Are “They” Us? The Intellectuals’ Role in Creating Division Peter Baehr
Intellectuals of varied occupations—journalists, artists, teachers, and academics—repeatedly lament the corrosion of Western democracy. Trumpism, racism, and populism are the chief culprits, we’re told, of a growing intolerance and irrationality. But could it be that intellectuals share responsibility for the problems they deplore? That the divisions in society and the resentments pulsing through it are in part the intellectuals’ creation? That they, the ill informed and dismissive, are us, the learned? Intellectuals are harming democracy not through ill will but through a way of speaking and writing—I’ll call it the unmasking style—inherited from the revolutionary tradition. Instead of elevating public discourse, this style coarsens it. It does so by reckless exaggeration, by cruel parody, by stretching concepts like race beyond their proper compass, and by treating large groups of people as idiots or pariahs. We meet this afternoon under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. I pay tribute to its director, Roger Berkowitz, to its staff and donors. For several years, Roger and his colleagues have hosted conferences on controversial issues, which means issues that actually matter. No stranger to controversy herself, Hannah Arendt would surely approve of the Bard initiative. And for the purposes of my talk today, there is still another reason to invoke Hannah Arendt’s legacy. I’m referring to the distinction that she makes, in several books and essays, between disclosing and unmasking. In disclosing, Arendt says, we reveal ourselves to others and ourselves to ourselves through their responses. In unmasking, it is others who reveal us, and they do so from a hostile, outsider’s standpoint. If disclosing highlights a unique and idiosyncratic individual, unmasking exposes a category of person—an imposter, an enemy, a conspirator—that attracts suspicion and disdain. During the French Revolution, unmasking was the term of choice among Jacobins to expose “enemies of the people,” supposed renegades bent on undermining the new republic. Thousands fell victim to a frenzy of exposure when their words were wrenched out of context or when false motives were ascribed to their actions. Later, the Bolsheviks adapted the unmasking idiom to root out “objective enemies,” people deemed guilty of a crime not by virtue of any act that they had committed but because of their class or status position—landlord, kulak, teacher, priest; in a word, nonproletarian. This was an early version of what today we call identity politics. Within three decades of the Russian Revolution, unmasking encompassed intellectuals and “cosmopolitans” (Jews). In the show trials of the 1930s, and in a series of purges, people 66
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Racism and Antisemitism
