THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS

 Naill Ferguson is one of my favorite public intellectuals (along with Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson, William Bennett, Charles Murray, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and the late Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley). A self-described contrarian historian, Ferguson was born in Scotland and educated at Oxford. After teaching in England, he immigrated to the United States where he initiating taught at Harvard and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali- born Islamic critic and former member of The Netherlands Parliament.

Ferguson’s most recent article was “The Treason of the Intellectuals” which drew its inspiration from the book of the same title by French philosopher Julien Benda. Published in1927 Benda’s book attacked  European higher education and its associated intellectuals with extremist views on nationalism and racism particularly regarding Jews. Benda asserts that years before Hitler took power in Germany universities not only in that country but elsewhere in Europe laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism and the pending Holocaust.

Ferguson in his article expands Benda’s argument by asserting that intellectuals are against committing treason against their craft by allowing their universities to become breeding grounds for antisemitism which manifested their hatred for Jews following the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7 2023. The only real difference between Benda and Ferguson is that the former condemned Right-wing extremism while the latter sees the present danger stemming from the extreme Left.

I usually eschew analogies between Nazism and current events. I find it distasteful to label someone contemporary as a Nazi or Hitler reincarnate for several reasons. First, the labeling is usually wildly inaccurate. The person labeling his/her opponent as possessing such vile evil is intellectually lazy at best or patently dishonest at worst. Second, the labeling generally shows an ignorance of history. It seems that accusers in this situation believe evil only originated in 1933. And finally, accusing someone of being a Nazi or Hitler tends to shut down debate. How could a decent person engage in conversation with another allegedly possessing evil to find common ground in the public arena?

Nevertheless, in Ferguson’s case, his analysis is so historically rich in connecting the extremists both  the contemporary Left with the Right of a century ago. Thus, I invite the curious reader to read Ferguson’s for themselves and make up their own minds. Access the following link-  Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals | National Post