Pioneeers

 

Eric Hoffer, on Pages 136 to 138 of his book, The True Believer, writes of men of letters that pioneer a mass movement. I quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                           107

 

The men of letters of eighteenth century France are the most familiar example of intellectuals pioneering a mass movement. A somewhat similar pattern may be detected in the periods preceding the rise of most mass movements. The ground for the Reformation was prepared by the men who satirized and denounced the clergy in popular pamphlets, and by men of letters like Johann Reuchlin, who fought and discredited the Roman curia. The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbits and their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the school and the book supplanted the temple and fatherland. In any social order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold.

 

The mass movements of modern time, whether socialist or nationalist, were invariably pioneered by poets, writers, historians, scholars, philosophers and the like. The connection between intellectual theoreticians and revolutionary movements needs no emphasis. But it is equally true that all nationalist movements—from the cult of la patrie in revolutionary France to the latest nationalist rising in Indonesia—were conceived not by men of action but by faultfinding intellectuals. The generals, industrialists, landowners and busienessman who are considered pillars of patriotism are latecomers who join the movement after it has become a going concern. The most strenuous effort of the early phase of every nationalist movement consists in the convincing and winning over those future pillars of patriotism. The Czech historian Palacky said that if the ceiling of a room to which he and a handful of friends were dining one night had collapsed, there would have been no Czech nationalist movement. Such handfuls of impractical men of words were at the beginning of all nationalist movements. German intellectuals were the originators of German nationalism, just as Jewish intellectuals were the originators of Zionism. It is the deep-seated craving of men of words for exalted status that makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. It was Napoleon’s humiliation of the Germans, particularly the Prussians, which drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call on the German masses to unite in a might nation that would come to dominate Europe. Theodor Herzl and the Jewish intellectuals were driven to Zionism by the humiliations heaped upon millions of Jews in Russia, and by the calumnies to which the rest of the Jews in continental Europe were subjected toward the end of the nineteenth century. To a degree the nationalist movement which forced the British rulers out of India had its inception in the humiliation of a scrawny and bespectacled Indian man of words in South Africa.”

 

My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox, though it is I that am making it explicit. Hoffer warns us clearly not to give men of words political power on the one hand, but, if they are not invited in with respect and rewards of some kind, they will pioneer a mass movement to overthrow the standing social order.

 

For indviudating supercitizens, most intellectuals that come with new ideas should not be mistreated or scorned, or picked on, but neither should they be given the keys to the city. If the effort is made to include everyone or most everyone into the standing order, then those excluded because they are crazy or nihilistic without compromise, the union of supercitizens should be able to keep them quelled and powerless.