world. The "right people", of course, would be the intellectuals themselves ó or, at any rate, politicians who would consent to be guided by the intellectuals. If a few kulaks or Jews had to die for the revolution, well, the greater good and all that...the important thing was that violence wielded by Smart People with the Correct Ideas would eventually make things right.

[...]

But Benda also indicted what I shall call "treason of the second kind", or revolutionary relativism ó the position that there are no moral claims or universal values that can trump the particularisms of particular ethnicities, political movements, or religions. In particular, relativists maintain that that the ideas of reason and human rights that emerged from the Enlightenment have no stronger claim on us than tribal prejudices.

Today, the leading form of treason of the second kind is postmodernism ó the ideology that all value systems are equivalent, merely the instrumental creations of people who seek power and other unworthy ends. Thus, according to the postmodernists, when fanatical Islamists murder 3,000 people and the West makes war against the murderers and their accomplices, there is nothing to choose between these actions. There is only struggle between contending agendas. The very idea that there might be a universal ethical standard by which one is `better' than the other is pooh-poohed as retrogressive, as evidence that one is a paid-up member of the Party of Dead White Males (a hegemonic conspiracy more malign than any terrorist organization).

Treason of the first kind wants everyone to sign up for the violence of redemption (everyone, that is, other than the Jews and capitalists and individualists that have been declared un-persons in advance). Treason of the second kind is subtler; it denounces our will to fight terrorists and tyrants, telling us we are no better than they, and even that the atrocities they commit against us are no more than requital for our past sins.

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Today's treason of the intellectuals consists of equating suicide bombings deliberately targeting Israeli women and children with Israeli military operations so restrained that Palestinian children throw rocks at Israeli soldiers without fearing their guns. Today's treason of the intellectuals tells us that because the U.S. occasionally propped up allied but corrupt governments during the Cold War, we have no right to object to airliners being flown into the World Trade Center. Today's treason of the intellectuals consists of telling us we should do nothing but stand by, wringing our hands, while at least one of the groups in the Islamo-fascist axis acquires nuclear weapons with which terrorists could repeat their mass murders in New York City and Bali on an immensely larger scale.

Behind both kinds of treason there lurks an ugly fact: second-rate intellectuals, feeling themselves powerless, tend to worship power. The Marxist intellectuals who shilled for Stalin and the postmodernists who shill for Osama bin Laden are one of a kind ó they identify with a tyrant's or terrorist's vision of transforming the world through violence because they know they are incapable of making any difference themselves. This is why you find academic apologists disproportionately in the humanities departments and the soft sciences; physicists and engineers and the like have more constructive ways of engaging the world.

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It's not a game anymore. Ideas have consequences; postmodernism and multiculturalism are no longer just instruments in the West's intramural games of one-upmanship. They have become an apologetic for barbarians who, quite literally, want to kill or enslave us all. Those ideas ó and the people who promulgate them ó should be judged accordingly.

I did a series on politicized postmodernism in the academy last summer. The focus is on what that stance has done within the academy, particularly on how it has eroded the discipline of literary study. Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, Part IV is here, and the conclusion is here.