Intellectuals and Race (9 page)

A very similar process occurred in the Habsburg Empire, where the Germans in Bohemia were an educated elite and where Czechs there who wanted to rise into that elite could do so by acquiring the German language and culture. But a new Czech intelligentsia, including university students and school teachers, promoted Czech cultural nationalism.
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Czech nationalists, for example, insisted that street signs in Prague, which had been in both Czech and German, henceforth be exclusively in Czech.
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In the town of Budweis, Czech nationalists demanded that a quota of Czech music be played by the town orchestra.
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Symbolism— including intolerance toward other people’s symbols— has often marked the efforts of an ethnic intelligentsia.

The rising indigenous intelligentsia— whether in Latvia, Bohemia or elsewhere— tended to treat the cultural advantages of Germans as a
social
injustice, against which they mobilized other members of their ethnic group to oppose Germans and German culture. Whether in the Baltic or in Bohemia, the Germans tended to be more cosmopolitan, and initially resisted efforts by the newly arising indigenous intelligentsia to fragment
society along ethnic lines. But the persistent and increasing promotion of ethnic identity by the newly rising ethnic intelligentsia eventually led the Germans to abandon their cosmopolitanism and defend themselves as Germans.
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The net result in both countries was ethnic polarization, often under the banner of some variation of “social justice,” requiring the lagging group to be put on a par through some process other than their own acquisition of the same knowledge and skills as others.

Similar polarization has been produced in other countries with the rise of a newly educated intelligentsia— usually educated in “soft” fields, rather than in the sciences or in other subjects that would produce marketable skills with which to compete with members of other ethnic groups who already had such skills and experience. One historical study referred to the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity in the nineteenth century
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— a description that would apply to many ethnic identity promoters in other parts of Europe and Asia, as well as in the United States, then and now. The “educated unemployed” became a common expression in the twentieth century,
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whether in Europe, Asia or elsewhere— and such people became common sources of ethnic polarization.

An international study of ethnic conflicts pointed out: “The very elites who were thought to be leading their peoples away from ethnic affiliations were commonly found to be in the forefront of ethnic conflict.”
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Romania between the two World Wars was a typical example:

          The years under review recorded a more visible presence of “the intellectual proletariat”: schoolmasters, lawyers, students and university graduates. This social category continued to grow, but it met with great difficulties in asserting itself and gaining a satisfactory social status. Its members were handicapped by their precarious social situation and financial difficulties during their years of study. Most of them were “first-generation” intellectuals or the sons of teachers, priests or petty functionaries. They were the main source of the right-wing movements’ audience and accounted for a high proportion of the antisemitic organizations’ membership. As in Poland and Hungary, the relatively large numbers of Jews in the universities and free professions exacerbated the frustration of young people in their endeavors to carve out “a position” for themselves in the urban social structures.
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Among the leading promoters of anti-Semitism in Romania over the years have been an academic described as “the most important Romanian philosopher of the late nineteenth century,”
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another academic described as “the greatest Romanian historian,”
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and another intellectual described as “One of the most important twentieth-century Romanian national poets.”
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Newly educated classes have been especially likely to specialize in softer subjects and to be prominent among those fostering hostility toward more advanced groups, while promoting ethnic “identity” movements, whether such movements have been mobilized against other ethnic groups, the existing authorities, or other targets. In various periods of history, the intelligentsia in general and newly educated people in particular have inflamed group against group, promoting discriminatory policies and/or physical violence in such disparate countries as India,
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Hungary,
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Nigeria,
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Kazakhstan,
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Romania,
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Sri Lanka,
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Canada,
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and Czechoslovakia.
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Whether at the level of minority activists in a given society or at the level of leaders of national revolts against external imperial powers, promoters of nationalism have been disproportionately intellectuals— and intellectuals from a limited range of fields. “Few nationalist militants were engineers or economists, or professional administrators,” as a study of nationalism said of the generation of African leaders during the transition from colonial status to that of independent nations in the twentieth century. For example, Kwame Nkrumah was a British-educated lawyer, Jomo Kenyatta an anthropologist, and Léopold Senghor a poet.
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Much the same pattern could be found in other parts of the world as well. Leaders of the Basque separatist movement in Spain and of the Quebec separatist movement in Canada were also soft-subject intellectuals.
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In the less developed eastern regions of Europe, the rising intellectual class during the years between the two World Wars likewise tended to concentrate in the softer subjects, rather than in science or technology, and to seek careers in politics and government bureaucracies, rather than in industry or commerce. As a scholarly history of that era put it, institutions of higher education in East Central Europe turned out a “surplus academic proletariat” which could not be absorbed into “economically or socially functional employment” because they were trained primarily in law or the humanities.
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Romanian institutions of higher education were described as “numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated,” serving as “veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues.”
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Much the same pattern would be apparent decades later in Sri Lanka, which was all too typical of Asian Third World countries in having “a backlog of unemployed graduates” who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.
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Ethnic leaders who would later promote the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the atrocities that followed in the last decade of the twentieth century, included professors in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as a novelist and a psychiatrist.
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The mass slaughters in Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge were likewise led principally by intellectuals, including teachers and academics.
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Historian A.J.P. Taylor has said that the first stage of nationalism “is led by university professors” and that “the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world.”
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Whatever the actual sequence, the intelligentsia in many countries around the world have played a central role in promoting intergroup and international animosities and atrocities— and in trying to artificially preserve, revive, or fabricate past glories.

