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Relearning the Obvious
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 Intellectuals like to notice
and savor subtleties that other people miss. But the really valuable
intellectuals are those who notice the things that are too obvious for most
of us to see, a category I like to call the “superobvious.”
As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Men
can  always
be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough.” Once somebody does
point out the superobvious, you wonder how you failed to notice it yourself,
and you aren’t likely to forget it again.
Reviewing a book on “comparative
genocide” in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael
Andre Bernstein remarks that “there is something disheartening in
the very existence of a rubric like comparative genocide.”
Well, now that you mention it, yes. The practice of
destroying whole peoples, as a matter of official policy, has become so
frequent in this century that whole books are written weighing the relative
horrors of various exterminations.
Mr. Bernstein also cites Robert Conquest’s
alternative phrase (coined to describe Stalin’s “great
terror”): nation-killing. That phrase eerily echoes the
optimistic phrase nation-building. They go together.
In the past, most governments saw it as their duty
to preserve the social fabric and keep peace among their subjects.
Government was so inherently conservative that nobody used the word
conservative, because there was hardly any other kind of regime.
Even the most brutal rulers were blessedly free of the modern utopian idea
of “building a new society.” The Roman Empire conquered many
countries, but it didn’t try to remake them on some abstract model.
The American Revolution was largely an attempt to preserve the traditional
liberties of Englishmen against an encroaching monarch.
![[Breaker quote for Relearning the Obvious: But we keep forgetting]](2006breakers/060808.gif) It
was
only in the age of the modern nation-state that rulers began defining some
of their own subjects as “aliens,” not because those subjects
came from abroad, but because they were, according to official ideologies,
racial or class enemies. A Jew who had lived in Germany all his life was no
longer a “true” German. A Russian whose ancestry was purely
Russian found himself redefined as a “counterrevolutionary
element.” Japanese Americans suddenly found themselves deprived of
constitutional rights for racial reasons.
Building a new society has generally meant
the preliminary destruction of an old one to make way for a utopian
perfection that never seems to arrive. The revolutionary
“leader” often excites intellectuals with his dynamism and
genius; various members of the brainy set have fawned on Lenin, Hitler,
Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others whose chief achievements, in retrospect,
have been the purge and the systematic massacres we’ve come to
call “genocide.” Most of these have been peacetime policies, not
wartime measures — except in the sense that the “new
society” is at war with the traditional society.
Until recently, the intellectuals, sneering at religion
and “bourgeois” morality, have accepted the ambition to
remake society as self-evidently laudable. They’re a little more
subdued these days. As we look back on the 20th century, the big question
isn’t which utopia has turned out best, but which has inflicted the
most horror on its subjects. This question has now yielded a new academic
field: the aforementioned “comparative genocide.”
If this blighted century yields one clear lesson,
it’s that concentrated political power is the most deadly danger the
human race faces. “Well,” it will be said, “we already
knew that.” Yes, we did. But somehow we forgot it, and kept
forgetting it. It was too obvious to be repeated, so we stopped saying it, and
finally we stopped knowing it.
At some point the benign possibilities of the
centralized state seemed to outweigh the perils. But the benign possibilities
never materialized, and all the perils took their revenge — in terrible
wars, and in “peace” that was more terrible than most wars of
the past.
Utopianism is out of fashion now, but the
progressive-minded intellectuals we have always with us. After a century of
mass murder, they still feel menaced by the posting of the Ten
Commandments in schools and courthouses. It bears reflection that the Ten
Commandments, those superbly obvious injunctions, are among the few
things they don’t want children exposed to.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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