GEORGE STADE
875
rights, well-fed vegetarians who walk on picket lines with Chavez,
middle-class intellectuals who try to organize workers, young
women who let go of everything else to pick up the burden of bag
ladies, men who undergo psychic castration to make it with femi–
nists, missionaries who try to convert forest-dwelling pagans, poli–
ticians who go on about the tribulations of the aged. They get more
than they give, and what they get is not healthy. Their motives, of
course, are mixed, but a large proportion of them are bad. There is a
kind of self-sacrifice that is indistinguishable from taking charge;
most often, the only decent thing to do is get out of the way. James
Baldwin once said that all he wants from whites is for them to get off
his back. He's got a point.
5. In all wars, revolutions, civil wars, uprisings, partisan ac–
tions, and reprisals, my sympathies are with the nonpolitical citizen
who gets caught in the middle.
6. Steven Marcus has recently quoted Weber's observation that
in political action "it is
not
true that good can only follow from good
and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true." The
Player King in
Hamlet
says it better:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown,
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
T.
S. Eliot's Gerontion says it best- in the passage beginning "Think
now." Anybody who goes in for political action lets himself in for
historical irony, which is a product of the disparity between the in–
tentions of an act and its consequences. In the attempt to keep Viet–
nam out of China's orbit we transformed it into a satellite of Russia.
7. Intellectuals are not necessarily intelligent. The main symp–
tom of an intellect is that its possessor is adroit at manipulating ab–
stractions . This knack is no more dependent on mature wisdom than
are the skills of a child prodigy in chess, music, or mathematics; like
other child prodigies, the intellectual very often never grows up. But
even the intelligent intellectual is more susceptible to the allure of
systems of abstract political ideas than the canny know-nothing. If a
thermonuclear war breaks out, it won't be because of my Irish work–
ing-stiff friends or their Russian equivalents. You don't have to be
intelligent or an intellectual to become a member of the intelli–
gentsia: all you have to do is hang around with other members and
reiterate their gripes.