Conversely, the historic examples of dramatic self-improvement in nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Scotland— countries that set out to change themselves, rather than to blame others— concentrated on building tangible skills, such as in engineering and medicine in the case of Scotland, and science and technology in the case of Japan.
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By contrast, in the twentieth century a whole generation of future Third World leaders who went to study in the West seldom concentrated on studying the science, technology or entrepreneurship that produced Western prosperity, but instead concentrated on the social theories and ideologies in vogue among Western intellectuals in academia and elsewhere. The countries they led after independence often paid a high price in economic stagnation or even retrogression, as well as in internal polarization that turned group against group.

Language politics has been one aspect of more general polarization that has poisoned relations between more prosperous and less prosperous groups in India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, among other places where the lagging majority tried to insulate themselves from competition with more successful minorities by making their own language a prerequisite for education and/or employment.
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In Asia, as in Europe, Africa and the Western Hemisphere, the intelligentsia have been prominent among those pushing ethnic identity ideology and intergroup polarization.

Under such influences, Sri Lanka went from being a country whose record for harmonious relations between majority and minority was held up to the world as a model by many observers, in the mid-twentieth century, to a country whose later ethnic polarization produced decades of mob violence and then outright civil war, in which unspeakable atrocities were committed, on into the early twenty-first century.
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The polarization between Czechs and Germans in nineteenth century Bohemia took longer to reach the level of historic tragedy but nevertheless it did. A key turning point came when the new nation of Czechoslovakia was created in the twentieth century, from the breakup of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War, with the former kingdom of Bohemia now being Czechoslovakia’s most economically and culturally advanced region— in part because of the Germans living in a section of that region called the Sudetenland. One indicator of the wide cultural differences among the various peoples of this small country was that the illiteracy rate in Bohemia was only 2 percent in 1921, while half the people in the province of Ruthenia were illiterate.
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Much of Czechoslovakia’s industry was located in Bohemia and a substantial proportion of it was in the hands of the Sudeten Germans.

Now armed with the power of government of their own country, Czech leaders set about “correcting” both historic and contemporary “injustices”— namely the fact that the Germans were more economically and otherwise advanced than the Czechs and other groups in the country. The government instituted preferential hiring of Czechs in the civil service and transferred capital from German and German-Jewish banks to Czech banks, as well as breaking up large German-owned estates into smaller farms, for the benefit of the Czech peasantry.
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Violent German protests led to Czech soldiers
shooting and killing more than fifty Germans,
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setting the stage for a continuing bitter escalation of the polarization between Czechs and Germans, leading to larger tragedies in the decades that followed.

Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in 1938 and then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. With the country now under Nazi rule, the roles of Czechs and Germans were reversed, with brutal suppression of the Czechs that lasted until the defeat of Germany in 1945 allowed the Czechs to take control of the country once again. In the bitter backlash that followed, there was both official discrimination against Germans in Czechoslovakia and widespread unofficial and often lethal violence against Germans, more than three million of whom were expelled from the country, leaving behind a German population less than one-tenth of what it had once been.
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The Germans’ skills and experience were of course expelled with them, and these were not easily replaced. Half a century later, there were still deserted towns and farmhouses in the Sudeten region, from which the Germans had been expelled
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— mute testimony to the inconvenient fact that differences between Czechs and Germans were not simply matters of perceptions or injustices, unless one chooses to characterize historical circumstantial differences as injustices. All this was part of the price paid for seeking cosmic justice for intertemporal abstractions, in a world where maintaining peace and civility among flesh-and-blood contemporaries is often a major challenge by itself.

Whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere, a common pattern among intellectuals has been to seek, or demand, equality of results without equality of causes— or on sheer presumptions of equality of causes. Nor have such demands been limited to intellectuals within the lagging groups, whether minorities or majorities. Outside intellectuals, including intellectuals in other countries, have often discussed statistical differences in incomes and other outcomes as “disparities,” and “inequities” that need to be “corrected,” as if they were discussing abstract people in an abstract world.

The corrections being urged are seldom corrections within the lagging groups, such as Hume urged upon his fellow Scots in the eighteenth century. Today, the prevailing tenets of multiculturalism declare all cultures equal, sealing members of lagging groups within a bubble of their current habits
and practices, much as believers in multiculturalism have sealed themselves within a bubble of peer-consensus dogma.

There are certain possibilities that many among the intelligentsia cannot even acknowledge as possibilities, much less try to test empirically, which would be risking a whole vision of the world— and of themselves— on a roll of the dice. Chief among these is the possibility that the most fundamental disparity among people is in their disparities in wealth-generating capabilities, of which the disparities in income and wealth are results, rather than causes. Other disparities, whether in crime, violence and alcohol intake or other social pathology, may also have internal roots. But these possibilities as well are not allowed inside the sealed bubble of the prevailing vision.