Having nothing better to do yesterday, I picked up a book my dad had left lying on the coffee table. The book is titled Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. It is a series of character sketches and mini-biographies of men such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Percy Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemmingway, etc.
I expected to be bored witless and instead was fascinated.
These men have been labeled the greatest thinkers, writers and philosophers in past three centuries. Their works are read aross the world in schools and universities. These intellectuals, who are revered for their contributions to mankind, share an amazingly similar pattern of egocentricity, selfishness, self-deception, dishonesty, adultery, alcoholism, infidelity, greed, debt, hate, lying, and violence. Faithfulness in marriage, friendship, and money was not only beyond them, they truly did not recognize the need for it or even care. They used the people, especially the women, around them as objects. They claimed to love Mankind, but showed little or no love to the individual men around them. They and their ideas were the center of the universe.
Does this somehow devalue their great works, Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Shelley's poetry, Rousseau's philosophy, etc.? My answer is a resounding, YES! Men who lived their personal lives with such dishonor and outright wickedness do not deserve recognition no matter how genius their works. The complete disjunction between their ideas/ideals and their actions calls into question the value of everything they ever said or wrote. Their ideas, words, and philosophies came out of the same diseased minds that tainted everything and everyone around them.
