Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas [Paperback]

Unlike many who have "reviewed" this book, I've actually read it. Some have called it a right-wing screed and taken Flynn to task for not denouncing people like McVeigh. Understand that Flynn is explaining why some will grasp onto an idea, regardless of its factual integrity, and promote it. These are not ignorant folks, but well-educated professionals and educators. "Ideology trumps all" is his thesis.

I'm sure someone else could take some right-wing ideological tenets and do the same thing, but they haven't.

If you read this with an open mind, and disregard your own biases, it may allow you to take a fresh look at some of your own opinions. In the chapters dealing with Animal Rights and Environmentalism, Flynn makes a good argument that people blinded by ideology have actually caused more pernicious problems by "solving" a simpler one through their efforts. What he points out is how ideology becomes an overpowering force in some people's lives, and that is something we should all consider.

Ideology is at odds with logic and consistency because logic and consistency require that, occasionally, a sacred cow must perish. Ideology and its adherents require that those loyal to the cause never stray; fundamentalist religion and followers of a particular ideology can be said to suffer from the same myopic affliction. Thus, what we have in Daniel Flynn's Intellectual Morons is an exploration of how otherwise intelligent people-mainly Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and other intellectual luminaries of the left-have jettisoned the principles of logic and intellectual rigor in favor of chicanery, deceit, and manipulation to further their political agendas.

The premise for the book is promising, and, in some of the chapters (each of which chapter is devoted to a particular `intellectual moron' and his or her adherents) Flynn succeeds at this admittedly ambitious goal. For instance, the first chapter on Herbert Marcuse is generally excellent (though it too has its flaws); Lynn eviscerates the idea that Marcuse's obscurantist prose contained worthwhile ideas. Rather he compares Marcuse's often contradictory and perplexing phrases to that of Orwell's Newspeak in 1984 ("Ignorance is Strength," etc.) Unfortunately, this effort is inconsistent throughout the book, and some of the claims Flynn makes are bizarre, unsubstantiated, or just plain vicious in their nature.

Flynn believes that Marcuse's writing leads to the logical consequence of courts' upholding gay marriage, Clinton's lechery, Madonna, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears (page 21 of the hardcover edition). It is not clear how this follows; certainly, if we are to adduce causes for these pop culture phenomena we can point to many strains of thought over the past 100 years that have allowed vapidity to flourish. On the next page (page 22), Flynn, in a footnote, bizarrely refers to the movie The Hours as a "boring feminist film" when the film was neither, unless by `boring' is meant it was not a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and by `feminist' is meant that most of its stars were women.

Further examples abound, all of which are to the detriment of Flynn's overarching thesis that the intellectual left is bereft of cogency and a commitment to an objective standard of truth. To wit: on page 34, he cites as an inevitable consequence of Alfred Kinsey the playing of music videos on MTV that resemble "soft-core porn." When was the last time MTV played music videos? The nineteen-eighties? So why does Flynn mention Aguilera and Spears as the soft-core porn stars?

On page 39, he relates the story of Alfred Kinsey mutilating his genitals, and offers as the explanation for this act merely that Kinsey was perverse and repulsive; he refuses to explore the possibility that Kinsey's homosexuality caused him distress and that his genital mutilation was an attempt at a kind of self-flagellation. This is a path of inquiry that is at once obvious and worth pursuing. It certainly would not be the first time that someone shamed about their sexuality or sexual proclivities attempted self-mutilation.

Page 102: "According to [Howard] Zinn, [Christopher Columbus] and those who followed him to the New World ventured for one reason: profit." This isn't news; it's well established that Columbus convinced Ferdinand & Isabella to finance his voyage with the promise of jewels and gold and silver for Spain's empire. Indeed, the whole of the mercantilist economy that developed when the new world was discovered depended on the assumption that exploration was undertaken for purposes of earning a profit. Flynn argues that Zinn reduces everything to economics; if it happened in history, Flynn says, Zinn believes it has a profit motive. While this may be a stretch, and Flynn is correct to point out that Zinn has an unhealthy obsession with trying to point out the alleged evils of capitalism, it does not follow from this that Zinn is incorrect in claiming that Columbus had money on his mind when he proposed his voyage.

These criticisms are a shame because his book attempts to highlight a very important fact that most other commentators conveniently ignore: much of what passes as intellectual conversation and inquiry among the political left these days (as well as the reactionary right) is ideological in nature and not really intellectual. Most of it is artifice, some of it is conjecture, and all of it ignores the inconvenient reality that, as Lynn notes at the end of his book, ideas have consequences. Lynn makes the point that Marx's publication of Das Kapital presaged the death of 100 million people in the twentieth century. He implies that we ought to ask what will the consequences of some of the more outlandish ideas proffered by today's intellectuals be?

Unlike other "reviewers" I did read the book. Flynn, through several vignettes, tries to explain modern American culture through the prism of "intellectuals" whose ideas affected our society. The author makes 3 salient points that bear repeating: With the decline of religion, intellectuals increasingly turned to ideology for meaning, the core of ideology is political and, most importantly, ideology values ideas over people.

The first chapter brilliantly summarizes Marcuse and "Cultural" Marxism wherein every facet of human existence is politicized. His ideas permeated our culture - from "diversity" wherein the Left was supported and the Right silenced, to identify politics (gay/ethnic/gender group rights) to victimization to anti-Western bias to a redefinition of education. He had particular disdain for old-fashioned liberals like Hubert Humphrey. He was astute, though, in recognizing that the common worker would never accept his ideas and therefore must be "forced" to be free.

Elements of violence and authoritarianism are present in all these groups; the "truth" must prevail and violence is necessary for the greater good. This explains the perplexing notion of "liberals" praising despots whole first act would be silencing them or of commentators praising Arafat while condemning Israel. Each ideology seeks Utopia - from an (ir)rational Randian world to Strauss's American Empire to a primitive garden of Eden where humans live in peace with nature and its creatures and have sex without consequences or emotion.

The article on Chomsky and his continual excuses/espousing of various events (to this day he denies the Kymer Rouge killed millions of Cambodians) was another tour de force. He emphasizes that the mjority of those in non-academic studies (identity politics) drift into three major areas: Academia, politics and the media.