The Idiocy of Ideologues

By Alana Finley | Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas
Daniel J. Flynn
Crown Forum, 2004

If you ever needed a reason never to do course reading again, Daniel J. Flynn has one for you: The authors of all those "intellectual" books are morons. Or liars. Or perverts. Or deadbeats. Or all of the above. In Intellectual Morons, Flynn exposes in depth sixteen "gurus" and the flawed ideologies they perpetuated. To add to the fun of confirming that leftist professors spend their lives teaching lies, it turns out they've been teaching lies thought up by some pretty crazy people.

After Why the Left Hates America, liberals may see this book as another one of Flynn's attacks on the liberal establishment. Flynn gives a few head-nods to old-style liberals, but certainly gives more credibility to conservative thinkers. He does include obligatory attacks on right-leaning ideologies, but he clearly finds the lives and lies of the leftists are more gripping. There's the man who finds it erotic to hang himself by his testicles, the animal rights activist who justifies bestiality and writes about a woman having sex with an octopus, and the feminist who supported terrorism and some Nazi ideas. These are none other than respected liberal minds Alfred Kinsey, Peter Singer and Margaret Sanger.

Flynn's book illustrates how those dedicated to ideologies fall into so many logical traps that they give original ideas a bad name. For example, Flynn says concern for the environment is reasonable, but explains that Paul Ehrlich's library of ridiculous doomsday scenarios makes the Stanford professor seem more like Chicken Little than a legitimate academic.

The theory of Intellectual Morons is simple; many of the book's central points are made clear even in the introduction. After even a brief perusal, the reader cannot help but be struck by how off-the-wall these thinkers really were and how ridiculous it is to honor them as champions of freedoms. The freedom they promote is based more on the language of Orwellian Newspeak than that of Constitutional rights. Their tolerance means listening only to those who agree with you. Their normalized sexuality means everything except abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage. Their multiculturalism means America-bashing.

The Newspeak of any political movement forces its followers to accept everything as a package deal. Once an ideology is in place, those who subscribe ask only what they can do to serve the cause. Though many join causes for noble reasons, Flynn explains, their resulting actions under the cause's banner are often awful failures covered up by ignoble lies. Those who succumb to ideology refuse to accept responsibility for their actions. Many radicals described in Intellectual Morons ignored their critics rather than accepting their challenges. They either made difficult any criticism, like Kinsey, who proofread reporters' reviews of his studies, or they deflected criticism by issuing ad hominem attacks on their critics, as did Rigoberta Menchu when attacked detractor David Stoll as a "racist."

The book can actually be laugh-out-loud funny when Flynn relates some of his morons' best quotations. For example, animal rights activist Peter Singer says that because humans are mammals, "does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings." Perhaps even less understandable is birth control advocate Sanger's harsh words supporting "race betterment" and the prevention of undesirable people from procreating. She claims such a program "makes possible the breeding out of human weeds—the defective and criminal classes—[and] the breeding of the clean, strong and fit instruments to carry on the torch of human destiny." And liberals think conservatives sound like Nazis?

Showing that liberal true believers routinely ignore their heroes' darker sides and even celebrate such anti-intellectualism, Flynn makes his point clearer. Ideologues will claim that Singer is a sound academic or that Sanger could not have been a bigot. They hail the thinkers' willingness to do anything for the cause, and they follow in suit. Flynn cites a 1999 incident where environmentalists cut down 180 trees at the University of Washington to protest the school planting hybrid poplar trees. But the activists did not cut down the hybrid trees but instead cut down ordinary raspberry bushes. This act shows no rational purpose, but it's an act of protest and so they say it serves the cause. Flynn accuses many followers of radical ideologies of not having "the slightest clue how to serve the cause effectively." Perhaps Flynn would be a little more supportive of something like the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, whose actions directly benefited their goals [see TDR 1/29/86].

Flynn succeeds in showing how so much of modern academic curriculum is based on exalted lies. Kinsey's famous studies on male and female sexuality, very influential among 1960s liberals, were based on faulty statistics. Menchu, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu, fabricated important events in the book and lied about her background—even though the book's popularity was based on its non-fiction status and its claims of gross social injustice. Associating W.E.B. Du Bois with Martin Luther King, Jr. as an important civil rights leader entirely discounts his intense fervor for segregation during his later years.

Dartmouth is largely absent from Flynn's critique of the Ivy League, which he accuses of incorporating ridiculous agendas. Dartmouth is not exempt from his criticism, but at least it's not Princeton, where Singer holds a professorship in bioethics, despite his defense of bestiality and his proposal of a twenty-eight day period after birth when parents should be allowed to kill their child.

Singer's story is among the better ones in Intellectual Morons perhaps because it comes early in the book; as the accusations pile up, the stories get more predictable. Most of the shocking material is in the first half. After reading about Kinsey's twisted sexual experiences, what does it matter that Ayn Rand had an affair with one of her devotees?

Flynn leaves open a challenge for self-examination. He challenges his readers to consider not only the ideologies debunked in Intellectual Morons but also any other ideologies to which they might subscribe. He seems to support conservative thought more than liberal thought, but he's equally wary of those who blanket themselves as full supporters of conservatism. He implores readers to reexamine their support of key social and political ideas and find some rational justification for them, or at the very least, when there is no objective answer, to admit to making a subjective conclusion.

The Idiocy of Ideologues

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