Ordinary Miracle: Intellectual-Slayer Paul Johnson

How serendipitous when a latter day Boswell like myself finds his Jonson!

No, not that kind of “Johnson” … but a Samuel Johnson whose first name is Paul.

I’d never heard of him till today … Paul Johnson, I mean.

Karl Marx

Samuel Johnson was an exotic figure out of 18th Century England who, aside from being afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome, was also afflicted with literary genius.

James Boswell was his devoted biographer.

My Johnson is decidedly a Brit genius out of the 20th Century and, if you can believe it, afflicted, as I have been, with the Jesuits!

Studied in his teen years, as I had, with The Black Robes!!

He is also, not like I, a brilliant historian!

If you don’t believe me, Paul Johnson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

One of the few smart moves that President ever made.

Why am I so entranced by Paul Johnson?

I just read his unerring exposure of intellectuals, The Heartless Lovers of Humankind.

If my “Boswell Days” with this Johnson only last the length of my admiration for one particular essay by this esteemed historian, I will still have shared my moment with one of my favorite “Ordinary Miracles” of life.

No one, and I mean no human being in the past, present or even the future, will serve up to “intellectuals” a more piercing examination, diagnosis and autopsy of them than this contemporary Dr. Johnson.

Accurately and with no need of any exaggeration, Paul Johnson dates the symbolic birth of the intellectual as having occurred at the outset of the French “Enlightenment” and the rising sun of Voltaire, whose own intellectuality had him explode with the piercing description of his peers as “enlightened despots”!

The intellectual has, according to this Dr. Johnson, “filled the position left by the decline of the cleric, and is proving more arrogant, permanent and above all more dangerous than his clerical version.”

That’s just openers!

He picks Percy Bysshe Shelley as his first target … and … well … how many years did poor Shelley have to grow up in?

He died one month away from his thirtieth birthday.

I never matured until my sixties!

Paglia

If he doesn’t like young romantics, the good Doctor should read Camille Paglia on Romantics in general. Her assault upon them in Sexual Personae makes Dr. Johnson’s invasion of intellectuals look almost medicinal.

Romanticism for Ms. Paglia is one of the very few pastimes she would acknowledge as a perversion.

Fascinating woman, Camille Paglia!

Where was I?

Oh, yes, skipping Shelley out of my simple respect for the Romantic Dead … and, as Paglia points out, Shelley, like Keats, was more of a Romantic than an intellectual … we move on to my favorite example of intellectual perversion, Karl Marx.

“Karl Marx (1818-1884) was another example of a man who became convinced that it was his duty to put ideas before people.

The lucidity with which the Doctor captures this ultimately homicidal set of priorities … and, indeed, that’s the primary ingredient within Marx’s soul … or lack of one … “ideas!”

Then the second sentence of this exhumation:

“Hence his relentless and often unthinking cruelty to those around him became a kind of distant adumbration of the mass cruelty his ideas would promote when they finally became the blueprint of Soviet state policy.

From Marx’s perennially sophomoric self-obsession to the deadly fruits of that ideological narcissism, Paul Johnson captures it all in one sentence.

Then he reveals the essentials of Marx’s parents.

His father, who was afraid of him, detected the fatal flaw: “In your heart,” he wrote his son, “egoism is predominant.”

Meanwhile Marx’s mother remarked:

What a pity it was that he (Karl) did not try to acquire capital instead of writing about it.

In the next paragraph, Paul Johnson lists the hypocritically petty bourgeois obsessions forcing Marx to “keep up appearances.”

Then, how this “man of ideas” treated people:

He seduced his wife’s servant, begot a son by her, then forced Friedrich Engels to assume paternity. Marx’s daughter Eleanor once let out a cri de Coeur in a letter: ‘Is it not wonderful, when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practice all the fine things we preach – to others?’ She later committed suicide.

Then from a larger point of view there’s this:

Marx’s whole life was an exercise in emotional or financial exploitation – of his wife, of his daughters, of his friends. Studying Marx’s life leads one to think that the roots of human unhappiness, and especially the misery caused by exploitation, do not lie in the exploitation by categories or classes – but in one-to-one exploitation by selfish individuals.

Finally the author sums up Marx in the context of his only interest: ideas.

Nor is this indifference to others a mere human failing in a great public man. It is central to Marx’s work. He was not actually interested in real human beings, how they felt or what they wanted. He never met a member of the proletariat, except across the platform at a public meeting. He never made a visit to an actual factory, rejecting Engel’s offers to arrange one. He never sought to meet or interrogate a capitalist, with the solitary exception of an uncle in Holland. From first to last his source of information was books, especially government bluebooks.

Following this, Dr. Johnson’s x rays of Vladimir Lenin must be prefaced by the novelist, Vladimir Nabokov’s estimate of Lenin:

A glass of the milk of human kindness, at the bottom of which is a dead rat.

The historian, however, begins with this:

It is no accident, I think, that Lenin (1870-1924) never set foot in a factory until he became the Soviet dictator, and never, so far as we know, had any real contact with the workers whose lives he claimed the right to transform.

Then moving on to the third of this Unholy Trinity:

Nor did Stalin ever seek out the working man or the peasant to discover what he actually wanted; he was also a great devourer of statistical columns. What masses of facts these monsters ingested before they went on to devour human flesh! One might say that the road to the gulag is paved with unwritten PH.D. theses.

Hmmm … and an eventually Nobel Prize Winning Marxist cum law degree from Harvard in 1988, when Dr. Johnson’s essay was written, had reached his third year as a Communis … uh … I mean Community Organizer.

It is no coincidence I have linked Dr. Paul Johnson with Samuel Johnson. Dr. Paul actually quotes his literary predecessor admiringly:

I incline to the contrary belief of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) when he observed, “Sir, a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money”

Nor so brilliantly revealed as when he is getting to the heart of Marxism and the soul of enlightened despotism.